When India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant compared unemployed young people to cockroaches last week, he probably expected outrage, maybe an apology cycle, and then silence.
What he got instead was 15 million Instagram followers in five days, a cockroach logo on a mobile phone, and a movement that has already overtaken the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s own social media presence. The Cockroach Janta Party was born, and its viral rise is more verdict than joke.
The CJP calls itself the “Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed.” Its membership criteria include being chronically online and able to rant professionally. The irony is sharp and deliberate: these are not the qualities of people who gave up.
These are the qualities of a generation that studied hard, followed the rules, and then watched the system fail them, and decided to say so loudly.
India’s government would prefer you focus on the GDP number. With projected growth of 6.3% to 6.8% for 2025-26, the economy is, by global standards, performing well.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made this the centerpiece of his legacy, a rising India, a confident India, an India that will be the world’s third-largest economy by 2030. The headline growth figures conceal an economy that has failed to deliver broad-based opportunity.
Growth for whom?
The latest data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy tells a different story from the government’s headline figures. Youth unemployment among those aged 20 to 24 hovered around 44 to 45% for much of 2025, levels that are substantially worse than before 2014, when the current government came to power.
Even the more conservative official measure, the Periodic Labor Force Survey, puts youth unemployment at 9.9% for the 15-to-29 age group, more than three times the general rate. In urban areas, the picture is bleaker still, with youth unemployment reaching 14.7%.
Education, which was supposed to be the great equalizer, has become an additional cruelty. Unemployment among Indians with secondary education and above stands at 6.5%, meaning that staying in school does not protect you from joblessness; it often just delays it at greater personal cost.
For women, the numbers reach extremes: female youth unemployment hits 41% in Goa and 44% in Kerala, and nearly 40% among degree-holding women in Jammu and Kashmir. This is the country the CJP’s 400,000 members signed up to criticize, more than 70% of them between the ages of 19 and 25.
Meanwhile, the wealth generated by India’s growth has flowed in a strikingly narrow direction. According to the Centre for Financial Accountability, the top 1% of Indians now control more than 40% of national wealth, while the bottom 50% survives on just 15% of national income.
Between 2019 and 2025, the wealth of India’s richest 1,688 individuals grew by 227%, from roughly 31 lakh crore rupees to 88 lakh crore rupees. Household debt in the same period nearly doubled. India’s Gini coefficient for wealth concentration, at 0.74, now matches the United States, a comparison few in Modi’s government would welcome.
This is not a coincidence. It is the result of policy choices: a growth model built around services and consumption, which generates GDP growth but not the mass employment that manufacturing once provided; tax structures that have concentrated gains at the top; and a persistent failure to invest at scale in the quality of education and job creation that an aspirational generation was promised.
When the system eats its own children
Nothing illustrates the institutional rot more clearly than the NEET examination scandal. In May 2024, approximately 2.4 million young Indians sat for NEET-UG, the sole nationwide gateway to medical education. The question paper had already been sold.
In Bihar, police arrested 13 people who had allegedly charged students up to 50 lakh rupees, roughly $60,000, for advance access to the exam. A student whose family had sold land and taken on debt to fund coaching died by suicide after the NEET-UG 2026 exam was similarly canceled over another paper leak.
This is the system the Chief Justice was defending when he called unemployed youth cockroaches for holding “fake and bogus degrees.” The more honest question is: who ran the institutions that produced those degrees? Who administered the leaked examinations? Who built the economy that cannot absorb two million medical aspirants, let alone the hundreds of millions beyond them?
The CJP’s 30-year-old founder, Abhijeet Dipke, now based in Boston after leaving India two years ago, put it plainly to Reuters: “The youth of India has largely vanished from mainstream political discourse. Nobody is talking about us. Nobody is listening to our issues or even trying to acknowledge our existence.”
The brain drain embedded in that quote is itself data. Dipke is one of countless educated young Indians who concluded that the country’s future was not going to include them, and left.
A democracy that stopped listening
India is, by law and by election, a democracy. It is also, by press freedom metrics, one of the more constrained media environments in the world.
In the 2026 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders, India ranked 157th out of 180 countries, a six-place decline from 2025, and lower than Bangladesh and Nepal.
RSF cited rising violence against journalists, highly concentrated media ownership, and outlets with “increasingly overt political alignment.” The political indicator sub-score placed India 160th globally.
This matters for the CJP story for a specific reason: if India’s mainstream media were functioning as an accountability mechanism, it would not have taken a viral meme movement to put youth unemployment, exam leaks, and financial insecurity onto the national agenda.
These issues have been visible for years. They were made invisible by a media ecosystem that found it more comfortable to broadcast GDP growth projections than to interview the families selling land to send their children to coaching institutes.
The CJP’s platform, covering everything from media independence to demanding that half of parliament seats be reserved for women, reads less like a party manifesto and more like a list of things that a functioning press should already have been demanding of government.
Potent crude symbolism
It is worth pausing on the name itself. The cockroach, in popular imagination, is the creature that survives everything: nuclear winters, institutional failure and elite contempt.
When the Chief Justice reached for that image as an insult, the young people it was directed at heard something different: a description of what they had already become. Resilient, persistent, impossible to exterminate.
Dipke cautioned against comparison to the Gen Z-led protests in Bangladesh and Nepal that recently toppled governments. That caution is worth respecting, movements that begin on Instagram do not automatically become political revolutions. Whether the CJP converts fifteen million followers into sustained pressure, or becomes a case study in the limits of digital dissent, remains to be seen.
But the underlying conditions that created it are not going away. Artificial intelligence is already beginning to displace entry-level roles in India’s back-office and services sectors, the employment buffer that absorbed millions of educated workers who could not find manufacturing jobs.
The exam pipeline is leaking. The housing market is pricing out a generation. The media is concentrated. The wealth is concentrated. And a Supreme Court judge, speaking from the heights of the institution designed to protect citizens, reached for the word “cockroach.”
India’s government should be less concerned about 15 million Instagram followers and more concerned about what those 15 million people are describing. They are not wrong about what they see.
They are just the first generation willing to say so at a volume that cannot be ignored.
Nimra Khalil is a geopolitical analyst and opinion writer whose work focuses on international relations, security strategy and the evolving balance of power in an increasingly multipolar world, with a particular emphasis on South Asia and the Asia-Pacific region
