The Cockroach Republic — Part 1: The Insult That Named a Generation

Why millions of young Indians became cockroaches in a week

A week in May

On May 15, 2026, during a hearing about fake educational degrees, the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, reached for an image of contempt. As widely reported, he likened young people who fail to find a place in the profession, and who turn to social media, journalism and RTI activism to attack the system, to cockroaches and parasites. The next day he said a section of the media had misquoted him: his target, he explained, was people who had entered professions such as law with bogus degrees, not India’s youth, who he said inspired him (The Tribune).

It didn’t matter. The clip had already travelled, not as a comment on fraudulent lawyers but as a verdict on a generation: the unemployed young, as seen from the summit of the republic.

On May 16, Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old political communications strategist studying in Boston, posted a question on X: what if all the cockroaches came together? He made a Google Form, a parody logo and an Instagram page (Morung Express). He called it the Cockroach Janta Party, one letter away from the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has governed India since 2014. Its mascot was an AI-generated cockroach in sunglasses (Scroll). Its membership criteria included being “unemployed, lazy, chronically online” and able to rant professionally (Herald Goa).

What happened next has no precedent in Indian politics. The page gained roughly half a million followers on its first day and three million by May 18. Within about four days it passed the BJP’s 8.7 million Instagram followers (Global Voices), and within a week it had passed twenty million (The Daily Ittefaq). Young people added cockroach emojis to their bios and posted #MainBhiCockroach: I too am a cockroach.

Within weeks the joke had a manifesto, an anthem, imitators across the border in Pakistan, and a sit-in at Jantar Mantar, Delhi’s designated protest street. By late July it had forced the resignation of the Union education minister, which, as the economist Yamini Aiyar observed, this government had never before done under public pressure (TIME).

This essay is about that first week, and about the question its speed poses. Satire is not new to India. Neither is youth anger. What was new is that an insult became an identity: tens of millions of young people, told they were vermin, looked at the word and said, yes, that’s us.

Why?

The easy answer is that this is simply what a distracted, online generation does: it turns everything into content. This essay offers a different answer. The cockroach did not create a movement. It named a condition that millions of young Indians already felt and had no word for: the condition of being surplus, disposable to an economy that does not seem to need them, yet stubbornly, absurdly surviving.

The convenient explanation

There is a story about Indian Gen Z that almost everyone over forty already believes. It holds that this generation, raised on smartphones, has been rewired for distraction and instant reward. It cannot focus, cannot wait and cannot take criticism. It confuses posting with doing. In its unkind version, it is lazy, entitled and chronically online: precisely the creatures the Chief Justice’s remark seemed to describe.

The story deserves to be taken seriously, because parts of it rest on real evidence.

India’s own Economic Survey for 2025-26 warned that digital addiction harms young people’s academic outcomes and workplace productivity through constant distraction, lost sleep and shorter attention spans (Herald Goa). A widely cited 2025 study by Michael Gerlich found that heavy users of AI tools scored lower on critical-thinking tests, largely because they offloaded their thinking to the tools; participants aged 17 to 25 leaned on the tools most and scored lowest (PsyPost).

The markets tell a similar story. India’s market regulator, SEBI, found that traders under 30 made up 43% of individual derivatives traders in FY26, and that 89% of them lost money, the highest share of any age group (Free Press Journal). Abroad, Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation has argued that phone-based childhoods produced an epidemic of youth anxiety.

If you wanted a portrait of a generation lured by quick rewards, the materials exist. But a portrait is not a measurement. When the stereotype’s central claims are tested directly, they fail.

Narcissism. The trait most often pinned on young people raised in front of cameras has not risen. The most careful study of the question, by Eunike Wetzel and colleagues, compared about 60,000 American college students across the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. Once the researchers corrected for shifts in how students read the survey’s items, narcissism had slightly declined, including entitlement and vanity (Psychological Science). Even Keith Campbell, co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic, came to believe that narcissism among students had been falling since the 2008 recession (Greater Good).

