What the BJP Feared Enough to Ban the Cockroaches

My not-so-much two cents on the rise (and fall?) of the Indian Cockroach movement

A phenomenon hitherto unprecedented in world history crystallised in India, and the government’s response to it wasn’t to safeguard it, but to murder the very essence of democracy it should’ve upheld.

A party on Instagram accumulated over 15 million overnight (2 million on X), becoming the single-largest political party by membership in India: The Cockroach Janata Party (open the link for context).

But what shocked me was, in fact, the speed at which the ruling government got on its feet to suppress the online movement. Why the speed? Why did the government feel an urgency to throttle the protest as soon as possible? What was the fear underneath it?

Sure, it comes from fear that has already done the math!

The BJP doesn’t fear the cockroaches: They fear the symptom of it. The fifteen million people scattered across the world with no epicentre or direction are manageable as long as they remain a disorganised mass. But what the establishment fears is the moment that this equation changes. What if someone tries to capitalise on the movement? That moment when this disorganised mass finds a unifying face and a mandate to rally on, which by all likelihood it could’ve if let alone.

TVK proved it. The film star Vijay walked into politics with no ideology sharper than “I’m not those corrupt politicians”, pulled crowds and capitalised it into his debut political success, putting an end to the seventy-year-old Dravidian political history of the state.

A little spectacle to the public frustration, plus a popular face, equals something dangerously real. We all know it by now. The recent youth eruptions in Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh all point towards it.

Of course, Delhi observed and remembered it.

The establishment knew better than any journalist did what the act of youth congregating under an umbrella meant to it. It’s a stress test, and the system cracked. And so the government nipped the rebellion (revolution?) in its bud before it got on its nerves tomorrow. Silenced it before it found its voice.

But what does this silencing mean at all?

It shows that we, as a namesake democracy, have the political tolerance of a teaspoon. Anything that even remotely represents “the writing back to the centre” as an absurdist humour or as large as a rebellion can’t be dealt with. It’s to be handled with such urgency as a national emergency.

And what does it say of the government that can’t face questions or survive being laughed at?

India has a long history of speaking truth to power centre through satire. From Birbal to Kabir to political cartoonists who once made the prime ministers feel uncomfortable rather than litigated. And now, when the satire crystallised on X platform, when it got too large to ignore, the state did what the insecure power always did: it labelled the joke a threat.

The cockroaches were a condition that the government couldn't disprove. And their act of killing it only confirmed it.

After all, who else knew the architecture of the movement other than the BJP? In the 1980s, the party had only two seats in the parliament. Although laughed at and dismissed as inconspicuous, it worked its way up from the grassroots level to later capture power.

Through RSS Shakhas, systematic cadre developments, cultural movements, and a slow capture of public imagination through narratives, it engineered its own rise all on its own, unlike through inheritance like the Congress did.

So, as it sees fifteen million people gather around even for a joke, it doesn’t treat it as fun. It reads the first chapter of a familiar book. It knows that movements don’t begin with manifestos.They begin with feelings, shared identity, a sense of feeling unrepresented. The cockroaches only needed an organisation and a face to bring it all together.

The BJP knows it better than anyone else because it had been there, and hence the urgency to close the gap.

This is the fear that rallied their nerves, and perhaps still does.

But here’s what is even more damning. When the ban landed, the fifteen million went silent.

And that silence is the only thing that matters now.