On May 15, 2026, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, speaking from the bench of the Supreme Court, likened unemployed young Indians to “cockroaches,” saying that, unable to find work, they turn to social media, journalism and RTI activism to “attack the system” and calling them “parasites of society.”

These were not remarks made by a politician at a campaign rally or a television anchor in a prime-time outburst, to say the least. These words were on the record, spoken by the occupant of the highest judicial office in India, though the CJI clarified that the statement had been misrepresented and misinterpreted.

However, “cockroach”, to everyone’s astonishment, snowballed into something unexpected. The spiny, long-legged insect — typically loathed — has unexpectedly turned into a symbol of dissent for India’s Gen Z, serving as a pointed rebuke to the country’s ruling establishment.

Digital Humiliation as Political Fuel

The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), which commenced as a satirical platform by Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old Indian political communications strategist, amassed more than 20 million followers in a week, more than double the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Instagram following. Its demands were categorical: the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan; compensation to the students who died by suicide owing to the NEET paper leak; and a broader five-point reform charter targeting systemic transparency, jobs, accountability, press freedom, judicial dignity and education reforms.

This may register as a unique political moment when an insult culminates in an identity and ridicule becomes resistance. The unexpected rise of the Cockroach Janta Party goes beyond a mere joke or expression of anger. It can be comprehended as a small, seemingly absurd and deeply revealing social theatre in which a generation, not limited to Gen Z but including a great deal of Millennials who feel dismissed by power, has now chosen to wear contempt as a badge. In this unfolding of events, it entails something quite old, quite modern and very Kafkaesque.

Franz Kafka’s novel The Metamorphosis (Kafka, 1996), published in 1915, explores the degrading and transformative power of alienation. The protagonist, Gregor Samsa, struggles to reconcile his humanity with his transformation into a giant bug. He faces alienation from the people he cares for and, in contrast, sees that his transformation into a bug enables the lives around him to grow and be renewed.

Kafkaesque philosophy, in general, as enunciated in Kafka’s works, presents a world that is complex, illogical and oppressive, where individuals are trapped in a cobweb of absurd and intensely bureaucratic structures. In doing so, it explores existential crisis, guilt and alienation as it seeks to confront seemingly inescapable obstacles.

Kafka comprehended that the deepest forms of humiliation, lethargy and disaffection are often not sporadic or dramatic; they arrive silently through routines, indifference and the apathy of structures and systems that go on chugging even when the human being as an adjunct of them is crushed. Gregor Samsa, the protagonist in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, does not just wake up as an insect; he wakes up to a world that has prepared to treat him like one. And that is why Kafkaesque imagery resonates with the CJP, as Kafka wrote about institutions that do not humanise people.

Understanding the Emerging Demography

Based on the commonly accepted definition of Gen Z (born 1997–2012) by Pew Research International, the age bracket of a typical Gen Z member in 2014 was 2 to 17 years old. Today, this group is predominantly adults aged 14–29, constituting approximately 370–380 million in 2026, or 27% of the total population.

Thus, a young, aspirational and dynamic demographic has not witnessed a regime throughout their formative years. These youngsters were given a standard template for what it means to be “successful”. They were promised that being political would distract from their goals. The typical success template offered to them was: study, qualify for competitive exams, get a degree, get a job and improve their standard of living. This teleological trajectory did not seem to fructify as predicted. 

There is a perceivable dismantling of education as a crafted path to success among the youth, with parents investing years of savings and students pushing themselves to the brink for different competitive exams. The family revolves around and organises its life in the hope that their children’s hard work will be rewarded fairly.

However, data indicates (Sehgal, 2026) a serious crisis in India’s examination system, with approximately 89 paper leak cases and 48 retests between 2015 and 2026. Recent analysis also suggests that, in the post-2015 era, across 148 exam-related fraud cases (Ranka and Paudel, 2026), there has been exactly one conviction.

On the other hand, public expenditure on higher education in India has remained overwhelmingly low, hovering around 1 to 1.3 per cent of GDP over the last decade. India’s Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in higher education, as per UDISE+ 2025–26, is merely 28 per cent, indicating that the system tends to become expensive and exclusionary.

In professional education, the majority (76.2%) of standalone institutions are run by the private sector, with only 23.8% by the government; the trend is further perpetuated by the NEP 2020. It is not surprising, then, that according to RBI data, there has been a 95.83% increase in outstanding education loans in absolute terms between March 2019 and March 2025.

The intense, cut-throat scramble for admission spots in a handful of publicly funded, quality-subsidised institutes has spawned a mushrooming industry of coaching centres that sell students the dream of getting in.

For instance, according to the Justice A.K. Rajan Committee report, in Tamil Nadu, which had once abolished entrance exams to protect socially marginalised students, NEET has spawned a ₹5,750-crore coaching industry, with more than 400 coaching centres mushrooming since 2016. In such a strenuous situation, a single paper leak brings a plethora of emotional, psychological and economic challenges to students from myriad socio-cultural backgrounds.

These trends enunciate a predictable logic: the normalisation of private coaching as a prerequisite, a compromised examination system, very limited and underfunded public institutions, increasing privatisation and deteriorating quality of education all snowball into a suboptimal and precarious workforce that, most of the time, is not employable, at a time when employment opportunities are already scarce.

So, instead of questioning the system, the generation begins individualising the failure — which apparently the CJI did as well. It is no surprise, then, that Gen Z and millennial Indians are far more prone to stress and anxiety than older generations (Godbole, 2024).

The CJP provided a tool of politicisation for a generation that, by and large, had been depoliticised. It represents a situation where formal channels feel inaccessible, amidst other contributing factors such as GST, demonetisation, the Agniveer scheme, exam leaks, privatisation, the gig economy and collapsing institutional trust.