Impatience. The marshmallow test, in which a preschooler can eat one treat now or wait for two, has been run since the 1960s. In 2018, Stephanie Carlson and colleagues, including the test’s creator Walter Mischel, compared 840 children tested across three generations. Children tested in the 2000s, today’s Gen Z, waited about two minutes longer than those tested in the 1960s and one minute longer than those in the 1980s. Mischel cautioned that ability in a laboratory is not the same as willingness amid everyday temptations (American Psychological Association). Still, the generation supposedly unable to wait was, as small children, measurably better at waiting.

Aggression. If screens had conditioned a generation for rage, youth violence should have climbed through the smartphone era. In the United States, where the data are best, juvenile arrests for violent crime fell by half between 2006 and 2019 (OJJDP).

Mental health. The claim that smartphones caused a youth mental-health crisis remains fiercely contested. Reviewing Haidt’s book in Nature, psychologist Candice Odgers noted that hundreds of researchers searching for large effects have mostly found small, mixed and correlational ones (Klingenstein Center). India adds a twist: in Deloitte’s 2024 survey, 64% of Indian Gen Z rated their mental health as good, against 51% of Gen Z globally (Outlook).

Patience, Indian style. India’s own evidence of discipline is hiding in plain sight. In one survey of aspirants for government and banking jobs, 39% were preparing for three or more competitive exams at once (Sentinel Assam), for exams in which only a tiny fraction succeed (The Daily Brief). Millions of young Indians spend years in rented rooms preparing for a handful of seats. Whatever else that is, it is not a generation that cannot defer gratification. It may be the most practised generation of deferrers India has produced.

None of this makes the platforms harmless. Attention, sleep and reckless trading are real concerns, and the heaviest users carry the heaviest risks. But the evidence supports a narrower claim than the stereotype: platforms amplify and accelerate what young people feel. They do not author it. A feed can spread a feeling at extraordinary speed. It cannot conjure, out of nothing, a mood that tens of millions recognise as their own within a week.

So the question remains. If the cockroach was not the product of a broken generation, what was it the product of? To answer, we have to look beneath the screen.

The condition beneath

Begin with a number that looks like a misprint. In India, the unemployment rate for young people who cannot read is about 3%. For young graduates, it is about 40% (The Daily Brief). The more education a young Indian has, the likelier they are to be out of work.

Part of the explanation is grimly simple. The poorest cannot afford to be unemployed, so they take whatever work exists. Graduates, often backed by families who sacrificed for their degrees, can afford to wait for something better (Subtext).

But the waiting rarely ends well. Azim Premji University’s State of Working India 2026 found that between 2004-05 and 2023, India added about five million graduates a year, while only about 2.8 million found jobs each year (Storyboard18). Of young graduates who report being unemployed, only 7% secure salaried work within a year. Graduate unemployment among the youngest has hovered between 35% and 40% since 1983 (Subtext): four decades of growth, liberalisation and digital revolution, and the ratio barely moved.

The pressure is intensifying. Government labour data put unemployment among 15- to 29-year-olds at 16.2% in June 2026, against 5.5% overall (Business Today). Globally, postings for jobs requiring zero to two years of experience have fallen 29 percentage points since January 2024, as AI absorbs tasks once handed to juniors (HR Katha). The first rung of the ladder is being sawn off just as the largest youth population in history reaches for it.

Then came May 2026. About 2.27 million students took NEET-UG, the national medical entrance exam, on May 3. On May 12 it was cancelled after authorities found evidence that the paper had leaked (Pedestrian). For students who had spent two or three years preparing, often in coaching towns far from home on money their families had borrowed, this was not an inconvenience. It was proof that even the one door marked merit could not be trusted. Reports of student suicides followed (Al Jazeera, via Hiru News). The Chief Justice’s remark came three days after the cancellation.

The queue

To understand why this stung, you have to understand the queue. Asked to choose between a government job, a private job and starting a business, 60% of young Indians in a Lokniti-CSDS survey chose the government job (Avanti Docs).

Outsiders often read this as cultural conservatism, a preference for status and a pension. Culture plays a part. But the economics are compelling on their own. A World Bank study found that India has one of the widest gaps in the world between public-sector pay and pay in the formal private sector (World Bank), and government jobs offer security in an economy where most work is informal. The economist Kunal Mangal argues that the problem is not too much government hiring, but too wide a gap between the value of a government job and every alternative (Mercatus Center).

