3 min readNew DelhiJun 6, 2026 04:48 PM IST
First published on: Jun 6, 2026 at 03:57 PM IST
By about 10 am, the protest site at Jantar Mantar was just beginning to warm up. Protestors were seeping in slowly, drawn by word that Abhijeet Dipke, founder of the online youth movement Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), would arrive directly at the site rather than at the Parliament Street police station. He hadn’t shown up yet. But Saurav Das, spokesperson and a key member of the movement, was already there.
By 11 am, Dipke was still nowhere to be seen.
A worried Das walked across the road to a group of police officers. “Sir, the police is stopping Dipke’s car. He is not able to reach,” he told them. The officers denied it. They coordinated with Das as he worked the phone for Dipke’s location, and after a while he seemed satisfied, drifting back under the shade of a tree, sipping from the straw of a paper coffee cup.
“They sent us the coordinates. Our officer went there and found no one. Now what can we do,” one officer said.
Half an hour later, with the crowd now decently dense — at least 600 people, mostly young, mostly students, with a sprinkle of older faces here and there — Dipke finally arrived in his white Ertiga, to a cheer.
He took to the raised footpath against the boundary wall of the Janata Dal office, where protestors in cockroach masks and clutching posters had gathered, and began his much-awaited speech.
He came quickly to the ultimatum. If Dharmendra Pradhan did not resign by 5 pm, Dipke warned from the stage, the CJP would carry its protest to cities across India through the week and return to Jantar Mantar the following Saturday.
From there he widened out to the last decade of Indian politics. “For the last 10-12 years we have been trapped in Hindu-Muslim politics. Did it get a job for anyone? Who benefited from all this? I am ready to sacrifice my freedom for the cause,” he said, straining to be heard over the claps that swallowed his words.
He turned, too, to the deletion of the CJP’s X account, framing it as an attempt to topple the ‘movement’. “The youth and the students of this country have not sold themselves as yet. Attempts have been made to suppress the movement. You can delete our post but not erase us,” he said. The applause this time was meeker, the noon heat of the national capital settling over the crowd.
What followed was mostly sloganeering, Dipke calling and the crowd answering –“Dharmendra Pradhan isteefa do, Chaatra ekta zindabad, Yuva ekta zindabad.”
Then came the part he hadn’t planned for. As Dipke stepped off the pavement, protestors lifted him onto their shoulders to a loud cheer, his short, sturdy frame passed down the length of the crowd. Dipke resisted, protesting, in a sense, against his own protestors — demanding to be brought down.
Soon he was lost in it altogether, as smaller knots of people took over the area with their own slogans and songs. One group sang “Desh humara kaha jaa raha, kaho Narender maza aa raha”; another kept up the call for the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) founder Abhijeet Dipke led a protest at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on Saturday, (Express Photo by Gajendra Yadav) 
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