India’s viral “cockroach” political parody group says its website has been blocked just days after it launched. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has gained more than 20 million online followers since being set up as a joke after India’s chief justice reportedly compared unemployed young people to the insects.
He later clarified he was referring to people with “fake and bogus degrees”, not India’s youth more broadly.
Its website can no longer be accessed in the country and also appears to be down elsewhere. The group’s founder Abhijeet Dipke said Indian officials had “taken down our iconic website” and asked why they were “so scared of cockroaches”.
He wrote on X that the group, which is not an official political party, was already working on a new “home” and added: “Cockroaches never die.”
Its official X page – with more than 200,000 followers – is also inaccessible in the country. Those trying to open it are shown a message that it has been withheld “in response to a legal demand”.
Dipke, a political communications strategist and student at Boston University in the US, has also claimed both his personal Instagram and the group’s have been hacked.
The CJP – or the cockroach people’s party – satirises the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been in power since 2014.
The group claims to be “the voice of the lazy and unemployed”. Its tongue-in-cheek membership criteria include being chronically online and having “the ability to rant professionally”.
It has used AI-generated images to promote its cause online and has inspired the hashtag #MainBhiCockroach (“I too am a cockroach”).
The group’s Instagram account has amassed more than 22 million followers – more than twice as many as the BJP’s.
Young volunteers have also turned up dressed as cockroaches at clean-up drives and protests in recent days.
Dipke previously told the BBC that the group’s popularity spoke to wide discontent among young Indians about the high unemployment rate, and a feeling they are being ignored by mainstream politics.
India has one of the world’s youngest populations, with roughly half its 1.4 billion people under 30 years. Yet formal political participation remains limited.
By BBC News
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