22 Million Indians Are Calling Themselves Cockroaches And It Is Working

A country of 1.4 billion people. Out of that, 367 million are young. Now, 22 million of them are officially identifying as pests.

This is not a dystopian movie plot. This is India in the summer of 2026.

It started with a slip-up. In mid-May, the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, was presiding over a live hearing. He got frustrated. He called unemployed youth and government critics “cockroaches” and “parasites.”

It was supposed to be a put-down. A way to shame them. It backfired spectacularically.

Three weeks later, a virtual entity called the Cockroach People’s Party (CJP) exploded onto Instagram. No physical office. No cadre system. Just a digital badge of honor for being useless. It racked up 22 million followers.

Let that sink in. Modi’s own Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been grinding for over a decade to get 9 million followers. The cockroaches have 22 million.

The government tried to stomp on them. They found the streets of New Delhi already swarming.

Everyone talks about India’s demographic dividend. Sixty-five percent of the population is under thirty-five. That is 367 million people aged fifteen to twenty-nine. The world watches this, expecting a new economic engine.

But an engine needs parts that fit.

The State of Working India 2026 report is a brutal read. Out of those 367 million youths, 263 million are struggling to find work. Two out of every three young people are effectively surplus labor.

The irony is the education level. Two-thirds of these jobless folks have college degrees. That number was forty-six percent in 2017. It is sixty-seven percent now. Degree inflation is moving at warp speed, leaving the actual economy in the dust.

Five million kids graduate from college every year. Less than half get any kind of job. Only 6.7 percent land stable, salaried gigs.

Think about the math. A family sells everything to send a kid to school. The result is a piece of paper and a grown adult moving back into his childhood bedroom.

So when the Chief Justice called them cockroaches, he didn’t insult them. He gave them a name for what they already felt.

If joblessness is the slow poison, the exam leak scandal is the acute overdose.

For the poor, education is the only ladder. That ladder just snapped.

In May 2026, the NEET medical exam collapsed. Two-point-two million students studied for years. The papers leaked online before the test. Years of work, gone.

And this is not some one-off glitch. For five years, fifteen different states have seen massive paper leaks. The cheating networks are sophisticated. They are businesses.

The rich kids buy the answers. The poor kids walk uphill both ways, barefoot, in the snow. It is a cliché because it is true.

When hard work is provably futile, you get nihilism.

Enter Abhijit Deepak. Thirty years old. Political strategist. He saw the void. He did not give a speech. He made a meme.

His demands were petty and perfect. Fire the education minister. Stop charging fees to re-check exam papers. Don’t let judges take cushy jobs in the upper house after retirement.

It is not a manifesto. It is a list of grievances. And it worked.

The BJP is a tank. Massive, heavy, expensive. The CJP is a swarm of gnats. You cannot hit them. You cannot reason with them. They just buzz.

They do not use big words. They use jokes. One post showed a cockroach on a fuel price chart. Caption: “Even roaches are feeling the pinch now.”

It is a different language. The old guard does not speak it.

On June 6, the screens went dark and the streets lit up. New Delhi. Thousands of masks. Not chanting for revolution. Chanting for a job.

“Stop calling us cockroaches. Give us a paycheck.”

The cops shut down twelve metro stations. Five thousand paramilitary troops. Barricades. Tear gas.

A protester told Reuters something chilling. “Arrest a hundred roaches. There are a thousand more you cannot see.”

This is not about unemployment. Unemployment is a statistic. This is about legitimacy.

The World Inequality Report 2026 tells the rest of the story. The top one percent holds forty percent of the wealth. The bottom fifty percent? Six percent.

Ten years of this. It is not getting better. It is calcifying.

Your birth is your destiny. That is not a metaphor. It is a spreadsheet.

A kid studies hard. Passes the test. And still ends up in an eighteen percent unemployment pool. Or worse, stuck in a gig job that pays three dollars a day while AI takes the rest.

So they wear the mask. The cockroach. It is perfect. Resilient. Impossible to eradicate. Ignored until there are too many of them.

The government’s response? The same old playbook. Ban the accounts. Label them a security threat. Whisper death threats to the founder.

It will not work. You cannot suppress a chemical reaction with a hammer.

The CJP proved that the old political machine is broken. Young people do not believe voting matters. They do not believe the GDP numbers. They do not care about “Vishwa Guru” rhetoric.

They care about rent.

Maybe the CJP fizzles out. Maybe it gets absorbed into the next election cycle. Maybe it turns violent. Who knows.

But the fact remains. The demographic dividend is a demographic time bomb.

These kids asked a question using a joke. If the hardest workers get the smallest slice, who is the pie for?

Twenty-two million cockroaches are telling you that the palace is built on sand.

The Chief Justice wanted to shame them. He gave them a flag instead.

Nothing survives like a cockroach. Nothing unites a species like an exterminator.

The authorities can ban the apps. They cannot ban the hunger.

Because the roach does not fear the foot. The roach fears the light.

A note beyond the headlines

I write about global politics, but not just the news —

the human choices, moral trade-offs, and life lessons behind major events.

More reflections here:

https://substack.com/@nanmoon