India’s Unemployed Youth Are the Canaries of a Troubled Economy – the Cockroach Commons Know It

The Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) has had the remarkable feat of garnering more than double the followers on Instagram than those of the ruling party – 22M and counting, as opposed to 8.9M of the BJP – in just a week, enough to understand why it has been such effective satire. This is in the same month that the BJP won majority for the first time in Bengal, returned to power in Assam, and is understood to be one step closer to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) project of Hindu Rashtra. 

In the midst of this global victory lap, where foreign media such as The Washington Post published an Op-ed by Bill Drexel, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, stating “More votes have been cast for Modi than for any politician in human history, by a margin in the hundreds of millions,” a telling misspeak by the Chief Justice of India on May 15 calling India’s unemployed “cockroaches” and “parasites”, led to the founding of the CJP by Boston University-trained public relations graduate Abhijeet Dipke. So viral is this satirical formation that venerable outlets like the CNN, BBC, The Guardian, and Reuters are reporting on it, where the contrast between the lofty lotus and the lowly cockroach are immediately understood as semantic shifts in narratives of power. 

CJI Surya Kant’s subsequent clarification that he only meant those with fake degrees, did himself no favours where the Prime Minister’s own college degree has been the subject of past scandal and speculation. One of the pillars of effective satire is to bring to light latent hypocrisies. But more, it was the dehumanising logic of his remarks themselves that gave fodder to this internet phenom, allowing Dipke to riposte that the clarification itself was classist impinging on citizens' constitutionally protected right to speech. The gap between the CJI’s role as someone who upholds and protects the constitution, and his speech that undermines those very functions, is wide enough to launch the party of pestilence. 

Also read: The Chief Justice Called Them Cockroaches. History Knows Where That Language Leads

The inversion of the language of dehumanisation – widely seen as a precursor to authoritarianism or genocide – and its inversion to something agentive and self-identificatory mirrors many similar signifier shifts in society, like the term queer. Mahua Moitra, MP of the defeated TMC party in Bengal, had risen to viral internet attention herself by outlining the seven early signs of fascism in her maiden Lok Sabha speech in 2019, amongst which were the “unimaginable subjugation and controlling of mass media”, and “complete disdain for the intellectuals and the arts.” 

She tweeted recently, “I too would like to join the CJP (besides being a card carrying member of the Anti National Party.” Warholian fame on the internet may last only 15 minutes, but the memory of the people’s internet is long. 

Anti-national, urban-naxal, libertandu and other slurs have been popularised on social media alongside the dominance of BJP messaging in national discourse. We have come so far in our understanding of how consent to their agenda has been manufactured, that the counter analytics of IT Cell, WhatsApp University and godi media are also part of the linguistic zeitgeist. 

Silences and contradictions

Another clear example of this was brought to the fore when Norwegian journalist Helle Lyng asked Narendra Modi, a Prime Minister who has not had an unmediated press conference in 12 years, a seemingly innocuous question: “Why don’t you take questions by the freest press in the world?” 

Lyng within hours had her Instagram and Facebook accounts suspended by the weight of complaints made against her, and responding to the online dogpiling, she had to tweet “I never thought I would have to write this, but I am not a foreign spy of any sort, sent out by any foreign government. My work is journalism, primarily in Norway now.” Satire is able to show bullies, even of the cyber variety, up for who they really are, and the CJP continually highlights whose speech is being bullied into silence for asking questions, and who remains silent evading answering them.

In our famously shortened attention spans, Modi seemed to surf past the Norwegian blowback onto the next stop on his five-country itinerary, with a video of his gift to his Italian counterpart, that has 10M views on the Instagram – a collaboration between the official accounts of Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Giorgia Meloni. A pest is currently outperforming two heads of state in the internet economy. The peskiness of the spectre of youth unemployment is crawling all over a carefully orchestrated image of international bonhomie and collaboration, and the cleverness of media jujitsu elevating the cockroach outperforming the pun of Melody for Meloni. 

At the heart of this current festering, and the moment that the people’s internet has seized upon, is the chasmic discrepancy also between the words of the Prime Minister, and his actions. He left on this frenetic foreign tour the day after announcing austerity measures for citizens of the country, including a recommendation not to travel abroad for vacations. 