“Unemployed youth” goes beyond a generational category and becomes a marker of economic precarity, exam anxiety and social humiliation, and that is why the insult resonated with millions.

Irony a Substitute for Institutions?

The power of the “cockroach” in the current viral moment of the CJP seems to resonate with something Kafkaesque that is crawling beneath: unwanted, impossible to eliminate. The apparent insult is meant to make someone feel unworthy. But when an insult is taken up by a community, it culminates in a “badge”, where shame becomes performance, humiliation becomes satire, and satire culminates in political self-recognition.

This is what makes the CJP a movement beyond its meme value. One may expect a series of theories and a plethora of critiques of the CJP, questioning its genesis, nomenclature, context, larger goal, future expectations, structure and virality, and whether it represents a durable political structure — either to dismiss it altogether or to expect perfection from the movement.

However, it is symptomatic of what young Indians are feeling today. They are not represented in the popular grammar of politics, in which, ironically, they are very much alive. One may watch any speech by a typical politician from three decades ago to date and find few notable changes in the lexicon, jargon or content; it is still typecast in the old vocabulary of ideology.

We are living in times when people do not always organise through manifestos; they organise through jokes and irony, and through satire honed by the lived frustration of everyday experiences. When a generation commences to mock a system in its own language, it is because the system fails to listen and acknowledge any other medium of language.

Humour becomes a symbol of resistance when the seriousness of language is rendered redundant. When millions of youngsters attribute themselves as “cockroaches”, it is a reflection of the fact that they feel treated as expendable enough to make the insult their own.

The “Roach” as a Survival Metaphor

Kafka would instantly recognise a world in which people are often trapped in an inexplicable logic, where suffering is procedurally normalised. And this is where it has metamorphosed for India’s youth, where issues of unemployment, inflation, exam paper leaks, institutional apathy and corruption, crony capitalism, erosion of ethical political conduct and communal polarisation have all been pushed under the thick rug of jingoism, where even questioning becomes out of contention.

The “Cockroach Janta Party”, a pun intended to echo the ruling party as well, goes beyond being funny; it is bleak, where people are pushed to the margins, institutional apathy becomes the order of the day, and thus it becomes Kafkaesque. The youth-led movement across the globe has increasingly become more digitally connected and less ideologically driven, focusing on the fundamental questions of democracy — fairness and accountability.

France’s Yellow Vest protests, youth mobilisation in Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, and Chile’s metro fare demonstrations began with specific demands and evolved into larger discourses on governance, accountability and institutional functioning.

The CJP protest, therefore, should not be reduced to being only about the NEET examination in isolation. The perpetual exam failures provided a much-needed spark to a decade of brazen institutional corruption, polarisation, unemployment, a dramatic rise in wealth inequality, deteriorating public health and education, crony capitalism, environmental contestations, and the strangulation of any form of dissent. Contested accountability of the incumbent Modi government was simmering; it wasn’t a matter of “if” but a matter of “when” vox populi would fulminate. This snowballed into the protest.

It even echoed among conventional ruling party supporters — including BJP supporters, families of security forces and even the children of BJP leaders.

The protest, which remained predominantly non-violent, reached its crescendo on July 20, 2026, when thousands of protesters launched “Sansad Chalo” (March to Parliament) in New Delhi. The demonstration was marked by intense clashes between protesters and security forces, who used heavy lathi-charge (beating up with bamboo canes), tear gas, water cannons and even pellet guns.

This event led to a meteoric rise in the movement’s volume and intensity, with youngsters participating in every nook and corner of the country, creating the most burlesque and creative memes, one-liners, art, profanity, and skits that mocked the government.

This “mockery” as a form of criticism was, all the while, alien to a government that was mostly accustomed to hitting back at traditional criticism from the opposition. It apparently tear-gassed the so-called political correctness and state-enforced reverence.

The movement culminated in resounding success, as all the demands made by the CJP were agreed to in principle by the government, including the Union Minister of Education tendering his resignation, in a party that has bragged about its ministers not resigning.

The movement should not, therefore, be reduced to some online quirky cultural episode; rather, it is a symptom of rising disenchantment with the political dispensation. It might not entail ideological clarity or formalisation, but it reflects emotional literacy in expressing resistance, converting pain into virality and outrage into engagement.

It is where the pain became a performative meme, and for one to get noticed, one must first be absurd. The CJP should not be comprehended as a celebration of degradation, but rather as an attempt to resist degradation in its finality; it builds a public language out of what was supposed to be a slur.

It should not be reduced to existing frameworks of resistance or revolutions, or to our desire to pin it down as a success or failure. When millions of identities get contested, the slur metamorphoses into an identity.

Thus, “cockroach”, in the stated context, is not just a creature of filth; it signals a survival grammar that lives in the cracks of the system, difficult to erase, which makes the image so potent. As George Orwell puts it, every joke is a tiny revolution.

Bibliography

Ranka, Ashutosh, and Nice Paudel. “India’s Broken Exam System: The NEET Fiasco.” ThePrint, May 19, 2026.

Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Translated by I. Johnston. Penguin Classics, 1996.

Sehgal, Rashme. “Paper Leak, Cancel and Repeat NEET-UG 2026: A Scandal?” National Herald, 2026.

Godbole, Tanika. “India: Why Are Younger Generations So Stressed?” DW, January 29, 2024.

“NEET-UG: NTA Exam Cancellation, Protests Across India; CBI Probe After Paper Leak — Live Updates.” The Hindu, May 12, 2026.

(The author is Assistant Professor of Political Science at GITAM-Hyderabad. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at mayank-mishra@live.com)