Cockroaches at the Carnival: What the CJP Tells Us About Protest, Press and the Public Sphere

If satire is Gen-Z’s civic language, a viral meme can start a party, but it takes institutions to sustain a democracy. The Cockroach Janta Party made authority look ridiculous, but unless spectacle turns into substance, this summer’s revolt risks fading into just another algorithmic trend in an endless digital feed.

There is something wonderfully medieval about calling yourself a cockroach and marching on Parliament with it. When Chief Justice Surya Kant reportedly compared India’s unemployed youth to cockroaches and parasites, a twenty-something political strategist named Abhijeet Dipke did the only sensible thing a Gen-Zer raised on irony could do: he founded a party out of the insult. The Cockroach Janta Party took its name as a deliberate parody of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. This is culture jamming, plain and simple: hijack the symbols of power and hand them back changed.

There is something deliciously subversive about naming yourself after the cockroach specifically. It is among the most reviled creatures in the everyday imagination, filthy, resilient, impossible to kill off properly, and the Cockroach Janta Party took its name as a deliberate parody of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. This is culture jamming exactly as Mark Dery described it: hijacking a familiar sign and turning it back against the structure that produced it. An insult became a logo. Satire became organisation.

Dery traced that instinct further back than internet memes or ad-busting, to the medieval carnival, whose significance Mikhail Bakhtin worked out in Rabelais and His World. Kings became fools, fools became kings, hierarchy was suspended for the duration of the festival, and authority was mocked in a space specifically licensed for the mocking. The cockroach costumes of the CJP at Jantar Mantar and other such protest sites, its anthem, its manifesto for the “Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed”: carnival with a Wi-Fi connection, doing exactly what carnival always did, making the respectable look ridiculous and the ridiculous acquire moral seriousness. Humour unsettles authority more than outrage does, because it strips away the solemnity authority depends on.

I hope the CJP stays exactly this: a disruptive cultural intervention rather than another electoral formation. Democracies need spaces held by organisations like Adbusters and the Yes Men, whose hoaxes have exposed more institutional rot than most investigative journalism manages. Electoral politics has a talent for domesticating rebellion. The moment a movement starts counting constituencies and alliances, satire gives way to bureaucracy, and politics is already Kafkaesque enough without every good joke wanting to become a party with a manifesto and a treasurer.

What interests me more than the symbolism, as a media scholar, is the strategy underneath it. Dipke is a Boston University public relations graduate who built his craft on meme campaigns for the Aam Aadmi Party’s 2020 Delhi run, and it shows: this was platform-native storytelling from the start, not a protest that later found an Instagram account. Reels, memes, visual identity and irony were the organisation, not decoration bolted onto it. That is the real Gen-Z contribution to political communication. Humour is not a distraction from politics for this generation, it is the politics while memes are doing the work editorial cartoons used to do, for an audience that has never opened an editorial page.

That should worry the people who still call themselves the mainstream press. Instagram and messaging platforms have become the primary source of political information for millions of Indians, and newsrooms increasingly find themselves reporting on conversations that have already happened online, hours or days late. PM Narendra Modi’s own overnight Instagram address, delivered in a register Gen-Z would instantly recognise as boomerposting, is a Prime Minister admitting that television is no longer where the conversation lives. None of this reflects well on Indian journalism, and the protests were, among other things, a referendum on how little trust remains in institutions generally, mainstream media very much included.

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence assumed a fearful majority reading the room and staying quiet. Digital platforms complicate that rather than resolve it. They lower the cost of dissent by letting people find others who already agree with them, which is how a satirical account outgrew the BJP’s own Instagram following within days. But algorithmic amplification also manufactures its own orthodoxies, where people stay quiet not because of the state but because of their own timeline’s judgement. Social media does not end the spiral of silence. It multiplies it into a dozen overlapping ones running at once.

The coverage itself was a working demonstration of framing theory. Some outlets led with examination irregularities and accountability, others with disruption and policing, others with the sheer novelty of a party born from a meme, and the resigned Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s own attempt to brand the CJP a “B-team of terror groups” on television was framing too, an effort to criminalise dissent through vocabulary that failed because the footage was already public. None of these frames was false exactly. Framing rarely tells an audience what to think but it decides what they think about.

Watching this as a Manipuri produces its own discomfort. Protest is close to a civic language where I come from, streets and sit-ins and torch rallies woven into ordinary political life, and that history conditions how I see marches in New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Pune. They look, unfairly perhaps, almost gentle by comparison. Not because the grievance is smaller, but because these are protests inside a functioning rule of law, where a minister still resigns and cameras still roll. I wrote about a summer when the state itself broke down, on this blog; that contrast follows me into every reading of Jantar Mantar in New Delhi or Freedom Park in Bengaluru.

The real weakness of the movement is geography. It stayed largely urban, dependent on the platforms that made it visible, and it only forced its way onto television’s own agenda once Sonam Wangchuk’s twenty-six-day fast gave it a body count the cameras couldn’t ignore. Sustaining a movement after the meme has gone viral is a harder problem than making the meme in the first place. Spectacle gets attention; institutions need endurance, and the CJP has shown none of the second yet.

So did this expand India’s democratic conversation, or did it simply trend well? Jürgen Habermas imagined the public sphere (ꯃꯤꯌꯥꯝꯃꯐꯝ) as a space for reasoned debate independent of state and market. It is not a coffee house or a letters page any more, but it is a feed run by an algorithm nobody outside a few companies can see into. Whether meme politics can become deliberation without being swallowed by the attention economy that made it possible in the first place is, I think, the actual question this summer leaves behind.