What Is The Cockroach Janta Party? Inside India’s Viral Gen Z Political Movement | N18V | 4K

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:01][Music] What started as a political satire movement has now become a viral revolution.

[00:00:09]The Cockroach Janata Party was founded on the 16th of May at the age of 21. Its official Instagram handle has crossed 13 million followers. It is the fastest growing internet phenomenon in Indian political discourse in recent times. For perspective, the BJP's official Instagram page has nearly 9 million followers while the Congress Party's handle has a little over 13 million followers.

[00:00:35]So what is the cockroach Janata Party, how did it start and why is it gaining so much fraction.

[00:00:42]Last week during a court hearing the Chief Justice of India Justice Surya Kant said that [music] parasites were attacking the system and equated youngsters to cockroaches who don't get any employment and don't have any place in a profession.

[00:00:56]Can't later clarify that his remarks were related to some people acquiring fraudulent degrees and did not target India's youth whom he calls the pillars of a developed India but the damage was done. Jens The Internet Users Were Fuming. One of them was Abhijeet Deepak. A 30 year old graduate in Public Relations from Poston University. He put out a post on X asking what if all cockroaches came together. He followed it up by setting up a website and social media accounts for the Cockroach Janata Party and asked people to sign up if they were unemployed, lazy, chronically online, and those with the ability to run professionally. The party instantly wrapped up lax number of sign ups and got the packing of prominent opposition politicians like S Akhilesh Yadav, Mahwa Moitra and Kirti Azad. While it is not a formally registered party, it has a manifesto which includes not granting any retired Chief Justice a Rajya Sabha seat and 50% reservation for women.

[00:01:56]Cockroach Janata Party founder Abhijeet Deepak falls under the unemployed youth category himself. He did his graduation degree in journalism in Pune and moved to the US to pursue higher studies. He just completed a two-year Masters in Public Relations at Western University. Deep K Vaz, previously associated with the Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party's social media and election campaigns between 2020 and 2023, said it was triggering to hear the CJI use the word 'cockroach', so he decided to launch a party. Dev said he built his party online within 24 hours of first posting about it. Leveraging AI tools such as Cloud and ChatGPT to design its look and manifesto. His initiative is in line with a long tradition of global countercultural political movements that use abstraction and performance to challenge mainstream politics.

[00:02:49]The timing of the cockroach Janata Party is interesting. In recent years, South Asia has been the ground zero of historic jancy protests in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. More than a quarter of India's population is Japanese. The country produces more than 8 million graduates a year but the unemployment rate remains high. And that's where the cockroach Janata Party comes in. It is focused on channeling youth frustration and demanding political accountability.