My cohost Nidhin and I have a complicated personal history with cockroaches. Growing up as NRI kids in the Gulf in the 80s and 90s, the first thing every household bought was a can of Piff Paff. You’d spray it into every crack in the bathroom, hold your breath through what felt like light chemical warfare, and watch the cockroaches scatter — only for more to show up the next week. Years later, when I brought my wife to Dubai for the first time, she ran out of the bathroom because a cockroach had crawled out of the drain. Resilient little things. Kill one, and somehow two show up in its place. Which, as it turns out, is exactly the branding logic behind the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) — the satirical Indian youth movement that’s been the subject of two episodes of The Sunday Draft now, three weeks apart. The one-line recap, for anyone just joining us On May 15th, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant made an off-the-cuff remark during a Supreme Court hearing — something to the effect of “there are youngsters like cockroaches, they don’t get any employment, they don’t have any place in the profession,” going on to call such people “parasites of society.” He later said he was talking specifically about people using fake degrees, not Indian youth broadly. Didn’t matter. The internet had already run with it. The next day, a 30-year-old public relations student named Abhijeet Dipke — studying in Boston turned the insult into a website, a manifesto, and an Instagram account. Within 78 hours: 3 million followers. Within a week: over 20 million. That’s where we left it on May 24th, in an episode I recorded with my friend Varun. And we were, frankly, skeptical. The report card, one month on Here’s how our original doubts have held up: “Is this genuine, or astroturf?” “Will Dipke actually show up, or run this from Boston forever?” “Does it have a real leader?” “Will it register as a political party?” “Will it just die out as an online fad?” The manifesto, revisited The five-point manifesto hasn’t changed a word since May 24th — which is itself a little notable. No Rajya Sabha seat for any retired Chief Justice as a “post-retirement reward” — only makes sense once you know the backstory. Cancel media licenses owned by Ambani and Adani, and investigate the bank accounts of “Godi media” anchors — is the one that got the loudest reaction from us on air. Women’s rights, and a few more. What’s not in the manifesto, interestingly, is anything about education — even though the actual demand driving every protest so far. The shadow hanging over all of this: the Aam Aadmi Party precedent The fear isn’t that CJP gets crushed. It’s that it succeeds just enough to get absorbed — that the moment it needs money to keep going, money comes with strings, and the movement that started as “we are not here to set up another PM CARES” ends up looking a lot like the things it was protesting. Or, as we put it on the show: the problem was never the cockroaches. It’s the conditions — the heat, the gaps in the walls, the trash nobody collected — that make a place hospitable to them in the first place. Spray it down, and something will always come back, until someone fixes the actual conditions. What’s next We’re planning to bring on an actual Gen Z voice for a future episode — someone closer to the ground, ideally once this movement has been through a real test (a setback, a stall, a crackdown) rather than just riding a growth curve. Until then: follow the protests, not the follower count. Thanks for listening to the full episode. Our banter will definitely enlighten you. See you next Sunday. The Sunday Draft is a weekly conversation about the news nobody asked us to cover. Subscribe to get next week’s episode straight to your inbox. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesundaydraft.substack.com
