Cockroaches Crawl Over Decaying Parties in Modi’s Parallel Universe

Image: Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) supporters protest on June 6, 2026 in New Delhi, India │ Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times/ Shutterstock.com

This weekend witnessed a cockroach infestation like never before in history. Hundreds of people braved New Delhi’s sweltering heat to gather at a protest site in the Indian capital donning cockroach masks on Saturday in the first physical demonstration of a nascent Gen Z movement called the “Cockroach Janta Party” that has already gained millions of followers online. The city’s press corps turned up in large numbers to cover the great crawling out party; the entire nation eagerly monitored how it was panning out.

What began as an online meme fest in reaction to a throwaway comment by the chief justice equating jobless youths to cockroaches, blew up in no time. It accumulated 19 million Instagram followers in less than a week, more than what Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) can boast of, and enough to raise “national security” fears for the government to have it blocked on social media platforms.

The creator of this unique party representing the “voice of the lazy and unemployed”, a student at Boston University, made a dramatic return to Delhi on the day of the protest to lead the “revolution”. His immediate demand is the resignation of the education minister for a series of public examination fiascos of paper leaks and misgrading that have aggravated the country’s youth.

The Modi dispensation is making the usual noises about a foreign plot while some government critics hint the movement is being engineered to blunt opposition forces – they point to the uncharacteristically quick clearance given to the demonstration. But whatever is driving it, the movement’s instant connect is undeniable. It points to a lot more than mere anger at an incumbent government, and is emblematic of pathologies that go beyond Modi’s government, or even India.

More than anything else, the cockroach movement is a reflection of the decay of political parties that ails democracies today. It is an expression of a deeply felt crisis of representation that has come to pervade democracies, with people ceasing to connect with political parties – including opposition parties – and seeking out apolitical platforms to channel dissent. The claustrophobia of post-truth polities with captured media and governing institutions run by strongmen like Modi only exacerbates this resigned disconnect.

People and politics: The great disconnect

Noticeably, the cockroach movement comes on the heels of a series of state elections in which the BJP pulled off historic wins, like the anti-government O1G meme movement that gained pace after Hungary’s Viktor Orbán won by a landslide in 2018 to secure a third straight term. 

With its latest electoral triumph, the BJP now controls 22 of India’s 28 states. Modi’s continued success would seem to be at odds with the latent dissent of the cockroaches. It isn’t, for this apparent political success masks a grievous disconnect between people and politics. His serial successes in the face of his manifest failures only deepens the disconnect. The more election victories he stacks up despite the mounting hardships of lived experience, the more distrust he generates in the system.

Pre-poll surveys have for years been showing that the main voter priorities are jobs and inflation, yet the issues that invariably end up dominating campaigns are those of Hindu domination, anti-Muslim scaremongering, and the supposed success of Modi’s rule. Modi’s narrative control through a captured media, his party’s unlimited resources minted on the back of executive power, and the emotive appeal of his polarizing identity politics, allow his party to crowd out the substantive issues of survival and sustenance. It’s easy to see why so many people might feel unrepresented and disconnected.

India, for example, is undergoing a crippling heat wave; all the 50 hottest cities in the world happen to be in India. In just one state, the heat wave has killed more than 8,000 people in five days. Yet heat, just like air pollution that kills close to 2 million people every year, is invisibilized in mainstream political discourse.

Disconnect of this nature has resulted in the loss of public trust in politicians and governments worldwide. In many democracies, from Kenya to Nepal, it has manifested in violent movements. In other democracies, it is reflected in reduced turnout and plummeting party memberships. In others still, like in the U.K., it’s manifested in voter migration from mainstream parties to parties like the Greens and Reform in search of authentic representation.

The malaise at the heart of this is the hollowing out of mass parties, eroding their capacity for connecting citizens to political processes. As parties become ever more dependent on big money with the decline of mobilizing party organizations such as unions and associations, politics increasingly moves from volunteer-driven social activism to expert-managed campaigns driven by data analytics, PR strategies and digital marketing.

The party’s over

The technocracy colonising politics intensifies the popular withdrawal from political life. Once embedded in society, politics feels increasingly remote and elite-captured as parties function less as social organizations and more as appendages of the state. As Peter Mair argues in ‘Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy’, political parties have become so disconnected from society that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.

As parties decay, so does the quality of public representatives – no longer filtered through party constituents and collectives. The chief minister of Delhi, grappling with a water scarcity, last week blamed it on water evaporating from the pipes in the heat wave. The deputy chief minister of Bihar state, with the worst public healthcare systems in India, meanwhile declared the government’s healthcare vision for the state was to make people so healthy that there would be no need for hospitals. The laughable incompetence of the kakistocracy that constitutes much of India’s ruling classes makes politics feel even more disconnected and unreal.

These pathologies are hardly confined to India, but are magnified by the advanced stage of its democratic decay and the uniquely undemocratic traits baked into its party system. Indian parties, for example, are highly centralised and lack intra-party elections – privileging loyalty over competence, and breeding kakistocracy and voter apathy.  

The Hindu supremacist BJP might appear to have bucked the trend of voter disengagement by using emotive cultural appeals, but the use of hate to override all social cleavages and governance demands only increases voter apathy. The constant dog-whistling and incitements can grate when they drown out more pressing bread-and-butter issues.

When the media is captured – like in Modi’s India – the perpetual gramaphoning of an alternative reality of progress and prosperity feels like a joke in the face of the grim realities of daily life. India’s economic growth is collapsing, the currency is in free fall, foreign investors are stampeding out of the country, hunger is growing, more people are dying without medical care than before, public examinations are flunking, and graduates are struggling to find jobs. But these seldom make primetime television, where government spins and hate campaigns rule.

If the loyal media misrepresents the state of affairs, the loyal opposition – out of power and money, and organizationally depleted – is incapable of representing citizen angst. Appendages of the state, these parties cannot challenge the legitimacy of a captured system and make peace with the status quo, making the prospect of any electoral correction seem impossible. This lack of a viable alternative worsens the crisis of representation. Digital activism fills the void, as a sign of frustration at the ruling dispensation as much as against the countervailing institutions incapable of gatekeeping power.

So, cockroaches should worry Modi and the opposition alike as the movement is less a declaration of war on the government than a cry of help over the failure of representative democracy. Their infestation in the world’s largest democracy should scare political parties everywhere. 

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