On the morning of May 15, 2026, the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, looked down from the bench of the Supreme Court and said something that courtrooms are not supposed to contain: contempt dressed as metaphor. Unemployed young people, he declared during an open hearing, were like “cockroaches”: parasites with no place in a profession, no place in society. He later clarified he meant something narrower. But the word had already escaped. And words, once loose, belong to the people who catch them.

What happened next was not outrage in the conventional sense. No candle marches, no press conferences, no strongly worded op-eds in English-language dailies. What happened instead was something far stranger and, in retrospect, far more significant. A 30-year-old PR student in Boston named Abhijeet Dipke opened a Google Form and typed: “Launching a new platform for all the cockroaches out there.” Within 72 hours, 3.5 lakh people had signed up. Within days, the Cockroach Janata Party had 11 million Instagram followers, surpassing the BJP itself.

The party described itself as “Secular, Socialist, Democratic, and Lazy.” The Lazy was not an accident. It was the whole point.

Franz Kafka, 1915

“When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”

Franz Kafka published The Metamorphosis in 1915. A man wakes up as a cockroach. His family, who once depended on him, now finds him repulsive: a burden, a source of shame, a thing to be hidden and eventually forgotten. He does not ask to be a cockroach. He simply wakes up as one. And the world, rather than asking why, begins to build its life around his absence.

Kafka was writing about alienated labour, about bureaucratic dehumanisation, about what a system does to you when it decides you are no longer useful. He was writing about 1915. He was also, with unsettling precision, writing about 2026.

The anatomy of a metamorphosis

India’s Gen Z, the cohort born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s, grew up in a country that promised them a great leap forward. They were told that a degree meant mobility, that hard work meant reward, that the system, whatever its flaws, was essentially meritocratic. Then they took the exams. Then the scams surfaced. Then the jobs didn’t come. Then a Chief Justice called them parasites from a bench that was supposed to represent the law’s impartiality.

This is Gregor Samsa’s arc, compressed into a generation. You spend years being the family’s breadwinner (obedient, aspirational, invisible in your labour) and one morning you wake to discover that the institution has looked at you and seen vermin. Not a failure of the institution. Not a structural problem to be solved. Just vermin.

“Those in power think citizens are cockroaches and parasites. They should know that cockroaches breed in rotten places. That’s what India is today.”

The CJP’s masterstroke, and it is genuinely masterly, is in the inversion. Kafka’s Gregor is horrified by his transformation. He spends the novella trying to be human again, trying to eat properly, trying to hide his body so his family is not embarrassed. He dies ashamed. But India’s Gen Z did something Kafka never imagined: they chose the cockroach. They made it a flag. Main Bhi Cockroach (I, too, am a cockroach) became not a confession of failure but a declaration of solidarity. If the system is rotten, it is not the insects who should be ashamed.

Satire as the only honest language left

There is a reason the CJP reached 11 million followers faster than most established political parties can win a state election. Irony is not apathy. It is a coping mechanism for people who have been failed by earnestness. Indian Gen Z grew up watching sincere political engagement produce NEET scams, paper leaks, exploding unemployment numbers, and an administrative apparatus that answers every grievance with a circular. Satire is not what you do when you stop caring. It is what you do when you have run out of other options and you refuse to stop caring.

Kafka understood this too. The Trial, The Castle, The Metamorphosis: all of it is absurdist because the systems Kafka was describing were absurd, and the only honest literary response to an absurd system is an absurd one. The CJP’s manifesto, which demands things like a complete ban on post-retirement Rajya Sabha appointments, is wrapped in memes and party anthems, but it is not a joke. It is the same move Kafka was making: using the grotesque to expose what polite realism cannot reach.

What happens after the meme

The question that hangs over the CJP, and over every movement that begins in viral irony, is whether it can survive contact with earnestness. Reports suggest the party is already considering fielding a candidate in the Bankipur Assembly by-election in Bihar. That is the moment the cockroach must decide whether it will remain a symbol or become something more inconvenient: an actual political actor with actual demands that actual people in power will have to actually ignore or accommodate.

Gregor Samsa, remember, never found a way out. His metamorphosis ended in death, and the Samsa family, relieved, took a tram ride in the sunshine. Kafka was not optimistic about institutions reforming themselves. But the CJP is not Kafka’s story. It is India’s Gen Z writing a new chapter: one where the cockroach does not die quietly in its room but runs for office, floods the ballot, and breeds in every rotten corner of the system until the system has no choice but to reckon with it.

The Chief Justice clarified his remarks. He said he was proud of India’s youth. He called them pillars of a developed India. Abhijeet Dipke’s response was brief: “Not having a legitimate degree does not give anyone the right to call fellow citizens ‘parasites.’”

Kafka would have appreciated that. So would Gregor Samsa, had he survived long enough to see it.

About this piece: The Cockroach Janata Party was founded on May 16, 2026 by Abhijeet Dipke, following remarks by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant during a Supreme Court hearing. This article reflects events as of May 21, 2026. All statistics sourced from reporting by Al Jazeera, BusinessToday, and Wikipedia.