What began as a viral response to an insult became a larger mirror of youth culture. Priyal Srivastava writes on how online identities become temporary homes for a generation searching for belonging.
From the Cockroach Janta Party to zodiac signs, therapy labels and aesthetic archetypes, Priyal Srivastava examines how young people rush toward online identities in search of belonging — not because they are cockroaches, but because they are moths drawn to the next digital light.
The Cockroach Janta Party was not supposed to exist.
It began as a weaponised insult. When Chief Justice of India Surya Kant referred to unemployed youth and activists as “cockroaches” and “parasites” during a Supreme Court hearing in May 2026, the words were widely seen as humiliating and dismissive. Instead, the internet did what it often does best: it hijacked the venom.
Within hours, Abhijeet Dipke launched a satirical Google Form. What began as a slur quickly snowballed into one of the biggest internet phenomena India had seen in recent years. The Cockroach Janta Party’s social media presence grew rapidly, reportedly attracting millions of followers and turning a courtroom remark into a youth-driven online movement.
Suddenly, social media was flooded with self-proclaimed members of the CJP. AI-generated cockroach politicians appeared everywhere. Parody manifestos circulated faster than political press releases. People proudly adopted a label that, under any other circumstances, they would have run from.
The obvious explanation is resilience. Cockroaches survive everything. Young people saw themselves in that stubborn refusal to die. But that explanation lets the moment off too easily.
Embracing the Cockroach Janta Party was not a passive celebration of survival. It was an act of aggressive, self-deprecating irony. For a generation navigating hyper-inflated rent, coaching-centre pressures, paper leak anxieties and a job market where graduates often face chronic underemployment, looking at a discarded pest and saying, “That’s literally me,” became its own form of resistance.
If the system is going to treat you as disposable, you might as well claim the identity before someone else uses it against you.
Yet as the CJP evolved from a meme page into physical protests at Jantar Mantar, with demands linked to examination irregularities, unemployment and youth frustration, something more interesting emerged. The cockroach was never really the entire story. While political outrage creates sudden spikes of collective emotion, everyday life online follows a very different pattern.
We are not cockroaches. We are moths.
A moth does not fly toward every light because it believes every light is home. It flies because light promises direction. Warmth. Maybe even belonging.
Most of the time, it is just another bulb.
Online, we are no different.
Every few weeks, the internet manufactures a brand-new framework through which we are told to understand ourselves, and thousands of us instinctively rush toward it. We do not just consume these labels. We inhabit them. They become our personalities, our humour, our dating language, our shopping habits and, increasingly, our communities.
Not long ago, we were explaining our entire lives through zodiac signs. Every passive-aggressive Slack message from a manager, every failed situationship and every questionable life decision could somehow be traced back to being a Scorpio or a Leo.
Then, almost overnight, therapy language became the internet’s new native tongue. Scroll through the comment section of any relationship Reel or an Indian mental health influencer’s page, and you will find people confidently diagnosing strangers as “anxious” or “avoidant.” Ordinary relationship friction — someone taking six hours to reply on WhatsApp, leaving you on “read,” or pulling away during conflict — was compressed into neat psychological categories because labels are far easier to carry than uncertainty.
Before those conversations had even settled, the spotlight shifted again. This time, identity became aesthetic.
The internet crowned the “clean girl” — slick buns, expensive skincare, a hot matcha on a spotless desk and minimalist linen — as the blueprint for the ideal woman. Weeks later, the algorithm grew bored. Suddenly everyone was ordering midnight ice cream, living under a pile of unwashed clothes, calling themselves a “delusional girl,” and posting self-deprecating rants about being a “recovering corporate slave.”
The costume changed. The need underneath it did not.
The internet’s attention cycle is brutally short. Every identity eventually expires. Every aesthetic becomes cringe. Every meme dies. The crowd disperses almost as quickly as it formed, only to gather around something new. In fact, who knows? By the time you finish reading this sentence, the algorithm may already have reset, a new trend may have dropped, and a completely different light may have emerged.
It is easy to laugh at people who seem to reinvent themselves every few weeks. It is much harder to ask why they are doing it.
Beneath every new identity is the same question: where do I belong?
For many young people, that question has become surprisingly difficult to answer offline.
Our grandparents inherited neighbourhoods. Our parents inherited communities through extended families, festival committees and familiar evening routines at the local park. We inherit cities that we constantly move through but rarely settle into.
We leave home for a college degree, then pack up for a job in a completely different city. Friends drift across time zones, metro lines and corporate sectors. We live in identical 10×10 paying guest rooms in Indiranagar, Gurgaon Phase 3 or Powai, eating cold delivery meals with people whose full names we do not even know, spending our evenings scrolling through lives that seem far more connected than our own.
Loneliness today is not always dramatic. It is quiet.
It is having hundreds of followers but no one to grab a ₹20 cutting chai with on a rainy Tuesday night. It is knowing more about a South Delhi influencer’s breakup than the name of the neighbour next door. It is being constantly reachable, constantly visible and still somehow emotionally difficult to locate.
In that world, internet identities become more than trends. They become shortcuts to belonging.
Saying “I’m anxiously attached,” “I’m a corporate girlie,” or even wearing a CJP parody T-shirt is not just a way of describing yourself. It is knocking on a digital door and hoping someone on the other side says, “Me too.”
That is why these labels move so quickly and still matter so intensely while they last. They offer a temporary home in a world where permanent belonging feels increasingly fragile.
The Cockroach Janta Party was never only about cockroaches. It was about thousands of people rushing toward the same light at exactly the same moment, relieved, if only for a while, to discover they were not flying alone.
We were never cockroaches.
We were moths.
About the Author
Priyal Srivastava is a student and writer with TheNews21 Pulse. Her work focuses on culture, online spaces, psychology and everyday human experiences. Through her writing, she explores the tension between how people feel, perform, connect and cope in contemporary life.
