In just under three months, 30-year-old Abhijeet Dipke – the founder and face of India’s Gen Z “cockroach” protests – has acquired the kind of celebrity status normally reserved for a breakout actor or cricketer.
In politics or activism, unless you come from an influential family, such recognition can take years – if it comes at all.
“It’s been a rollercoaster ride. Two-three months ago, nobody knew me. I was just in my room in Boston watching documentaries or attending lectures,” said Dipke, who recently completed a master’s in public relations at Boston University.
“Now I’m here surrounded by hundreds of people, by cameras. It’s a bit overwhelming.”
In and around his hometown of Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar in the western state of Maharashtra, Dipke is routinely thronged by people wanting to shake his hand or take a photo.
If the attention bothers him, it doesn’t show. Perhaps because politics isn’t entirely new to him: before moving to the US, Dipke had worked with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), an opposition party that grew out of an anti-corruption movement, for three years.
Then, on 16 May, Dipke wrote a post on X that would change his life: “What if all cockroaches come together?”
It was a response to a remark by India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant, who had likened jobless youngsters to cockroaches. Kant later said his comments had been misinterpreted and were directed specifically at young people using fake degrees, rather than the country’s youth more broadly.
But the clarification did little to quell the outrage.
Dipke said he wrote his post while playing a video game. “It was totally spontaneous. I had no idea it would become such a big movement,” he said.
Encouraged by tens of thousands of responses, he joined a handful of former colleagues and activists to launch the satirical Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), its name playing on both the chief justice’s remark and that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Alongside the support, Dipke and the campaign were fiercely trolled by government supporters. Their website and X account was briefly taken down in India.
Dipke says that when he wrote to X and to India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology asking why the account had been taken down, he received a notice saying it had been withheld under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act which allows the government to block online information ‘in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State’.
The ministry did not reply to the BBC’s questions about the issue, but The Indian Express and other media reported government officials as saying the sites had been blocked because of ‘national security concerns’. Dipke says he decided to return to India in response to this.
“I took the decision to come back to India when I was called a national security threat by my own government. That really hurt me. Isn’t my government supposed to stand by me when I’m abroad?” he said.
“I decided I need to go back to my country to show I’m not a national security threat. I love my country, just not in the way that you [the government] want.”
