Why the Cockroach Party's Rise is No Surprise

The sudden rise of the Cockroach Janta Party on Instagram after Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant’s indefensible remark, which he clarified later, did not emerge from nowhere. To dismiss it as mere meme culture or online chaos would be a mistake. Something deeper lies beneath the irony, humour and frenzy of Instagram politics.

A generation that has grown up amid insecurity, surveillance, collapsing solidarities and relentless digital mediation suddenly found a metaphor that captured its diffuse anxieties. The speed with which the phrase spread, whether organised or spontaneous, tells us less about one Instagram account and far more about the conditions of Indian Gen Z.

As someone from what is called the millennial generation, I feel my generation encountered India differently. We grew up during the first decade of liberalisation, when the promises of urban India still appeared broadly believable. Cities represented mobility and aspiration. Students from small towns migrated towards engineering colleges, coaching centres, IT corridors and expanding service industries believing that life, however difficult, would materially improve.

Even those of us shaped by Left traditions and rightly skeptical of neo-liberalism could still see how aspiration itself was reorganising society. Welfare interventions like Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in the mid-2000s also created the impression that India, despite inequalities, would not entirely abandon its poor and marginalised.

Exploitation certainly existed, and much of it was becoming invisible in the media, especially in rural India, but there was also expansion and possibility. Gen Z inherited a very different India.

They entered adulthood after the 2008 financial crisis, amid deepening inequality, precarious employment, ecological collapse, social media saturation, aggressive hyper-nationalism under Hindutva politics and finally the psychological rupture of Covid-19.

Alongside, they inhabit cities marked by gig work, impossible rents, declining savings, shrinking formal employment and now the looming fear of AI-induced job displacement. This contradiction defines the generation: aspirational yet deeply insecure because of the political, economic and social failures accumulated over the last decade.

At a time when living standards for large sections of youth are declining, Gen Z reportedly drives nearly 43% of India’s consumption expenditure. Fashion, beauty, electronics, gaming, cafes, luxury aesthetics and digital subscriptions dominate spending patterns. This is not because they are uniquely materialistic. Capitalism has reorganised social acceptance itself through visibility as a consumer.

Under platform capitalism, one must constantly display oneself. To be desirable, employable, respectable or even socially relevant increasingly requires participation in consumer culture. FOMO is not a trivial individual weakness; it is a social condition produced by algorithmic life, endless comparison and the commodification of identity itself.

This is why Gen Z often appears contradictory. Environmentalism coexists with fast fashion consumption. Anti-capitalist memes circulate alongside influencer lifestyles and luxury aspirations. But these contradictions are not unique moral failings of young people. They are symptoms of late capitalism, where critique and commodification constantly absorb one another. Capitalism today does not merely sell products; it sells rebellion, irony and dissent back as aesthetics.

My generation, and generations before us, inherited older forms of collective life that neo-liberalism systematically weakened. Trade unions, student movements, reading circles, public libraries, neighbourhood cultures, ideological organisations and local political activity shaped how many of us understood society. Even disagreement took place within institutions.

Gen Z, however, has grown up at a time when many of those mediating structures have either collapsed or become inaccessible. They are perhaps the most connected yet emotionally isolated generation in modern history. Their friendships, identities, political encounters and even emotional lives are increasingly mediated through platforms. This changes political consciousness fundamentally.

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

Politics for Gen Z is no longer separate from entertainment, humour, identity or lifestyle. It arrives through reels, edits, influencers, memes, podcasts and algorithmic repetition. Humour has become a political language. Irony is now one of the primary ways frustration is communicated. This partly explains why stand-up comedians have become major interpreters of social discontent. Their popularity reflects widespread cynicism toward institutions, media narratives and the absurdities of contemporary life. Yet this cynicism often vents rather than organises. It expresses alienation without necessarily building collective structures capable of transforming it.

The Cockroach Janta Party phenomenon emerges precisely from this condition. The actual demands drafted by those behind the handle may not reflect the views of its millions of followers. Some positions, including the implicit support for retaining draconian laws like the UAPA, are deeply contradictory.

But that is not the central point.

The emotional identification is real. Millions of young people instantly recognised themselves in the insult by the CJI. The word “cockroach” resonated because many already experience themselves as disposable within India’s political economy: unemployed, overworked, underpaid, constantly judged, economically insecure and socially replaceable.

Unlike earlier generations, however, Gen Z’s response to power is shaped by conditions of heightened surveillance and atomisation. My generation inherited memories of mass mobilisation as the grammar of political action. Today’s youth have grown up amid intensified policing, digital monitoring, precarious employment and shrinking protections. Add to this the enormous resources spent by the regime in delegitimising dissent as “anti-national” or “anti-growth”.

