The Cockroach and the Cue Ball.
Long time ago, I used to play pocket billiard also called pool. I had discovered a blind shot, everyone disliked. Without fear of penalty or adverse point, I would hit very had on cue ball in the direction where maximum balls are, hoping that force would drop some ball in pocket. It was reckless but some times it worked.
Arvind Kejriwal is playing the same shot in Punjab.
Punjab is a four-way race. Congress, AAP, BJP and Akali Dal are already splitting the same voter base. In a first-past-the-post system, you do not need a majority. You need your rivals to bleed more than you. The winning number drops every time a new party enters the field.
The Cockroach Janta Party.
On May 15, 2026, Chief Justice Surya Kant allegedly compared unemployed youth to cockroaches in a Supreme Court hearing. The next day, Abhijeet Dipke registered his anger. He founded the Cockroach Janta Party, a self-described political front of the youth, by the youth, for the youth.
It is Secular, socialist, democratic and lazy, by its own description. It went viral. Twenty million Instagram followers in under five days. Three hundred and fifty thousand registered members by May 22. Impressive numbers, until you learn that it is not registered with the Election Commission, operates as a satirical movement, and its follower count has the fingerprints of bot inflation all over it and it inflated to millions.
The 20 million followers live almost entirely on Instagram, a platform whose bot detection remains charitable at best. On X, where Elon Musk has spent two years systematically purging fake accounts, the Cockroach Janta Party is barely visible. The contrast is the answer. Twenty million followers and two hundred protesters in June heat tells everything about the actual followers.
Dipke is not a random angry young man. He is a thirty-year-old political communications strategist who formerly worked for AAP. That detail matters.
Demands
Every demand on the party’s website targets BJP. Not Congress. Not Akali Dal. Not AAP. BJP alone. No Rajya Sabha seats for retired judges. Strict laws against vote deletion. Cancel corporate media licences. Each demand is aimed at the same political direction. The satirical wrapping gives everyone plausible deniability. The fingerprints are visible anyway.
In June the party called for a protest over multiple scandals in India’s education and examination system. The main trigger was the NEET 2026 paper leak, which sparked outrage among students and parents. The paper leak outraged millions, two hundred of them showed up on June 6.
The protest settled the question of what this party actually is.
The Protest on June 6
The crowd’s intellectual preparation matched the occasion. One protester could not spell cockroach, the name of the party he had come to represent, apparently unaware that his phone had a dictionary. Another could not name the minister whose resignation was the entire stated purpose of the protest. A third confidently demanded the removal of Amit Pradhan, combining two different politicians into one imaginary target. A fourth, refreshingly honest, said he had come to see what was happening. At least he knew why he was there.
One YouTuber asked a female protester what skincare routine she planned after standing in the June heat. She refused to answer.
Five hundred journalists and YouTubers showed up. Two hundred protesters came, mostly JNU activists, transgender community members and a handful of former AAP workers. Not one student preparing for NEET. Not one parent destroyed by a paper leak. The party had claimed to represent India’s unemployed youth. The actual base was the same small circle of political workers who attend every such event regardless of the cause.
The media-to-protester ratio told the whole story. This was a performance, not a protest.
The Slogan
The organisers asked the crowd to sit down. “Baith jao, baith jao,” they called out. The crowd, intellectually unequipped for even this modest instruction, presumed it was a slogan. Two hundred people began chanting it back. Baith jao, baith jao. A command to sit became a revolutionary cry. Nobody sat. This was the army Kejriwal was auditing.
The Heat
Any organiser who has mobilised people in North India knows what June does to turnout. You do not choose June if you want crowds. You choose June if you want an excuse for why the crowds did not come. The heat was not bad planning. It was an epistemic cover. Or perhaps its failure.
Abhijeet Dipke, who had flown from Boston to lead India’s biggest youth protest, could not last the morning. The man who picked June, picked Delhi, picked outdoor, was undone by the entirely predictable consequences of those choices. The revolution needed a cool car and a moment to recover. The founder himself had to be carried to an air-conditioned car mid-protest, felled by the very heat he had chosen as his backdrop. So much for awareness of ground realities of India.
The leadership was not suffering with the people. Organisers scrambled into air-conditioned cars between appearances. Saurav Das, one of the faces of this supposed youth revolt, was being fanned by a makeshift file wielded by a man twice his age, almost certainly hired for the purpose. The revolution was taking a cool break. The youth movement was being fanned by someone old enough to be its grandfather.
Kejriwal is Watching
Kejriwas was born in this style of politics. Jantar Mantar is his stage. He knows better than anyone what a failed protest looks like and what it costs. Mamata Banerjee recently called for a march in Kolkata. Almost nobody came. Her party read it as weakness, revolted, and her authority cracked. There is mass defection in the party with MLAs, already formed a seprate group. Kejriwal cannot afford that. He is already out of Delhi. Punjab is what remains. His 7 Rajya Sabha MPs have crossed over and joined BJP.
So he does not call the protest himself. He sends a former aide. He wraps it in satire so no failure can be pinned on him. He watches whether 200 people show up or 20,000. If it fails, he loses nothing. If it grows, he has a tool, a vote-splitter, a fifth party to bleed Congress and Akali Dal in seats where margins are thin.
Objective of the Party
The Cockroach Janta Party does not need to win a single seat. It only needs to pull few thousand votes away from the right candidate in the right constituency. In a four-way race that is already close, that is enough.
The cockroach survives not by fighting. It survives by being everywhere, by being too small to target, by being unkillable through normal means. Whoever named this party understood something about the strategy it was built to serve.
Hit hard. Aim at the cluster. Let the chaos work.
Cockroach’s Survival
But there is something about cockroaches, not everybody knows.
In places where dampness breeds them, killing with a slipper is messy and pointless. We had this problem in office. A pest controller was hired. He applied a small herbal paste, just a speck here and there under furniture, near bottom. No spreading, no spraying. Within days the cockroaches were gone. No bodies, no mess. Just vanished.
I asked him how it worked. He said one cockroach eats the paste and dies. The others eat its body. They die too. The cycle continues until none remain. The cockroach’s greatest survival instinct becomes the instrument of its total extinction.
Kejriwal would do well to remember that. A party built on performance and bot followers, released into real electoral terrain, does not stay a controlled instrument for long. It finds its own appetites. The cue ball he hits so hard into the cluster may yet come back and pocket him.
The myth says cockroaches survive nuclear explosions. In practice, they finish themselves.
References:
- Cockroach Janta Party Website
- Fainting Founding Father Abhijeet Dipke
- Ajit Bharti YouTube Channel.
- Anu Dagar YouTube Channel.