When India's Chief Justice Surya Kant compared unemployed young people to cockroaches last week, he probably expected outrage, maybe an apology cycle and then silence.

What he got instead was 15 million Instagram followers in five days, a cockroach logo on a mobile phone, and a movement that has already overtaken the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's own social media presence. The Cockroach Janta Party was born, and its viral rise is more verdict than joke.

The CJP calls itself the "Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed." Its membership criteria include being chronically online and able to rant professionally. The irony is sharp and deliberate: these are not the qualities of people who gave up.

These are the qualities of a generation that studied hard, followed the rules and then watched the system fail them – and decided to say so loudly.

India's government would prefer you focus on the GDP number. With projected growth of 6.3% to 6.8% for 2025-26, the economy is, by global standards, performing well.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made this the centerpiece of his legacy, a rising India, a confident India, an India that will be the world's third-largest economy by 2030. The headline growth figures conceal an economy that has failed to deliver broad-based opportunity.

Growth for whom?

The latest data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy tells a different story from the government's headline figures. Youth unemployment among those aged 20 to 24 hovered around 44 to 45% for much of 2025, levels that are substantially worse than before 2014, when the current government came to power.

Even the more conservative official measure, the Periodic Labor Force Survey, puts youth unemployment at 9.9% for the 15-to-29 age group, more than three times the general rate. In urban areas, the picture is bleaker still, with youth unemployment reaching 14.7%.

Education, which was supposed to be the great equalizer, has become an additional cruelty. Unemployment among Indians with secondary education and above stands at 6.5%, meaning that staying in school does not protect you from joblessness; it often just delays it at greater personal cost.

For women, the numbers reach extremes: female youth unemployment hits 41% in Goa and 44% in Kerala, and nearly 40% among degree-holding women in Jammu and Kashmir. This is the country the CJP's 400,000 members signed up to criticize, more than 70% of them between the ages of 19 and 25.