So millions join the queue. They prepare for exam after exam, often for years, for a handful of posts. The queue is rational for each person and ruinous for the generation: it converts youth into waiting.

The arithmetic of humiliation

The political scientist Ted Gurr argued in Why Men Rebel (1970) that unrest grows not from poverty as such, but from relative deprivation: the gap between what people believe they are owed and what they actually receive. This generation was promised a simple bargain. Study hard, clear the exams, and a secure life will follow. Many of the young protesters, Reuters found, grew up during Narendra Modi’s rise, buoyed by promises of jobs, opportunity and cleaner governance, and now feel those hopes remain unfulfilled (Reuters, via Sowetan).

That gap is what the cockroach named. As one analysis in The Wire argued, the word resonated because so many young Indians already experienced themselves as disposable within the economy: unemployed or underpaid, constantly judged, insecure and replaceable (The Wire). They did not need to be told they were surplus. They needed someone powerful to say it out loud.

Gregor Samsa’s room

Literature saw this figure long before economics did. In Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman who supports his parents and sister, wakes one morning transformed into a monstrous insect. What follows is not a horror story but a family drama. The breadwinner becomes a burden. His family feeds him, then hides him, then resents him. Kafka’s word for what Gregor becomes, Ungeziefer, originally named an unclean animal unfit for sacrifice: vermin, the creature outside the order of worth.

Millions of Indian graduates know Gregor’s room. It is the room in their parents’ house where they study for the fourth attempt, eating meals someone else pays for, bracing for relatives’ questions and news of the neighbour’s son who got through. When the Chief Justice’s words reached them, they did not hear a metaphor. They heard a description of the room.

Children of liberalisation

The remark landed so hard because of who it was aimed at. Indian Gen Z, born roughly between 1997 and 2012, is the first generation raised entirely after the economic liberalisation of 1991, mostly by parents who grew up in an economy of scarcity. Ipsos describes those parents as shaped by frugality, a fierce focus on education and family centricity (Ipsos). They raised their children differently, and invested in them as no Indian generation had been invested in before.

Fewer children, heavier hopes. Between 1992-93 and 2019-21, fertility fell from 3.7 to 2.1 children per woman in rural India, and from 2.7 to 1.6 in cities (OpIndia). Fewer siblings meant concentrated parenting: more money, more attention and more hope, all riding on one or two children. The Turkish psychologist Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı described what happens to families as societies modernise: a child’s economic value, as extra hands and old-age security, declines, while the child’s psychological value rises. Indian families kept both. The child became the emotional centre of the household and its retirement plan at once.

A childhood organised around the exam. Anxious about competition in an opening economy, parents moved children into private schools; rural private-school enrolment rose every year from 2006 to 2014, reaching 30.8% (ASER 2018). Paid private tuition spread even in villages, reaching 30.5% of rural students by 2022 (ASER 2022). Coaching towns like Kota turned adolescence into a training camp. Childhood came to revolve around a single sacred event: the entrance exam.

A voice at home. Parenting itself softened. Research on Indian families describes a gradual shift from obedience toward explanation and consultation, with younger parents more likely to believe that respect should be earned rather than extracted through fear (International Journal of Population Studies). The change was uneven: a national study in 2009-10 found that almost every schoolchild surveyed had faced punishment of some kind at school (Governance Now). But the direction was clear. These children were consulted more, heard more and expected to speak.

The phone, almost overnight. In 2014, mobile data in India cost about ₹269 per gigabyte. After a new operator launched in 2016 and set off a price war, it fell to under ₹12 within two years (Business Today). Average monthly data use per subscriber rose almost three hundredfold between March 2014 and June 2023 (Telecom Live). For most of this generation, the smartphone arrived not in infancy but in adolescence, and all at once. A childhood organised around exams was suddenly also organised around feeds, and through them, around constant comparison with peers who were getting through, getting placed, getting out.

