Iran war drives India’s cockroaches out, but can Modi crush them?

Barely three weeks after he launched a parody political movement that took India by storm, Abhijeet Dipke is being hunted and hounded by trolls, facing online extermination by the government, and his AI-generated satirical mascot, the cockroach, is as reviled in ruling party circles as the real thing is in kitchens across the country.

The movement was sparked by Indian Chief Justice Surya Kant’s controversial statements comparing the country’s unemployed youth to cockroaches. “Disheartened by those comments, I made a tweet on X that, what if all cockroaches come together? And on that personal X post, I received tremendous traction,” explained Dipke, an Indian political communications strategist and student at Boston University, in an interview with FRANCE 24.

Soon, a spoof party, the "Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)", or the People’s Party of Cockroaches, was born online. The name, a parody of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was digested immediately – and gleefully – by netizen critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s policies.

The satirical party hit the zeitgeist in a country that has been particularly impacted by the fallout of the Iran war. The Middle East conflict has also put a spotlight on Modi’s policies, exposing India’s vulnerabilities, highlighting New Delhi’s lack of clout on the diplomatic stage, and increasing the squeeze on significant sections of the population that have been overlooked in the Hindu nationalist government’s “economic miracle” discourse that has dominated India’s political stage for over a decade.

As millions flocked to the cockroach satirical cause, the movement’s social media accounts broke records, gained national and international media attention and even saw demonstrators don cockroach masks and display the parasite mascot at street protests.

It wasn’t long before the cockroach social media accounts came under attack, with Dipke alleging hacking and threats to his family. “I have been getting death threats for the last three days. Now, even my family is getting death threats,” said the 30-year-old native of the western Indian state of Maharashtra who is currently enrolled in a Master’s programme in the US. As digital rights groups condemned the violation of free speech, Dipke claimed there was a “full-blown attack against us to suppress this movement”.

Since Modi came to power in 2014, India has been slipping down press freedom indexes, with NGOs such as Reporters Without Borders warning that the Indian media “has fallen into an unofficial state of emergency”. But with the latest crackdown generating new waves of media coverage, the lid on the discourse of discontent has been prised open, and the scuttling cockroaches may be hard to contain.

Rising youth unemployment, falling US university admissions

While Kant has clarified that his observations from the bench slamming “youngsters like cockroaches” were misquoted and directed only at people obtaining "fake or bogus degrees”, his explanation failed to contain the uproar primarily because his remarks touched wounds that have been festering for years. But they have been suppressed by India’s political elites, according to analysts.

“There's been a lot of anger among the youth the world over,” noted Sushant Singh, a lecturer in South Asian studies at Yale University. “But I think fundamentally the trigger was the safety valves of the Indian state – which is the Supreme Court and the parliament and the Indian media – are no longer acting as safety valves or speaking when the executive overreaches. They're not providing the kind of correction that they're supposed to provide, which is where the frustration is building up in a certain sense among the youth.”

India has the world’s largest youth population, with about 65% of the 1.4 billion population under the age of 35, making youth unemployment a major issue for policymakers. Joblessness among India's urban youth stands at 14%, which is far higher than the overall unemployment of about 5%, official data ⁠show. That figure soars among graduates, with nearly 40% among those below 25 years unemployed, according to the 2026 State of Working India Report by the Azim Premji University.

The world’s most populous nation produces around 8 million graduate students a year, a hefty figure for the job market to accommodate. India also accounts for the largest percentage of foreign students in US universities, which in turn has supplied the US economy with a highly skilled workforce and an aspirational goal for students and their families back home.

But the American Dream in India is fading fast in President Donald Trump’s second term.

The Trump administration’s student visa restrictions, increased visa revocations often linked to minor infractions such as speeding tickets, and an atmosphere of intimidation – including threats to deport international students over pro-Palestinian speech – have seen foreign admissions in US universities fall by 17% in the 2025 fall semester, according to the Institute of International Education. In India, that figure plummeted to 75%, according to Indian media reports, with around 8,000 student visas revoked before December 2025.

Read moreFrom India to US detention: Trump's campus crackdown sends warning to foreign students

“The kind of people who go and study in the US, or who work in the US, are mostly Mr. Modi's staunch supporters because they come from the kind of socio-economic background which staunchly supports Mr. Modi,” explained Singh. “For them, being hurt [by Trump’s immigration policies], and Mr. Modi not being able to prevent the damage to them, is going to in some way damage Mr. Modi.”

A bromance sputters, then dies

While the Trump administration’s policies have sparked alarm in several world capitals, in India, it has heightened the scrutiny on Modi’s foreign policy and its rupture from New Delhi’s historic non-aligned position.

