On Saturday morning, Abhijeet Dipke, founder of the so-called Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), flew in from the United States to lead what was billed as a generational uprising in India. The cameras were ready. The hashtags were trending. Sonam Wangchuk was on stage. And the crowd? As per reports, somewhere between 800 to 1,000 people turned up at Jantar Mantar — a venue that Indian political movements have routinely filled by the tens of thousands on an ordinary weekday afternoon.
This, according to the BBC, was “India’s new political superstar.” According to the ABC, it was the moment that “India’s largest online youth movement” spilled onto the streets. According to the Telegraph’s award-winning foreign correspondent, it was a “viral cockroach party” that “threatens to bring down Modi.”
All of this, for fewer attendees than a mid-tier college festival.
The CJP playbook is not original — and that is precisely the point. Since Bangladesh’s so-called “Gen Z revolution” of 2024, which brought down Sheikh Hasina’s government and opened the door to Islamist consolidation under Prof. Muhammad Yunus, and Nepal’s opposition-driven street politics of recent years, a template has emerged: brand a protest movement in the language of youthful irreverence, flood social media with memes and follower counts, and wait for the Western press to do the amplification work for free.
In Bangladesh, this resulted in the dismantling of a secular, if imperfect, government — and the rapid rise of Jamaat-e-Islami and its affiliates in the resulting vacuum. In Nepal, street pressure has been a reliable instrument of political destabilisation regardless of which faction wields it. Now the Nepali youth want rapper-turned-politician Prime Minister Balen Shah to resign too.
The lesson that India’s fractured, desperate opposition drew from both cases was seductively simple: virality can substitute for legitimacy.
The CJP has followed this formula with almost textbook precision. Begin with a grievance that is real — NEET examination irregularities are a genuine problem, and Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan is a legitimate target of criticism. Then wrap that grievance in a satirical identity (the “cockroach” branding, originating from a Supreme Court hearing remark) designed for maximum shareability. Recruit someone who on surface looks like an independent figure, Sonam Wangchuk, to lend credibility. Claim astronomical online numbers. And then, crucially, let foreign media manufacture the aura of inevitability.
22 million claimed followers. 8 lakh petition signatures. 1,000 bodies at the protest 9including media, social media influencers hungry for content, and selfie hunters). At some point, even the most credulous foreign correspondent must ask: where did everyone go?
One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to notice that the CJP’s political positioning maps almost perfectly onto the Aam Aadmi Party’s talking points and that of the broader INDIA alliance. The demand for Pradhan’s resignation, the framing of the government as running a “politics of fear,” the conspicuous absence of any critique directed at opposition-governed states with their own examination scandals — all of this follows a script that serves India’s dysfunctional opposition more than it serves any student.
Dipke’s remarks at Jantar Mantar were revealing: “Stop religious politics, stop Hindu-Muslim politics.” This is legitimate as far as it goes. But it is also, notably, a campaign slogan — and one borrowed wholesale from opposition rhetoric. A genuinely independent student movement would direct its fire at the system, not at a single minister, and certainly would not arrive led by a figure flying in from the United States with pre-drafted ultimatums and media escorts.
India’s opposition, having failed to build a credible electoral alternative, has repeatedly turned to street theatre as a substitute for policy. The CJP is the latest, most social-media-optimised iteration of that strategy.
What makes this episode genuinely worrying, however, is not the protest itself — which was peaceful, modest in scale, and entirely within the norms of democratic expression. What is worrying is the complete abandon with which major Western outlets fabricated a narrative of revolutionary momentum from almost no evidence.
ABC (Australia): “India’s viral ‘cockroach’ political movement spills onto Delhi’s roads… India’s largest online youth movement has just had its first go at taking things out of reels and into real life.”
BBC: “India has a new political superstar — a cockroach.”
The Telegraph: “Viral cockroach party threatens to bring down Modi.”
AFR: “Viral ‘cockroach party’ crawls under Modi’s skin.”
None of these headlines were written after the protest. None of them reflected the reality of 1,000 people in paper cockroach masks at a venue that has seen millions. They were written in advance of the event — fed by the same social media metrics that the CJP itself was manufacturing — and they served audiences outside India who have no mechanism to verify that “22 million followers” does not translate to 22 million people willing to take to the streets of Delhi.
This is not merely sloppy journalism. It is a structural failure of legacy media institutions whose India coverage is increasingly shaped by diaspora correspondents, social media feeds, and a reflexive appetite for any narrative that frames Modi’s India as teetering on the edge of youth-driven collapse. The BBC’s audiences in Birmingham or ABC’s in Brisbane did not learn that the protest drew 1,000 people. They learned that India had a new political superstar. These are not the same story.
It bears saying clearly: the NEET paper leak scandal is a genuine outrage. But legitimate grievances do not automatically produce legitimate movements. The CJP’s petition with 800,000 signatures, its 22 million claimed followers, its promises that “lakhs of students will join us in a day or two” — none of this materialised on Saturday. What materialised was a small and ultimately inconsequential gathering that has been inflated, by foreign media that should know better, into something it is not.
The danger here is not that CJP will bring down the government. It will not. The danger is that this template — manufacture virality, import a foreign media narrative, launder opposition politics through a supposedly apolitical youth brand — will be refined and repeated. It was tested in Dhaka, adapted in Kathmandu, and is now being piloted in Delhi. Each iteration learns from the last.
Western public broadcasters like the ABC and BBC have, whether intentionally or through sheer analytical laziness, become the most important infrastructure that these manufactured movements depend on. They provide the international legitimacy that domestic social media cannot. They tell the story before it happens and ignore to update on the reality after it fails.
India’s democracy is robust enough to survive cockroaches. It is less certain that the international audience’s understanding of India will survive another decade of coverage like this.
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