India’s wild new cockroach party

There's nothing new or remarkable about joke parties, whether Britain's Monster Raving Loonies (all-day pubs!), or Canada's Rhinoceros Party (repeal the law of gravity!).

But we know of only one party that's gone from non-existent to 23 million Insta followers in three weeks — surpassing what the ruling BJP nationalists have racked up in a decade!

So it's worth a quick look at India's new Cockroach Janta Party ('janta' = people), and what it might reveal about India, no?

The origin story actually begins in the country's supreme court, where the newish chief justice seemingly^* compared young activists to "cockroaches" last month — lazy folks with "spurious degrees" who protest rather than get a job.

That's when a 30-year-old India-born and Boston-based political comms strategist (Dipke) flipped the insult into gold via his new CJP, as a play on the ruling BJP. Its mascot? The cockroach, of course: reviled, indestructible, and now organised.

He went on to release a manifesto pledging to curb post-retirement perks for judges, ending India's media mogul stranglehold, and demanding a new 50% quota for women in parliament and cabinet.

Throw in some quality memes about unemployment, college entrance scandals, and fuel prices, and things soon escalated into opposition endorsements, websites getting blocked on spurious ‘national security’ grounds, and Dipke himself then flying to India on Saturday!

But... what might this all reveal about India?

First, there's PM Modi's grip: today (Wednesday) he actually becomes India's longest-serving PM in history. But after three terms and some clipped electoral wings, the ability of such a quirky, cockroach-themed upstart movement to beat the world's largest political party on its strongest social media platform realistically exposes some cracks.

Recall that India's under-30s make up more than half the population — we're talking 700+ million people. And yet this CJP wave suggests…

• a) many are unhappy, whether it's job scarcity, governance failures, or inequality

• b) Modi's strongman development + nationalism story (backed by his media mogul friends) isn't always cutting through, and

• c) his vaunted demographic dividend is neither automatic nor guaranteed.

And that last one takes us to...

Second, there's Modi's economy: those sexy headline figures (~8% GDP growth earlier this year!) are still not translating into enough quality jobs: ~20 million or so young folks enter the workforce each year, but the formal economy is only absorbing maybe ~2.8 million. So there's a sense folks got sold a meritocratic dream that's now evaporating into a cloud of connections, plus a structural education-employment mismatch.

Meanwhile, other clouds still gather on the horizon: the Hormuz crisis is forcing India to pay more for its energy imports, driving the rupee to record lows and inflation back up.

And yet… amongst it all, it's also important to maintain a bit of...

Third, some perspective: Mr Dipke (of cockroach party fame) held a big weekend rally shortly after returning to India, but guess how many folks actually showed up? Maybe a thousand? So it's a reminder there's still a massive gap between digital energy and reality.

Recall also that, even amid today's shocks, India is still the world's ~fastest-growing major economy, it's still sitting on a forex fortress of ~$680B, and it's still managed to reroute most of its crude imports via non-Hormuz sources like Venezuela, Africa, and beyond.

So this isn't some 1991-style economic crisis nor 2020-era rural distress. Not even close. Modi still has runway (growth, reserves) to course-correct before this alienation deepens.

But that might first involve listening to these young folks, not geo-blocking their memes.

Sound even smarter:

• ^* India’s chief justice (Kant) later tried to walk back his comments, clarifying he never meant to disparage all of India’s young people, and was referring more specifically to grifters with fake degrees.