The Hindu nationalist prime minister made a splashy display of his tilt to the US during Trump’s first term, including a massive 2019 “Howdy Modi” rally in Houston, where, the New York Times noted, Modi “broke with protocol to campaign for a second term” for Trump.

But when Trump returned to the White House, he killed the bromance with a whopping 50% tariff announcement on Indian goods last year. The US president then topped it with his persistent claims of personally engineering an end to a brief cross-border war between India and Pakistan, the latest conflict between the two nuclear armed states over the disputed Kashmir region.

It was a win for Pakistan since it has long sought international mediation to resolve the Kashmir crisis, while India maintains it is a strictly bilateral issue. Islamabad repaid Trump by nominating him for a Nobel Peace Prize. Modi, meanwhile, bristled amid persistent news reports of the Indian prime minister avoiding a phone call with the US president, which were denied by both sides.

Watch moreWhy the falling out? Trump-Modi relations strained as US doubles tariffs on India

Iran war makes India ‘irrelevant’

The Iran War has heightened the perception of New Delhi’s sidelining on the diplomatic stage, as Islamabad emerged as a key mediator, with Trump dubbing Pakistan’s powerful military chief General Asim Munir his "favourite field marshal".

Read moreWho is Trump's 'favourite field marshal'?

China, India’s biggest Asian rival and more threatening neighbour, has also welcomed Pakistan’s efforts to negotiate and renew a shaky ceasefire.

China and Pakistan are historical allies, while India has been viewed in Western capitals as a strategic partner to contain Chinese expansionism in the Indo-Pacific. But the Iran war has rattled the pieces on the Asian geostrategic chessboard, with New Delhi noting Trump’s high-profile state visit this month to China, where the US president proclaimed he held “very successful talks” with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.

Earlier this week, Xi hosted Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and praised his guest’s “positive efforts” to bring peace to the Middle East. India, meanwhile, hosted US Secretary of State Marco Rubio for a visit that was widely viewed as a bid to defuse tensions between the world’s most populous democracies.

At the end of Rubio’s visit, most South Asia analysts concluded that the outcome of the visit was edifying, but not substantive. “There's been a little bit of optics. But I think the real issue is what concretely has been achieved that is in India's favour or which shows that the Trump administration is thinking differently about India. And we haven't seen progress on that,” explained Singh.

The Modi administration’s failure to condemn the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, a historic Indian ally, while forging close ties with Israel has also depleted India’s standing in the Global South and among the BRICS grouping, analysts say.

“India is just missing from the whole geopolitical debate in West Asia or the Middle East. And it’s not that India is just absent. Being absent is fine, but India's absence is not even being noticed. Which means that India is irrelevant,” Singh noted.

A Gen Z – and cockroach – threat  

The absence on the diplomatic front is heightened by the serious strains the Iran war has placed on the Indian economy.

The South Asian giant is heavily dependent on fuel imports from the Middle East, and the soaring cost of gasoline, diesel and cooking fuel has put a dent in the Indian rupee, with the currency slumping to a record low last week against the dollar.

“In terms of the shock this has had, not just on energy, but now the ramifications, which are coming on all sorts of fronts, including gold imports, the diamond and all sorts of different industries, that’s not really a good position for India,” said Sandeep Bhardwaj, a research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS). 

The cockroach movement, Bhardwaj notes, is “basically coming out of a lot of this economic anxiety, which is coming out of the persistent job crisis, which has been exacerbated by the economic crisis right now,” he said. “There is a real threat of that economic pressure snowballing into something real in terms of a political cost for the government.”

The political cost of downplaying youth discontent has been keenly felt in India’s neighbourhood in recent years. Gen Z protests have unseated governments in Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh, leading some to question if India could witness a similar experience.

But Bhardwaj is cautious about predicting a Gen Z replay in the world’s most populous nation. “India is so big. There are so many variations. For a non-political party, led a grassroots movement like this to engulf India, it's going to take a very long time and a lot of things to happen for it to become a major crisis in Indian politics,” he noted.

For the founder of the "Cockroach Janta Party", the meteoric rise of his online protest has led him to question how to take the momentum forward, but he’s taking his time. “None of this was intended. It was born out of satire,” said Dipke carefully. “I think the biggest mistake that all political parties in India have made is that they have stopped engaging with the youth. They no longer have a dialogue. They no longer listen to them. So that's what we are going to do,” he explained. “After getting those ideas and the data from them, that is when we will decide our next course of action.”

Dipke may not be sure of the next course of action for his viral movement, but he’s certain he will not abandon his resilient parasite mascot. “Of course, cockroach is going to be the name of this movement going forward because people are loving it, especially the youth and the Gen Z,” he said. “What was thrown at them as an insult, they are now carrying this name with pride. So, we are going to continue with the cockroach name.”