The Cockroach Republic: India Today update

The cockroach has been around for 320 million years. It has survived things considerably more formidable than Justice Surya Kant’s remarks. It survived the dinosaurs. So, let us begin at the beginning. With the word itself. Cockroach comes from the Spanish cucaracha. The English, being the English, heard cucaracha, did not understand it, and did what the English do with things they do not understand: they partitioned it, anglicised the pieces, and called it their word. Cuca became cock. Racha became roach. Read Full Story And thus a perfectly harmless cucaracha acquired a name that has been making ladies uncomfortable since the first roach emerged out of a crevice in her cave. Women prefer the word roach, for the sake of euphony. Without the prefix, it's delicate. Women are delicate. Unlike scientists. They named the order Blattodea, from the Latin blatta: an insect that shuns the light. An insect that shuns the light. Remember that phrase. We will return to it. In Hindi, the cockroach is a tilchatta or telchatta. I am not sure whether it licks sesame seeds or sesame oil to have two versions of its name. Telchatta is what my dadi called it before hitting it with her blue-sole Bata chappal. The word has a beautiful ugly rhythm to it, a word that sounds exactly like what it describes: something you would rather not say out loud in polite company. It is a word with no dignity and no apology for having none. Justice Surya Kant, the Chief Justice of India, was not thinking about etymology when he said it. He was thinking about a new generation of lawyers filing contempt petitions, wasting court time, scurrying about in the corridors of the judiciary with all the purposefulness of creatures that emerge when the lights go out. Youngsters like cockroaches, he said. Some become media. Some become RTI activists. Some become social media. All of them, in his telling, become pests. Control, Justice, control. But exercising self-control is something Uday Shetty can, Chief Justice Surya can’t. He went on. The birthed the CJP, unwittingly, and the BJP suffered all the labour pain. Abhijeet Dipke, a Boston-based unemployed youth with an AAP-adjacent political flavour and the instincts of a man who went to the Kejriwal School of Issue-Spotting, did what any sensible opportunist would do. He picked up the slur, dusted it off, and put it on a banner. Overnight, there was a Cockroach Janta Party. Within a week, there was a meme movement. The youth of India, ever alert to the global grammar of protest, had their own Je suis Charlie moment. Main bhi tilchatta. I am also a cockroach. Say it with pride. Say it with an Instagram reel set to a trending audio listed as an anthem, made with AI. The CJP and its manifesto are genuinely funny. As satire, it is well-constructed, instinctively targeted, and lands cleanly. As a political movement, it is about as consequential as the tilchatta in your kitchen: alarming to encounter, impossible to entirely ignore, but ultimately living in the pipe behind the sink. There is a serious condition called: Katsaridaphobia. This is an irrational fear of cockroaches. The heart begins pumping and the subject starts jumping. That's what happened when the BJP, the clear target of the meme campaign, began panicking over a narrative this CJP was setting. The party is too experienced to overestimate its seriousness as a political alternative, but it's oversensitive to a shift in narrative. Since a section of the Instagram youth was taking it as a serious revolutionary symbol, the BJP got the blue-sole slippers out. Causing more consternation than required. Here is the problem with the tilchatta as a revolutionary symbol. The cockroach is, by the frank testimony of its own scientific classification, an insect that shuns the light. It does not march. It does not occupy Durbar Square. It does not storm the Bastille or siege the presidential palace. It hides. It waits. It emerges when it thinks no one is looking, takes what it needs from the edges and the corners, and vanishes the moment the light comes on. This is an impressive survival strategy. It is a terrible revolution strategy. The comparisons to Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, have been made. They have been made breathlessly, excitedly, by people who would very much like India to be the next chapter in a compelling series. They are wrong, and here is why. In Bangladesh, the quota reform movement was a spark in dry timber, but crucially, it was the same timber, uniformly dry, burning at the same temperature across the same landscape of grievance. In Sri Lanka, the misery was total and democratic: a Sri Lankan in Jaffna and a Sri Lankan in Colombo were both feeling the same crisis in the same wallet simultaneously. When you have one sky and one catastrophe, you can have one uprising. India has 4,000 species of cockroach. This is not a metaphor. It is also a metaphor. The generation supposedly born between 1997 and 2012 is described as Gen Z, as if being bo