The Cockroach Movement – Satire or Sinister Design?

MR Lalu

A single cockroach in the kitchen can undoubtedly give you nauseating impressions about the tidiness of your most sophisticated space where you plan, prepare, and personalize your health preferences. What if you have hundreds of them swarming around the utensils and the space that you want to keep well-maintained, tidy, and healthy? You begin to spray repellents to exterminate the colony of intruders that you think, if allowed to multiply, would put you in trouble. Such was the chaos when millions of people on social media came out supporting a seemingly harmless movement. This, in a few days, turned into a stormy momentum, gaining much hype across the world as an unprecedented support-gaining social media political movement called the Cockroach Janata Party.

A rare move, with the rarest precision and planning, seemed to have gone beyond being a mere prank, and that was when I began to pay attention to this insect called the cockroach. Even one of them inside the house can be much of a headache, while millions can turn out to be catastrophic. A seemingly harmless statement by one of the judges of the top court turned into fuel feeding a wildfire of misinformation intended to dethrone a democratically elected government. The initial appearance of the insect on social media did not seem to be an evil design to destabilize India in tune with what had happened in neighboring countries and elsewhere in the world. The true design and intent began to become visible, and the target on the other side was the Prime Minister himself.

The panic, critics of the BJP say, was real as the new social media movement gained Himalayan hype, pushing the media handles of the world’s largest political party behind in just a few days. The CJP’s growth was not organic, and within no time, the deliberate design to malign the present government became clear. All parties and leaders who had lost their political clout ever since the regime change in 2014 rallied behind the cockroach movement. Political intellectuals representing the parties in the opposition camp, which were unseated by the Modi juggernaut, rushed to join the campaign. Shashi Tharoor was the most prominent, the Congress MP from Kerala, said that it was essentially a natural expression of anger among Gen Z against the failures of the Modi government. The momentum was seen from multiple angles and, undoubtedly, as support for the CJP swelled, its critics also lined up with admonishing remarks from the opposite side.

The CJP movement was deliberately built to create chaos and confusion among the youth against the government led by Narendra Modi. Similar to that of an event management campaign, the social media hype for the satirical political gathering had huge support from India’s unfriendly neighboring countries as well. Evidently, it became clear that there was global participation in the millions to make the CJP’s birth on social media a grand success and a celebrated subject of discussion. This, its founders and their silent promoters from the political spectrum thought, would create a sense of urgency to fill the political vacuum that other parties, including the Congress, failed to fill.

Let us, for a moment, ignore the fact that there have been well-articulated conspiracies behind this plotted movement. It is feared that a genuine perception is gaining traction, making the situation more vulnerable: that a growing discontent is simmering among some sections of the Gen Z while multiple provocative incidents keep exacerbating their dissent.

As the CJP gained momentum, more clarity emerged, with its sinister intent against the BJP government surfacing rapidly. Tavleen Singh, while writing about “Hope in Cockroach,” warned the ruling establishment that it was the common man who put them on the throne, and it is again the common man who holds the power to dethrone them. She said the anger of Gen Z, irrespective of the Modi government’s achievements in the last decade, would be enough to turn the climate stormy.

From the movement and its momentum, one thing was clear: all it wanted was to stimulate an agitation against Modi that its supporters thought would be a repetition of what happened in the Gen Z aggression in Nepal and Bangladesh—a regime change. A sinister dream that they thought would be realized with a politically invigorating movement by the Cockroach Janata Party on social media, with an aggressive Gen Z pulling their principal enemy, Modi, to the streets. Such was the preparation, indicating that any unrest, even a spark of it, could be blown into a wildfire causing catastrophe, with Modi being politically eliminated permanently.

Now, what is the danger in such satirically sinister shows, though temporarily gaining Himalayan hype?

They could create an atmosphere of urgency demanding an alternative. They could actually push the country’s electorate to forget the benefits that the present government brought to India. Its defense resurgence, economic rise, prominence in an uncertain global scenario, and all that it did for the poor, the marginalized, and the youth could be successfully erased from the memory of the people, leading them to violence.

The perpetrators thought that it could be even better achieved through the power of a disturbed generation influenced by violence and manufactured political content against the government. It could even be metamorphosed into more veritable and influential movements, creating confusion and unrest. The movement seems not to have taken off effectively. But as it was said on one of the Malayalam channels by a CJP sympathizer, the party, though at present getting ready to hatch on social media, would, if crushed by the government, re-emerge in multiple forms. It could be assumed that a more vigorous and sinister plan is getting ready in the background while CJP was an experiment. India and its government should be alert to avoid such an accident.

(Author is freelance journalist and social worker based in Kerala. The views expressed are personal opinion of the author.)