A satirical youth movement built on memes and a cockroach mascot has done what no opposition party managed in a decade: it has cracked Narendra Modi’s grip on India’s national story, and taken a cabinet minister with it.

Every long era in power eventually meets the one enemy it never planned for. Narendra Modi’s government was ready for a revived Congress, a charming rival, a corruption scandal that would not go away. It was not ready for an insect.

The threat began as an insult. In mid-May, while hearing a case about fake professional credentials, the Chief Justice of India reached for a comparison and called India’s jobless young people cockroaches and parasites of society. A decade ago, the remark would have faded within a day. Instead, a former political strategist named Abhijeet Dipke, who once worked with the Aam Aadmi Party, saw a chance. The next morning he launched a platform for the country’s “cockroaches,” and a movement was born that took the ruling party’s name only to mock it: the Cockroach Janta Party, a parody of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Then came the part no one in power expected. The joke exploded. Within days the movement’s Instagram account had passed the ruling party’s own, and it now holds nearly 22 million followers, more than double the BJP’s and far ahead of Congress. All this for a group with no registration, no candidates, and no real manifesto, marching under a mocking slogan: “Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed.”

It is easy to dismiss. It has no party structure,........

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