Fresh from a string of regional election victories, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is facing a challenge from an unexpected corner: an AI-generated cockroach.
A satirical protest movement that takes as its symbol the reviled insect has gone viral in India in recent days, attracting 19mn followers on Instagram as it offered an outlet for youth frustration over poor economic prospects, high unemployment and the political system.
The Cockroach Janta Party, a play on the name of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party), is the brainchild of Abhijeet Dipke, an Indian postgraduate living in the US. One of its slogans is: “They tried to step on us. We came back.”
His move was a rejoinder to India’s chief justice Surya Kant, who last week created uproar when he compared unemployed youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites”. Kant later said he was referring to young professionals with fake degrees.
Using images of a suit-and-tie-wearing cockroach standing at a podium, the movement describes itself as the “Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed”. It says its mission is to build a party for young people “who keep getting called lazy, chronically online and — most recently — cockroaches”.
Among its five demands are gender parity in parliament and the cabinet and the cancellation of all licences for media houses owned by India’s two richest tycoons, Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, “to make way for truly independent media”.
Economists say that despite relatively high economic growth, India faces a serious challenge from rising youth unemployment, with even graduates struggling to find decently paid jobs.
India has also not experienced youth protest movements such as those in Nepal, Indonesia and Bangladesh in recent years.
But the rapid march of the cockroach party has caused alarm. Authorities ordered the movement’s X account to be blocked, using legislation against online activity that threatens national security.
Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, a senior BJP leader and former minister, denounced the movement as the “result of a premeditated conspiracy”. “They can’t defeat a vibrant democracy with such violent anarchy,” he told the PTI news agency.
Dipke — who has shared images of the cockroach munching through a lotus flower, the symbol of Modi’s BJP — says he has received death threats.
Kanchan Gupta, a senior adviser at the information ministry, said the government is examining what he termed the “abnormal” phenomenon.
“Nobody has harvested this many followers in 72 hours,” he said. “Our assessment is that these are mostly bots, with a substantial number from Pakistan and other foreign countries.”
India and Pakistan frequently accuse each other of stirring up trouble, though Dipke said his data showed almost 95 per cent of followers were from India.
Harish Wankhede, a political science professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, said the Cockroach Janta Party’s sudden rise pointed to “frustration among the educated mass [at] the failure of the opposition to take up their issues in a radical way”.
“This is a kind of sentiment that was there for a long time,” he added. “This is just a kind of ignition.”
Modi’s BJP is enjoying a degree of political dominance not seen in decades after a string of election victories put the party in control of 22 of India’s 36 states and territories.
The main opposition Congress party, meanwhile, has faced criticism for failing to act as an effective countervailing force.
Shashi Tharoor, a Congress MP, said that whatever the motivations of the cockroach movement’s founders, “there is no denying that they have tapped into an important strain of national sentiment among our youth”.
“Both Government and Opposition need to sit up, listen and tackle the underlying discontent,” he wrote on X.
Anya, a 20-year-old biotechnology student in New Delhi, said the online protest movement reflected grievances among her peers at a system they perceived as “rigged”.
“Everyone is left to fend for themselves,” she said. “We don’t have the option to rely on the government . . . If there’s no quantitative change in a couple of years, we are all going to end up jobless.”
