It’s not even a month old, and yet the Cockroach Janta Party’s (CJP) Instagram account has accumulated more followers than the BJP and the Congress combined. It now sits at over 22 million. You could argue it’s not actually a ‘party’, it’s a social media handle, that too one that was formed on a whim when a careless judge made a stupid remark — but this handle is showing all signs of becoming a mass movement.

On Saturday, June 6, CJP’s founder, Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old Dalit from Maharashtra who’s pursuing a Master’s degree at Boston University, flew back to India to spearhead CJP’s inaugural in-person protest in New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar — that eternally restless ground where India’s litany of discontent has simmered for decades.

The protest was to demand accountability for alleged irregularities in national competitive examinations (including NEET, CBSE, CUET and SSC), which have jeopardised the future of millions of young Indians, and demand for Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation.

Young people arrived in cockroach masks, carrying flowers. According to reports, Dipke — in a move that smacks of strategic sophistication — had asked his followers to offer flowers to police personnel. The ‘real’ anger was masked in civility.

The heat was scorching, touching 40 degrees, so the turnout wasn’t unprecedented. There were reports going back and forth with polarised versions, either too inflated or too whittled down, but it would be fair to say around 2,000-2,500 people showed up, mostly Gen Zs. Not a bad show of strength.

The showstopper was Magsaysay awardee Sonam Wangchuk, the education reformer/innovator from Ladakh. His arrival transformed the afternoon’s agenda, and as one person pointed out, “This is no longer a meme rally. This is a coalition.”

So far so food. The CJP’s substantive grievance is real and cuts deep. In a country where a single examination can determine the entire trajectory of a young person’s life, the integrity of the education system is all-important. And it has been compromised, time and again.

It was a great rallying point, propped up by great optics.

But here is where the rub lies: the Indian establishment does not fight “movements”; it simply outlasts them. Take the case of Kanhaiya Kumar, who stormed onto the stage around a decade ago as the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, and who was appropriated by the Congress in 2021. Or “anti-corruption activist” Anna Hazare, who started a massive movement only to be practically forgotten a few years after his hunger strikes almost became a national emergency.

Today, with the CJP being a “viral” (not really grassroots) strain, the consequences could be even simpler. ‘Pundits’ are already pointing out that the establishment is most likely going to absorb, neutralise and ultimately exhaust any impact because CJP doesn’t have sufficient architecture.

The same Gen Z attention span that made the CJP explode online is also its greatest structural vulnerability. 22 million (and counting) Instagram followers do not translate automatically into votes, ground organisation, or the patient, unglamorous constituency-level work that actually moves Indian politics.

None of this is to diminish what happened at Jantar Mantar. It matters enormously that young Indians — routinely dismissed, economically squeezed, their examinations corrupted and their futures mortgaged — have found a language of protest that feels entirely their own. There is something genuinely electric about a generation that takes an insult from the Chief Justice of India, and turns it into a movement of millions within a fortnight.

Whether the cockroach survives, however, will depend on something no algorithm can manufacture: the willingness to stay — long after the memes have faded — and do the slow, invisible, essential work of building something that lasts.- (Sushmita Bose is Consulting Editor, NRIFocus.com)