Put these together and you have the young person who heard the Chief Justice’s words: the focus of a family’s sacrifice, trained since childhood to treat examinations as destiny, raised to expect a voice, and acutely aware, through the phone in their hand, of exactly how far behind they were falling. In a culture where a child’s failure is felt as the family’s, the insult did not wound individuals. It wounded households.

That is why it stung. These were not neglected children who had learned to expect contempt. They were the most invested-in children in Indian history, told in public that they were pests.

Who they actually are

If the stereotype is wrong, what is the right portrait? The best evidence describes a generation that is less individualistic, more devout and more hopeful than its Western counterpart, and for those very reasons more deeply wounded by public contempt.

Autonomy, but anchored. In a survey of 25,000 Indians aged 15 to 25, 84% said they always consult their parents on matters big and small, 95% said they feel a strong sense of responsibility toward their parents, and 89% said family matters more than friends (Paramount Insights). Ipsos notes that many keep living with their parents after they start working, and that parental approval of marriage remains critical (Ipsos). Kağıtçıbaşı called this pattern the autonomous-related self: people who make their own decisions while remaining emotionally bound to family. It is not Western individualism with an Indian accent. It is a different design.

A turn toward faith. Across much of the world, religious affiliation slipped in the 2010s. India has been moving the other way (DW, via IstoÉ Dinheiro). Young Indians are visibly embracing faith, but on their own terms: temple visits paired with paragliding, apps that offer remote darshan and pujas (Open), and, increasingly, conversations with AI about questions of meaning (The Quint). For some, faith is a way of coping. One unemployed 24-year-old in Gurugram told DW that he began visiting temples when he could not find work and his mental health was suffering.

Optimism amid precarity. Indian Gen Z is among the most hopeful in the world. In Deloitte’s 2024 survey, 58% expected the economy to improve over the coming year (Outlook). This optimism coexists with graduate unemployment near 40%, and the coexistence matters. Hope sharpens the gap between expectation and reality rather than softening it. People who expect nothing are rarely insulted. People who expect a great deal are.

Pragmatists of stability. These are not dreamers chasing passion. They chase the government job, prepare for several exams at once, and, when that fails, hedge with side hustles and sometimes risky bets on the markets. Their caution is a rational response to insecurity, not a lack of ambition.

Fluent in machines, straddling worlds. Young Indians use generative AI regularly at roughly twice the global rate (Outlook). They live on payment apps and short video, much of it in Indian languages rather than English. Ipsos describes the generation as straddling frugality and free spending, tradition and modernity, old and new ideas about gender (Ipsos).

Dissenters through irony. Ipsos also notes that Indian Gen Z are not, by default, activists in the Western mould. Their preferred instrument is the meme: indirect, deniable, deflating. In a family-centred culture where open defiance carries high costs, irony lets young people say the unsayable while keeping a foot inside the house.

The difference from the West is subtle but decisive. Western Gen Z largely seeks freedom from family and tradition. Indian Gen Z mostly seeks freedom within them. That is why a public insult cut so deep, and why the response took the form it did. A generation anchored in family does not storm the gates when insulted. It laughs, together, at the person who insulted it.

The moment of recognition

The French philosopher Louis Althusser described how ideology works through a scene on a street. A police officer calls out, “Hey, you there!” A passer-by turns around. In turning, he accepts that he is the one being addressed; the call has made him its subject. Althusser called this interpellation, or hailing.

On May 15, India’s young were hailed from the summit of the republic. And millions turned around, but they turned around laughing. #MainBhiCockroach was the turning: I am the one you meant, and I accept the name. The acceptance was not surrender. It was a refusal to let the hail do what it was meant to do.

Private shame, made public

Unemployment is lonely. Each graduate in Gregor’s room tends to experience failure as personal: the wrong subject, the wrong coaching centre, not enough hours. Psychologists call this pluralistic ignorance: everyone privately feels the same thing while assuming they are alone. The economist Timur Kuran showed how such hidden sentiment can sustain an order that few truly believe in, until something reveals how widely the sentiment is shared, and then change arrives with astonishing speed.

