Which Public Figures Have Supported the Cockroach Janta Party?

Lists of “CJP supporters” circulate widely online, and a lot of them blur two very different things: a politician praising a cause from a podium, and a person who actually turned up at Jantar Mantar, went without food, or put their name to the demands in public. This page keeps those separate. Every name below comes with one specific, checkable act — nothing vaguer than that, and nothing beyond what’s on the record.

The movement’s own people

The people who built and ran CJP day to day sit apart from outside supporters, but they’re worth naming precisely because their roles are so specific.

• Abhijeet Dipke — Founder and convenor. Registered the party on 16 May 2026, the day after Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s remark about “cockroaches.” Began a fast at Jantar Mantar on 18 July 2026 and was hit with blue ink thrown at him that same day.
• Saurav Das — Chief spokesperson. An investigative journalist by trade, he fronted the movement’s press engagement through the weeks of the Jantar Mantar sit-in.
• Ashutosh Ranka — Co-spokesperson. A former McKinsey consultant and IIT Kanpur alumnus who writes on education policy.

Activists who backed the protest in person

This is the category where “support” is least ambiguous, because each person either showed up, fasted, or spoke at a named event.

• Sonam Wangchuk — Engineer and climate activist. Fasted for 26 days starting 28 June 2026, losing 9.1 kg in the process. He was forcibly hospitalised on 18 July 2026 and resumed the fast from his hospital bed. He referred to himself as an “honorary cockroach.”
• Prashant Bhushan — Activist-lawyer. Publicly backed the movement’s demands during the protest weeks.
• Anna Hazare — Social activist. Voiced support for the movement — a notable data point given that his own hunger strikes shaped the last major anti-corruption movement to occupy Delhi’s streets.
• Anjali Bhardwaj — RTI activist. Backed the movement’s transparency and accountability demands specifically.
• Greta Thunberg — Climate activist. Spoke at a solidarity rally in Trafalgar Square, London, on 26 July 2026.

Film and music figures

Bollywood, regional cinema, and hip-hop all produced at least one figure who did something concrete — attended a protest site, spoke publicly, or performed — rather than simply posting about it.

• Prakash Raj — Actor. Attended the Jantar Mantar protest in Delhi and joined the gathering at Freedom Park in Bengaluru.
• Atul Kulkarni — Actor. Publicly urged young citizens to join the Delhi protest.
• Naseeruddin Shah — Actor. Among the film figures who publicly supported the movement.
• Ratna Pathak Shah — Actor. Publicly supported the movement during the protest weeks.
• Sonakshi Sinha — Actor. Publicly supported the movement during the protest weeks.
• Mammootty — Actor. Among the Malayalam film figures who publicly backed the students.
• Tovino Thomas — Actor. Publicly backed the students, part of the wider response from the Malayalam film industry.
• Hanumankind — Rapper. Among the hip-hop artists who performed at or attended the protest sites.
• KRSNA — Rapper. Part of the hip-hop contingent present at the protests.

Student organisations

The protests were, at their core, a student movement responding to the NEET-UG paper leaks, and the organised student groups behind it had their own named leaders on the ground.

• Neha Bora — National president, AISA (All India Students’ Association). One of six AISA members who joined the hunger strike alongside Wangchuk.
• Aishe Ghosh — Joint secretary, SFI (Students’ Federation of India). Among the student leaders organising at Jantar Mantar.
• Adarsh M. Saji — President, SFI. Helped coordinate the student organisations behind the protest.

Context: what these people were actually showing up for

It helps to know what the protests were about before reading the list above as a roll call of names. The demonstrations ran from 6 June to 25 July 2026 at Jantar Mantar in Delhi, originally sparked by NEET-UG paper-leak allegations and demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. CJP itself had been founded a few weeks earlier, on 16 May 2026, by Abhijeet Dipke — a day after Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s remark describing young activists as “cockroaches and parasites of society,” which the movement then reclaimed as its name. Pradhan resigned on 25 July 2026, citing moral responsibility, which is roughly when the wave of activist, film, music, and student support described above reached its peak visibility in the press.

That timeline matters for reading the list correctly. Wangchuk’s fast and hospitalisation, the actors’ appearances at Jantar Mantar and Freedom Park, Thunberg’s speech in London, and the student leaders coordinating on the ground all happened within this same six-to-seven-week window, while the protest was actively running and its outcome was still uncertain. None of it was a retrospective show of support after the fact — every act on this page happened while there was still something at stake.

Why this page doesn’t count political endorsements the same way

Several opposition politicians, across more than one party, publicly praised CJP’s demands from a podium or in official statements during the protest weeks. This page deliberately does not list them alongside the names above, and it’s worth explaining why rather than quietly leaving them out.

Endorsing a set of demands in a speech or a press statement costs a politician very little — it’s a normal, low-friction way for an opposition figure to align themselves with a popular cause. Fasting for 26 days, getting hospitalised for it, or standing in a crowd that faced tear gas and lathi charges is a different order of commitment entirely. Treating a podium endorsement as equivalent to physically showing up at Jantar Mantar would flatter both kinds of support by pretending they’re the same thing, when they plainly aren’t. Keeping the two apart is what makes this list trustworthy: everyone named above did something specific enough to check, and no one is padding the list simply because they said something supportive in public.

It’s also worth being explicit about what this page is not claiming. None of the people named above are CJP members, officeholders, or spokespeople for the movement unless stated — Dipke, Das, and Ranka hold those roles; everyone else contributed one documented act of solidarity. None of them have endorsed this website, its content, or the chai-support button elsewhere on this page. This is an independent, unofficial explainer, not a production of the Cockroach Janta Party.

Sources

This page draws on international press coverage of the 2026 Jantar Mantar protests, including CNN’s on-the-ground reporting from Delhi, NPR’s coverage of the movement’s origins and growth, and ABC News Australia’s reporting on CJP’s early surge in public support. Full citations are linked at the top of this page.