The Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) has had the remarkable feat of garnering more than double the followers on Instagram than those of the ruling party – 22M and counting, as opposed to 8.9M of the BJP – in just a week, enough to understand why it has been such effective satire. This is in the same month that the BJP won majority for the first time in Bengal, returned to power in Assam, and is understood to be one step closer to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) project of Hindu Rashtra. 

In the midst of this global victory lap, where foreign media such as The Washington Post published an Op-ed by Bill Drexel, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, stating “More votes have been cast for Modi than for any politician in human history, by a margin in the hundreds of millions,” a telling misspeak by the Chief Justice of India on May 15 calling India’s unemployed “cockroaches” and “parasites”, led to the founding of the CJP by Boston University-trained public relations graduate Abhijeet Dipke. So viral is this satirical formation that venerable outlets like the CNN, BBC, The Guardian, and Reuters are reporting on it, where the contrast between the lofty lotus and the lowly cockroach are immediately understood as semantic shifts in narratives of power. 

CJI Surya Kant’s subsequent clarification that he only meant those with fake degrees, did himself no favours where the Prime Minister’s own college degree has been the subject of past scandal and speculation. One of the pillars of effective satire is to bring to light latent hypocrisies. But more, it was the dehumanising logic of his remarks themselves that gave fodder to this internet phenom, allowing Dipke to riposte that the clarification itself was classist impinging on citizens’ constitutionally protected right to speech. The gap between the CJI’s role as someone who upholds and protects the constitution, and his speech that undermines those very functions, is wide enough to launch the party of pestilence. 

Also read: The Chief Justice Called Them Cockroaches. History Knows Where That Language Leads

The inversion of the language of dehumanisation – widely seen as a precursor to authoritarianism or genocide – to something agentive and self-identificatory mirrors many similar signifier shifts in society, like the term queer. Mahua Moitra, MP of the defeated TMC party in Bengal, had risen to viral internet attention herself by outlining the seven early signs of fascism in her........

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