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By:

Abhijit Joshi

31 August 2024 at 10:09:24 am

When the Cockroach Enters Politics

Regardless of whether or not the CJP wins an election, its rise signals a changing relationship between young Indians and political power. It would be tempting to dismiss the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) as another internet curiosity destined to enjoy a brief moment of virality before disappearing into the digital ether. Politics, however, has a habit of taking jokes more seriously than their creators intended. Whether the CJP eventually becomes a political force, lends its energies to another...

When the Cockroach Enters Politics

Regardless of whether or not the CJP wins an election, its rise signals a changing relationship between young Indians and political power. It would be tempting to dismiss the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) as another internet curiosity destined to enjoy a brief moment of virality before disappearing into the digital ether. Politics, however, has a habit of taking jokes more seriously than their creators intended. Whether the CJP eventually becomes a political force, lends its energies to another party, survives as a pressure group or simply fades away is impossible to know. But its emergence has already exposed something worth watching: a section of young Indians is becoming increasingly comfortable turning political frustration into organised digital dissent. Edgy Satire The CJP began in the language of satire, irreverence and internet culture. Its appeal lies partly in refusing the solemnity with which conventional Indian politics often presents itself. Parties arrive with flags, slogans, manifestos and carefully choreographed leaders. The CJP arrived with a joke. Yet behind the joke is a familiar political instinct: the desire to puncture institutions that appear too comfortable, too self-important or too remote from the citizen. India has seen this impulse before, though usually in different forms. Political movements have repeatedly emerged from dissatisfaction with established parties, bureaucratic opacity or the sense that the political class speaks at citizens rather than with them. What is different now is the medium. A generation raised on social media does not necessarily distinguish between political communication, entertainment and satire. A meme can make an argument; a viral video can become a campaign; a joke can acquire a constituency. This is precisely why established parties should resist the urge to laugh too quickly. India’s political parties are still largely organised around structures inherited from another age: hierarchical leadership, local cadres, rallies, posters and television appearances. Young voters, meanwhile, inhabit a political ecosystem in which authority is fragmented and attention is scarce. They are accustomed to questioning institutions in public, challenging narratives instantly and moving between causes with remarkable speed. They may not want another party in the traditional mould. They may want politics itself to behave differently. Interesting Experiment The CJP therefore represents an interesting experiment, regardless of whether it survives electorally. Its first challenge is credibility. Satire is a powerful weapon against hypocrisy, but governing requires rather more than exposing it. It is relatively easy to ridicule politicians, bureaucracy or public policy. It is harder to propose workable alternatives, build an organisation, select candidates, raise money transparently and maintain internal discipline. Every anti-establishment movement eventually encounters the awkward transition from saying what is wrong to explaining what should replace it. That is where many insurgent political projects falter. The second challenge is endurance. Digital movements can acquire astonishing momentum and lose it almost as quickly. The internet rewards novelty, provocation and emotional intensity. Politics demands patience. A movement that depends too heavily on its ability to generate attention can find itself trapped by the very ecosystem that created it. Yesterday’s viral cause is easily displaced by today’s scandal, controversy or meme. Yet dismissing such movements because they are ephemeral would also be a mistake. Political influence does not necessarily require winning elections. A pressure group can alter the vocabulary of public debate; an online movement can force established parties to address issues they would rather avoid; a small organisation can become disproportionately influential if larger parties begin borrowing its language. This is perhaps the most interesting possibility for the CJP. Its ultimate significance may not lie in the number of seats it wins, but in the questions it persuades others to answer. That is also why its rise should be viewed in the wider context of India’s changing political electorate. Young Indians are not uniformly anti-establishment, nor are they naturally aligned with any particular ideology. But many are less deferential towards political authority than previous generations. They have access to more information, more competing narratives and more opportunities to organise themselves outside traditional institutions. They can be cynical, impatient and contradictory. They can also be intensely political. Traditional parties often misunderstand this generation by treating it as an audience to be targeted rather than a constituency to be engaged. A slick social-media campaign is not the same thing as listening. Young voters may enjoy memes, but that does not mean their political concerns are frivolous. Employment, education, housing, urban infrastructure, corruption and the quality of public institutions remain stubbornly material concerns. The CJP’s real test, then, is whether it can convert irreverence into relevance. If it can, India’s political parties may have to contend with something they are not accustomed to: political competition that does not begin in a party office, a caste network or a traditional ideological organisation, but on a phone screen. If it cannot, the CJP will join the long list of internet phenomena that briefly captured attention before vanishing. Either outcome would tell us something. For now, the cockroach has achieved the one thing every political movement seeks before it can hope to achieve anything else: people are talking about it. Whether it becomes a party, a pressure group, a political ally or merely a footnote remains uncertain. But the question has changed. The political establishment no longer needs to ask, “Who are these young people?” It needs to ask a more uncomfortable question: "What are they going to ask next?" (The writer is a political observer. Views personal.)

Digital Delusions

The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) has been feted as a model bureaucrat on paper, at least. Under the state government’s 150 Days Sevakarmi Plus Programme, it recently clinched the top rank. In the parallel 150 Days E-Governance Reform Programme, it placed fourth - no small feat in a state keen to advertise its digital credentials.


The larger point is such metrics, however carefully designed, measure processes more than outcomes. They reward compliance, adoption and internal efficiency. Whether they capture the lived experience of the citizens of Maharashtra and Mumbai is another matter entirely.


The felicitation of MMRDA for its strides in e-governance fits neatly into this pattern. Outside conference halls and PowerPoint decks, Mumbai’s commuters remain stuck in a daily crawl that no algorithm has yet managed to dissolve.


E-governance, at its best, promises efficiency in form of quicker clearances, transparent tendering and real-time monitoring. MMRDA’s initiatives tick all the right boxes. They signal a bureaucracy eager to modernise, to shed its paper-choked past and embrace the language of smart cities.


But intent is not impact.


Consider the daily commute along the Western Express Highway or the arterial choke points of Bandra-Kurla Complex. Here, the promise of ‘smart mobility’ collides with a far more stubborn reality of perpetual construction, bottlenecks engineered as much by poor planning as by population density, and a near-total absence of coordination between agencies. Metro lines snake overhead and roadworks appear and vanish with little warning.


If MMRDA’s digital tools are meant to orchestrate this complexity, their effects are difficult to discern. Real-time data is only as useful as the decisions it informs. Yet traffic diversions remain ad hoc, often communicated late or not at all. Project timelines slip with wearying regularity, their delays seldom explained in terms accessible to the public. The result is that more information exists within the system than ever before, but commuters experience little of its supposed clarity.


This gap points to a deeper problem. E-governance, in many Indian cities, has become an end rather than a means. The risk is that digitalisation becomes a substitute for reform, rather than its instrument.


Mumbai’s traffic woes are not, after all, a data problem. They are a governance problem. They reflect a planning culture that prioritises project announcements over project completion, and ribbon-cuttings over long-term usability. No amount of digitisation can compensate for these structural deficits.


While the city’s metro expansion, coastal road and trans-harbour link are transformative projects where some degree of disruption is inevitable, the question is whether that disruption is being managed intelligently.


Here, MMRDA’s awards invite scrutiny. Do they reflect genuine improvements in how projects are sequenced, how traffic is managed during construction, how citizens are informed?


None of this is to dismiss the value of e-governance. But it cannot, on its own, resolve the contradictions of Mumbai’s urban governance. For that, the city needs coordination and accountability, something less glamorous than an award ceremony. 


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