Can Modi crush the cockroaches?

Once again, the young in India are misguided. Every generation, it seems, must discover afresh that it has been hoodwinked by the ruling class, and, in response, throw itself into some new crusade for radical renewal that arrives already exhausted, mistaking irony for ideology, performance for politics, and self-mockery for self-government. The upshot of such undirected disaffection, almost invariably, is that the movement proves a damp squib. Lather, rinse, repeat. Such is the tragedy of a great deal of student politics — not only in India but across much of the world.

The latest object of cathexis for India’s unhappy youth is the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). Its prospects, non-existent as they are, matter less than its provenance. The CJP is not an Indian eccentricity but the latest expression of a wider Gen-Z convulsion. Across the Global South, from the students who felled Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh to their coevals in Nepal, Kenya, and Madagascar, a generation trapped between economic stagnation and digital overstimulation has discovered the pleasures of rebellion. Yet rebellion is easier to summon than purpose. For every movement that matures into a political force, dozens dissolve into little more than a collective tantrum conducted through hashtags and megaphones. The significance of the CJP lies less in anything it is likely to achieve than in what it reveals about the poverty of the political imagination of a generation coming of age amid pervasive unemployment, institutional sclerosis, and digital hyperconnectivity.

The story begins with a meme. In May, Chief Justice Surya Kant, during a hearing concerning fraudulent professional credentials, remarked en passant that unemployed young people drifting into journalism and activism resembled cockroaches. The entomological insult ricocheted across the Indian internet. Within 24 hours, the CJP was born. Its mascot was the eponymous cockroach, smartly besuited; its slogan “the voice of the lazy and unemployed”; its natural habitat, the teeming meme swamps of the Indian internet. Within days, the movement had amassed millions of followers, transforming an offhand judicial insult into a political identity.

The architect of this improbable insurgency is Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old sometime comms man from Maharashtra and now, by his own telling, another superannuated recruit to the ranks of India’s educated unemployed. Dipke read journalism in Pune before moving to Boston University to pursue a master’s degree in public relations. Before discovering fame as India’s chief cockroach, he did time in the digital trenches, helping develop the populist Aam Aadmi Party’s meme-driven social media operation. By his own account, the CJP began as a Kafkaesque half-joke. Within days, however, a satirical website hastily assembled from Boston had become the toast of Indian newsrooms.

The CJP’s runaway success owes much to its status as an empty signifier: it possesses not so much an ideology as a vibe. In this respect, the party is very much a product of Dipke’s intellectual formation in PR. It is anti-establishment without being systematically anti-capitalist, oppositional without being programmatically Left-wing, and youthful without being especially radical. Its rhetoric revolves around a familiar omnium gatherum of grievances among educated urban Indians: joblessness, corruption, the persistence of political nepo dynasties, and the sense that the country’s gerontocratic political class has ceased to speak the language of younger generations. The movement’s genius lies in its ability to convert these diffuse frustrations into a collective identity. To call oneself a cockroach is at once an act of self-deprecation and solidarity.

The grievances animating students are, to be sure, far from imaginary. India produces millions of graduates each year while struggling to generate enough sensible employment to absorb them. Millions of young Indians enter university expecting social mobility, only to emerge as the immiserated caput mortuum of the credential economy: examined, certified, and yet no closer to the prosperity they were promised. Public recruitment examinations, meanwhile, are routinely engulfed by allegations of paper leaks and malpractice. Last year’s controversy over the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) — the fiercely competitive examination that serves as the principal gateway to medical education for more than two million Indian students each year — became a national scandal after allegations of leaked question papers and irregular scoring procedures cast doubt on the integrity of the process.

The broader crisis of educational credentialism is impossible to miss: ever more degrees chasing ever fewer opportunities. It is hardly surprising that the CJP struck a chord with this generation, giving it a carapace beneath which to nurse its dashed hopes and accumulated disappointments.

Yet what remains striking is how little substance accompan…