Abhijeet Dipke Reveals How Cockroach Janta Party Was Born, Details AAP Links
New Delhi: Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) founder Abhijeet Dipke said on Tuesday (August 25) that he founded his outfit in a fit of feeling upset by the Chief Justice of India's remarks about unemployed youth, without giving much thought to what would follow. He said this on-stage at a 'Gen Z Summit' organised by a TV channel, later releasing a clip of what he said.
Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das, co-convenors of CJP, were also present on the same stage. Dipke said at the summit that he had previously worked with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) along with Ranka. "We worked together in AAP earlier... In AAP, not in some terrorist organisation," Dipke said.
He said he had met Das a couple of times before launching CJP, and that he had followed Das's work as a journalist.
Dipke is known to be close to Manish Sisodia, former Delhi education minister in the AAP government. "Leaving for Boston with your guidance as my compass. No distance will ever weaken my commitment to AAP," Dipke wrote on X in August 2024.
Ranka's past association with AAP is also well-known.
Dipke worked with AAP’s social media and campaign operation between 2020 and 2023. During the 2020 Delhi assembly election, he built meme-based content aimed at young voters and later was a communications adviser to the Delhi government’s education department. Ranka worked at McKinsey before serving as an associate fellow in the Delhi Legislative Assembly under the AAP government from September 2019.
Dipke said at Tuesday's 'Gen Z Summit' organised by News 24 that after graduating in Boston, he would spend his time applying for jobs all day, going to the gym in the evenings and playing FIFA (a football video game) at night.
"When I took a break from my playstation one night, I saw the comment – the CJI had said that some people have nothing to do except to keep criticising, that they are jobless and lazy. I was surprised that a constitutional authority with the duty to protect freedom of expression was demeaning people for exercising that right," Dipke said.
So he wrote "what if all cockroaches come together" on X.
What if all cockroaches come together?
— Abhijeet Dipke (@abhijeet_dipke) May 16, 2026
After this, he returned to his videogame. "Two or three hours later, at around 10 or 11 pm, I noticed many people had commented on my post. Some were saying a new outfit should be launched, something should be done, a party or organisation be launched in response to the CJI's remarks and so on," he said.
Dipke said he agreed about doing something about the remarks too but wasn't sure what or how. Still only half-serious, he decided to "launch" a Cockroach Janta Party, taking the label ascribed to the unemployed by the CJI and giving it a new twist.
To become its member, he said, one had to be lazy, unemployed, a chronically online and a professional ranter. "I set up the same membership critera that [the CJI had] used to demean," he said. "And somewhere, it clicked with people. After all, they must have been feeling humiliated [by the remarks]," he said.
The CJI's statement, made on May 15, was that 'There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment and don’t have any place in profession." Dipke's account is that he heard about the remark on social media soon after it was being criticised online.
Speaking at the summit, Dipke said he would have booked a separate online domain for the CJP had he suspected that the membership form (a google form) he posted for signing up for the CJP would gather the tremendous support it did. He used his personal email ID instead.
His first post on X about cockroaches coming together now has over 1.8 million views.
The membership form had 5,000 members within a couple of hours. "I don't know why it spread far and wide, but it got these registrations within hours, which generally does not happen over X. Maybe someone shared it across platforms like Telegram or Facebook," he said.
Not sure what to do even now, he went to sleep for the night. In the morning, he saw 50,000 registrations on the google form. "I was totally not prepared for it," he said.
The CJP has since evolved from an Instagram or X phenomenon into a youth movement that secured the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, former Union minister of education late in July after a month-long agitation at Jantar Mantar and youth protests that snowballed across the country.
It has announced a fresh protest march on September 3, led by the families of those who died due to the cancellation of the NEET Undergraduate examination earlier this year, after the Union government did not fulfil its end of the terms to end that protest.
This article went live on August twenty-fifth, two thousand twenty six, at three minutes past nine at night.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