The follower count was that revelation. Every refresh announced a number, and every number told the next person: it’s not just you.

The sociologist Mark Granovetter’s threshold model explains the shape of that curve. People join a collective act once enough others have joined, and a visible, climbing counter lowers everyone’s threshold at once. Joining cost a single tap, and irony provided cover. Dipke later said that about 70% of the followers were under 28 and aligned with no party (Khaleej Times): exactly the young people who would never sign up for a political rally, but would happily join a joke.

Owning the insult

What the followers did with the word follows a well-studied pattern. The social psychologist Adam Galinsky and colleagues found that groups who reclaim a slur, using it about themselves, come to feel more powerful, while observers come to see the label as less negative. History is full of such reversals. “Suffragette” was coined by a British newspaper to mock women campaigning for the vote; “Impressionist” began as a critic’s jibe.

Henri Tajfel and John Turner’s social identity theory predicts when this strategy appears. When individuals can escape a devalued group, they leave it. When the exits are blocked, when there is no individual way out of being one of millions of unemployed graduates, groups turn instead to what Tajfel and Turner called social creativity: redefining what the label means. Nyla Branscombe’s rejection-identification model adds the emotional engine. When people feel rejected by a dominant group, they identify more strongly with their own, and that identification protects their well-being. The insult did not scatter the young. It bound them together.

None of this is the behaviour of a generation incapable of reflection. To mock a label aimed at you, you must see yourself from the outside, grasp how the powerful see you, and play with that image. The psychiatrist George Vaillant ranked humour among the most mature psychological defences, alongside sublimation and anticipation. The cockroach was not a failure of self-awareness. It was an act of it.

The insect’s double meaning

Finally, the creature itself. A donkey or a dog would not have worked. The cockroach carries exactly the two halves of the condition this essay has described.

It is unwanted: a pest in cramped corners, judged a nuisance, the thing every household wants gone. This is Gregor Samsa. And it is unkillable: sweep it out and it comes back. Commentators noted that this was the point; the insect is famous for surviving what kills other creatures (The Daily Ittefaq). This is the repeat exam-taker, back for the fourth attempt.

The party’s logo even placed the insect in the generation’s natural habitat: the outline of a cockroach on a mobile phone (Khaleej Times). Shame and defiance fit in one image, so anyone could join, whichever half they felt more strongly that day.

What the cockroach can’t explain

A good symbol hides as much as it reveals, and this one hides several things.

It speaks loudest for some. Much of what we know about Indian Gen Z comes from online surveys and Instagram, which over-represent urban, English-speaking, middle-class youth. The cockroach is, at heart, a graduate’s symbol: its grievance is the degree that leads nowhere. The young Indians with the lowest unemployment rate, those who never finished school, are not idle. They are working, often in punishing informal jobs, and their precarity looks different. A movement named for the surplus educated can miss the working poor entirely.

It glosses over divides. Young women graduates face markedly higher unemployment than young men. A student leader whose organisation marched alongside the movement told Al Jazeera that Muslim and Dalit students were the first to be jailed and intimidated once the protests ended (Al Jazeera). A shared insect cannot erase differences of caste, religion, gender and region. At best, it suspends them for a season.

It can be worn rather than wielded. For the active minority, the label was a weapon turned back on its source. For the passive millions who simply followed, it may have been something else. The psychologist Patrick Corrigan’s research on the “why try” effect shows that people who internalise a devalued label lose faith in their own efforts, and the sociologist Edwin Lemert described how people can grow into the labels pinned on them. When the membership criteria read unemployed, lazy, chronically online, some will treat the joke as a shelter rather than a stance.

It can substitute for action. Orwell once called every joke a tiny revolution. The emphasis can fall on tiny. As The Wire’s analysis warned, a movement that expresses alienation without building collective structures risks ending in exhaustion (The Wire). Irony is brilliant at deflating power and poor at building it.

These are not reasons to dismiss what happened in May. They are the questions it leaves open: whether laughter can become leverage, how power answers mockery, who wins the loyalty of the young, and whether a meme can become an organisation. The essays that follow take them up one by one.

The global mirror

India’s cockroaches have cousins.