Naturally, Gen Z politics often appears “indoorsy”. Instead of marches and rallies, one increasingly sees hashtag wars, meme offensives, coordinated unfollows, trolling campaigns and bursts of algorithmic disruption. This does not make them apolitical. It simply means the grammar of political participation has changed. But it also creates a danger. Algorithms can be managed. Trends can be neutralised. What is viral today can disappear tomorrow.

Globally, one troubling pattern is increasingly visible: the frustrations of young men are being captured far more effectively by conservative and right-wing forces than by progressive movements. India reflects this strongly. Neo-liberal precarity has produced not only anxiety but also a desperate search for belonging.

In that vacuum, Hindutva ecosystems, civilisational pride pages, online warrior aesthetics, Kanwar Yatras, Gen Z bhajan mandalis and hyper-nationalist influencer cultures offer certainty, identity and masculine community. The algorithm amplifies these tendencies.

Social media privileges outrage, spectacle and simplified binaries. Nuance performs poorly. Structural critique performs poorly. Historical analysis performs poorly. Meme-ready content travels faster than serious political engagement. In such an environment, politics increasingly becomes aesthetic rather than organisational.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi understood this transformation earlier than most. He performs power continuously through spectacle, symbolism, travel, meditation, inaugurations and relentless visibility. This permanent visibility is sustained by immense institutional and financial machinery overwhelmingly available to ruling-class politics.

Yet it would be a grave mistake to reduce Gen Z to passive recipients of propaganda. In many ways they are more politically aware than earlier generations. They possess sharp skepticism toward institutions, elite hypocrisy and media narratives. They instinctively understand irony. They navigate multiple identities simultaneously: Korean pop culture alongside Tamil pride, anime alongside nationalism, hip-hop alongside caste assertion.

Their world is hybrid, fragmented and intensely self-aware. Many of them were politically disciplined through an overwhelming Hindutva online ecosystem and continue to see the world through that lens. Many still broadly share the worldview propagated by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-Bharatiya Janata Party (RSS-BJP) while expressing issue-based grievances. But the failures of the present order are becoming impossible to ignore.

NEET paper leak has again exposed how serious the government is regarding medical education or education, in general. IIT Bombay secured only 70% placements this year. AI is increasingly threatening the service-sector dream that shaped middle-class aspirations. Young people know this. They sense uncertainty ahead. But awareness without collective grounding can quickly become exhaustion.

This is where serious political questions emerge for Gen Z. Can anger survive only as irony? Can memes alone confront unemployment, caste violence, gender inequality, agrarian distress, ecological collapse and corporate concentration of wealth? Can algorithms replace organisation? Can political consciousness emerge without sustained engagement with workers, peasants, women’s movements, anti-caste struggles and environmental movements? If institutions are distrusted, what democratic alternatives will replace them?

Gen Z is quick to critique, but the speed of trends also produces short political memory. This is where the establishment’s hostility toward dissent and ability to ‘manage’ trends become significant. To take one example, under a government championing national security, we still do not know who was behind the Pulwama attack, the Pahalgam attack or the Red Fort blast.

Also read: Wit Is Dissent

That questioning has stopped and has been subsumed by subsequent trends. Independent journalists, RTI activists, student dissenters, civil liberties advocates and critics of state power are depicted as destabilising forces. The labels change, “anti-national,” “urban Naxal,” “toolkit gang,” and now even “cockroach,” but the underlying logic remains the same: delegitimise dissent by portraying it as parasitic and manage trends.

There is a bitter historical irony here. For decades, the Left occupied precisely this place in the establishment’s imagination: persistent, inconvenient and impossible to fully eliminate. In many ways, the Left is the original “cockroach” surviving repression, censorship and hostility while continuing to speak about exploitation and inequality. Yet despite possessing the analytical tools to understand alienation under capitalism, much of the Left struggles to communicate in a language that reaches the online generation. That gap cannot be ignored.

Because beneath memes, humour and volatility lies a generation confronting declining material security, mental health crises, collapsing certainty and profound loneliness under digital capitalism. If these frustrations continue to be captured primarily through hyper-nationalism, reactionary identity and “us versus them” politics, and algorithm management, the Right will retain ideological advantage by diffusing issues.

Understanding Gen Z thus requires neither romanticising nor dismissing them. They are not the cause of this historical condition. Their angst is a clear symptom of the establishment's failure. Coupled with the upcoming AI-induced transformations in labour and production relations, young people increasingly see a vulnerable future ahead. Cynicism toward structures is understandable.

But eventually, a structured critique must evolve: on religion and spirituality, caste hierarchies, gender relations, labour exploitation, the peasantry, ecological destruction and the concentration of wealth and power. Without that grounding, anger risks becoming only another consumable trend. The challenge before progressive politics today is not to lecture Gen Z from afar, but to engage with them seriously, patiently and politically to organise hope before alienation hardens into permanent despair.

Vivek Sharma is a member of National Council, Communist Party of India (CPI). 

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