Abhijeet Dipke, youth campaigner: There’s an underlying frustration in India

The Interview

The episode features an interview with Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the Cockroach Janta Party, who rose to prominence following a viral so

Key takeaways

• Dipke's Instagram following grew to 26 million within months of the movement's launch.
• The movement was catalyzed by the Chief Justice comparing youth activists to 'cockroaches and parasites'.

Main topics

• Youth activism in India
• Cockroach Janta Party

Notable quotes

What if all cockroaches come together?

Conclusion

The interview highlights how digital-first activism can mobilize a gen

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Speaker 4 (0:36) Hi, I'm Marie Kooi from Asia Specific, where we bring you Asia-Pacific stories, unpacked by those who know them best. Indonesia is considering allowing dual citizenship for the first time to try to stop the country's best and brightest permanently leaving the country. But only a limited pool of people would be eligible. Most countries in Asia don't allow citizens to hold another passport, so is Indonesia's move smart? Join us twice a week. Search for Asia Specific wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Speaker 5 (1:08) Hello, I'm Yogitala Mai, the BBC's international correspondent, and this is the interview from the BBC World Service, the best conversations coming out of the BBC. People shaping our world from all over the world. Speaker 3 (1:23) I want to get freedom. I like that freedom. Speaker 5 (1:26) A gender equal world would be a better world for men too. We need this as fire. We need healing. We need trust. These companies don't really, they don't care what governments do. Speaker 1 (1:37) This is a war. The first thing that we want is the war to end. Speaker 5 (1:43) For this interview, I met Abhijit Dipke, founder of the Cockroach Janta Party, in a village in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, where he was campaigning to improve the conditions of rural schools. Dipke rose to prominence in India earlier this year after criticising the country's Chief Justice, who had compared unemployed young people and social media activists to cockroaches. Dipke was studying in the US when he posted, What if all cockroaches come together? on the social media platform X in response. Although he thought nothing of it at the time, his impromptu post quickly went viral, eventually snowballing into a youth protest movement that has shaken India's political establishment and thrust Dipke himself into the spotlight. Speaker 2 (2:27) I think there has been this underlying frustration among the youth of India, especially since a very long time. Because if we look at the unemployment data, currently India has the highest unemployment rate in last 40 years. And even when it comes to education, every year, all government examination, there is not even one single government examination where the paper doesn't get leaked or the exam doesn't get cancelled. So people are really, really frustrated with unemployment. with the way the education ministry is functioning in India, which was not accountable at all. Speaker 5 (3:04) Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Abhijit Dipke. Speaker 2 (3:08) It was really spontaneous. I had no clue that it would turn into a huge movement. It happened when the Chief Justice of India, who made a comment and compared the youth of India with cockroaches and parasites for criticising the system. And being the Chief Justice of India, he should be the one to safeguard the freedom of expression. But here he was, demeaning and insulting the youth. for merely expressing their opinion about the current existing political system and somewhere i just was taking a hot shot for that comment by saying what if all cockroaches come together and i did that while playing ps5 and i just made that random post on x and then after a couple of hours i saw that by then thousands of replies were there on that post and most of the Young people were saying, yeah, we should start our own platform, maybe our own party. So I thought, why not? Let's launch something like the Cockroach Janta Party using the word cockroach, which the Chief Justice of India used to demean the youth and also the janta taking from the ruling party. So Speaker 6 (4:08) his defense of that has been that he didn't actually say it about youngsters overall. He was talking about people who have fake degrees, who try to get into the bar. Speaker 2 (4:19) I think that is even more problematic then because there are some people here with fake degrees sitting on the topmost position here, allegedly. And also in a country like India where people struggle to get formal education, how can you just demean them by calling cockroaches and parasites in a country like India where majority of the population lives in the rural part and they don't have the access to quality education and because of that they don't have formal degrees. So I think even that clarification was very problematic. Speaker 6 (4:48) Now, when the Cockroach Janta Party got all of this traction online, you suddenly had lots of people following you. Can you explain what happened to you? Because I think, you know, you were blocked, your pages were not available for a little bit. Speaker 2 (5:02) Yeah, so the thing that happened is that I was expecting, like when we launched the Google form, I was expecting something 300 to 400 memberships. And then I saw the number just kept increasing. And that is what led me to, you know, why not launch an official website? of Cockroach Janata Party and somehow after launching the website we received more than 50,000 members within 24 hours and after looking at that those numbers I thought maybe it's a good time to launch even a social media channels and on Instagram in particular there was huge huge following within like I would say just a day in just a day we were able to cross 1 million and within four days we crossed 10 million surpassing the ruling party of India which had just 8 million followers As of today we have 26 million followers, that too within I would say just two or three months. And I think somewhere the government did feel nervous because of the rising popularity and that too overnight popularity. And that is why constant attempts were made to take down our accounts and even the government withheld our ex-account in India calling us a national security threat. Speaker 6 (6:07) So at what point did you think, okay, now this has got a lot of traction online, this needs to become a ground movement? Because after that, you decided to come to India. At what point did you make that decision? Speaker 2 (6:19) I was an international student studying in the US on an Indian passport. I was an Indian abroad. Everybody who knew me there knew me as an Indian, a brown guy, studying in the US. And somewhere that really hurt me, that really, I don't know, really made me sad. Isn't my government supposed to stand by me when I'm abroad? But this was the same government that called me a national security threat. And that really hurt me. And that is when I decided I need to go back to my country. And I need to show this, that I do love my country. And I'm a patriot. I'm not a national security threat. I just love my country. Not in the way that you want, but I do love my country. Speaker 6 (6:56) Now, we have seen, obviously, in the past decade or more, a pattern that anybody who is critical of the government... or its policies. There's a pattern of intimidation, threats, even jailing of activists, journalists, organizations. Were you afraid when you were coming back to India? And are you still afraid? Speaker 2 (7:14) I won't lie. Before taking the decision to come back to India, I was afraid. I was nervous. Who wouldn't be? Because when I called up my lawyer and I just asked him, like, what is the worst case scenario? And he told me it