Some of the same comedians and poets I wrote about in 2020, performing political poetry during the anti-CAA protests, are now picking apart the obvious class assumptions underlying whom Modi chooses to address when he says Indians should eat organic, not buy gold, and so on. Varun Grover in his special Desh Bacha Lo Guys cannily mocks the crony capitalism of the BJP regime. Where 80 crore Indians live below the poverty line, and 60% of the Indian population gets free rations from the government, Grover says the only person offended by the no gold buying diktat must be “Neeta bhabi”, who must have complained to her husband, Mukesh Ambani, that “there was no need to have conveyed this via the Prime Minister of the country”. 

Rise of a mass movement

Comedian Gaurav Gupta, who’s running schtick draws on his baniya identity, while dissecting Modi’s speech likens the advice to the sort of advice dispensed by his own parsimonious father – save electricity, cut expenses, etc. But the bit revolves around the obvious omission at the heart of Modi’s address: why? Why austerity, and why now? 

He adds that if Modi were on the Titanic, he would never announce that the ship was sinking, “Modi ji khel khele ja rahein hain, nanga naach (Modi ji is playing games, putting on a shameless spectacle).”

This is fundamentally why the CJP has been so wildly successful. Satire holds a mirror to social truths, often unsaid. The cockroach commons know what the halls of power will not disclose. That the unemployed youth of the country, far from being “parasites” and “cockroaches”, are in fact the canaries in the coal mine of a troubled Indian economy. The CJI’s comment, after all, were in the context of protests over the first ever cancellation of the country-wide NEET exams, stultifying over 22 lakh students and medical school aspirants directly. 

Also read: Cockroaches Have an Annoying Habit. They Come Back

India has seen mass popular movements in the 21st century before, like the anti-corruption sit-ins of the late aughts translate to dubious electoral dividends. Arvind Kejriwal, the leader of the Aam Aadmi Party, was also issued contempt notice for an “orchestrated social media campaign” initiated by another judge, Justice Swarna Sharma. 

The CJP, for its own part, is evolving past its initial cynical criterion of membership of the unemployed, lazy, chronically online, professional ranters, to a crucial five-point agenda with provisions to protect democracy, ranging from 50% reservation for women to ensuring the functioning of independent media.

There are a host of social media personalities and influencers on its page already, with the likes of Madri Kakoti (@dr.medusssa) celebrating the dismantling of deliberate online apathy in favour of the feeling of being alive once again albeit online. She also directs the over one crore people engaged with CJP to offline and ongoing struggles of Dalits and Adivasis in Odisha, wondering what a new influx of online voices elevating these struggles would do against the blackout of such stories on mainstream media. 

Another influencer, Shamita Yadav (@the.ranting.gola), had her Instagram account with nearly 1.6 million followers suspended. So, she collaborated with the CJP on a post through her new account @rantingjiji, starting her video with “Jai Samvidhan doston”, questioning whether Indians will let a woman’s voice be silenced, whether bureaucrats should decide limits on speech, and whether her crimes were to ask the government questions and demand accountability from the regime. However, she has also since questioned the efficacy of signing online petitions, pointing instead to those protesting on the ground in 48 degree Celsius heat, facing lathi charges, etc whom nobody talks about while CJP is being anointed as “youth ki aawaaz (voice of the youth).”

The success of the satirical CJP – immediate and widespread – may have no correlation to its political functioning as a cohesive ideological front in the future. But the people’s internet will prevail, at least till such time as a Broadcast Bill is passed that brings all digital content under state regulation and censorship. For the cockroach commons always finds a way, even if it is through more conventional word of mouth transmissions such as poems. 

As Rapper Kartavya Beniwal, in the CJP’s latest track Cockroach Janata Party Zindabad, sings: “Dikkat unko berozgari ki youth ki awaz uthane se/ lekin unko dikkat nahin, itni berozgari kyon (Their problem is with those raising the issue of unemployed youth, not with the unemployment crisis itself).”

Shayoni Mitra is a Senior Lecturer, Department of Theatre, Barnard College.

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