In China, where about one in six young people were unemployed, the young coined “lying flat” in 2021 to describe opting out of the grind. A starker identity followed: unemployed Gen Z proudly calling themselves “rat people” and posting videos of whole days spent in bed (Fortune, via Yahoo). Like the cockroach, the rat is an abject animal, embraced in self-mockery by the educated young.

In September 2025, Nepal’s Gen Z took a different road. A government ban on social media sparked protests rooted in deeper anger at corruption, and at politicians’ children flaunting lavish lives (Asia News Network) while youth unemployment ran near 20% (Council on Foreign Relations). Police fired on crowds. At least 72 people died, and the government fell within days (AllAfrica). Protesters rallied behind a former chief justice as interim prime minister through a Discord poll alongside in-person negotiations (Asia News Network). Six months later, a party aligned with the movement won the largest landslide in Nepal’s modern history (The New York Times, via Hawaii Tribune-Herald).

Across Indonesia, the Philippines, Nepal, Madagascar and Peru, young protesters carried the same emblem: the straw-hatted skull of One Piece, a Japanese anime about pirates defying oppressive power (Spiked). Their grievances were concrete: low wages, unemployment and police violence in Indonesia; water and power cuts in Madagascar; unequal health and education in Morocco (Khaleej Times). Madagascar’s president fled and the army took power. And within days of the Cockroach Janta Party’s launch, copycat cockroach parties appeared across the border in Pakistan (The Daily Ittefaq).

Set side by side, these cases reveal one condition and three responses. The condition is the same everywhere: an educated generation told, by economics or by elites, that it is surplus. The responses diverge sharply: withdrawal in China, satire in India, fire in Nepal.

What decides which? Not the character of the young. Chinese, Indian and Nepali Gen Z grew up on similar phones and similar feeds. What differs is context: whether public protest is possible at all, how the state answers it, whether organisations lie beneath the anger, and which cultural repertoire of resistance is available.

China leaves almost no room for public dissent, so the young lie down. In Nepal, a state that fired on its children turned anger into arson. India offered something in between: a democracy with courts, elections and a designated protest street, and a family-anchored culture with a long tradition of resisting power indirectly, through endurance, satire and self-suffering rather than confrontation.

That tradition is where this story goes next.

From naming to laughing

Every movement begins with a name for what people already feel. Before May 15, millions of young Indians lived inside a condition without a word for it: educated and idle, invested in and discarded, hopeful and humiliated. Each experienced it alone, in Gregor’s room.

The Chief Justice, without intending to, supplied the word. A generation took it, turned it over, and found that it fit, not as a description of laziness but of endurance. The cockroach is what survives when a system decides you are surplus. The stereotype of a broken, addicted, entitled generation cannot explain why the word caught fire. The condition beneath it can.

But naming was only the first act. The second was laughter: the memes, the placards, the mock rallies, the jokes told while running from police batons. That laughter would bring down a minister, unsettle a government accustomed to controlling the story, and connect a generation of digital natives to the oldest grammar of Indian resistance.

How did laughter become leverage, and why does power fear it? That is the subject of the next essay.

Next in The Cockroach Republic — Essay 2: Laughter as a Weapon. Humour, the feminine, and the oldest grammar of Indian resistance.

Sources

The remark and the movement

Testing the stereotype

Jobs, exams and the queue

How they were raised, and who they are

The global mirror

Scholarly works referenced: Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970); Branscombe, Schmitt and Harvey on rejection-identification (1999); Corrigan, Larson and Rüsch on the “why try” effect (2009); Galinsky et al. on reappropriating stigmatizing labels (2013); Granovetter, Threshold Models of Collective Behavior (1978); Gurr, Why Men Rebel (1970); Kağıtçıbaşı, Family, Self, and Human Development Across Cultures (2007); Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915); Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies (1995); Lemert, Social Pathology (1951); Tajfel and Turner, An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict (1979); Vaillant, Adaptation to Life (1977).

Author’s Note: This article was conceptualized, researched, and outlined by the author, with generative AI tools utilized to assist in drafting and refining the prose.

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