“A Society Of Spectacle (Without Substance)”, sirfaditya.substack.com, June 06, 2026
“One morning, when India’s unemployed youth woke up in the late afternoon from troubled dreams of another failure to become a Sarkari Babu, they found themselves transformed into cockroaches. I was reminded of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) where Gregor Samsa, a weary traveling salesman crushed by debt and familial expectation, awakens as a giant bug.
His family, while initially shocked, soon adapts by relegating Gregor to a dark, filthy room, throwing scraps at him when convenient, and ultimately finding his existence an impediment to their own petty aspirations. Kafka uses the metaphor of a bug for a disgusting and ultimately useless object. He remains trapped in his room, scuttling across the floor while the world outside moves on. That image now seems eerily close to what the so-called Cockroach Janata Party has become in India’s political landscape. But where Gregor’s tragedy was that he lost his human voice, this movement had none to begin with. It is a spectacle without any substance.
Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) is a satirical political movement that emerged as a reaction to Chief Justice Surya Kant’s en passant remarks during a hearing concerning fraudulent professional credentials. He said that unemployed young people drifting into journalism and activism resembled cockroaches. Soon enough, the youth started identifying as cockroaches and started assembling en masse virtually on CJP’s Instagram page. As of now, the Instagram page has above 22 million followers. It’s a huge number if you contrast it with traditional parties. BJP has 9.4 million followers (less than half of CJP), Congress has 13.7 million followers and AAP has 1.9 million. That number is constantly waved around as proof of a mass political awakening. It is not. A follower count does not a political party make, it makes a popular page…….”
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