What Are the Five Demands of the Cockroach Janta Party?

A Manifesto Built To Be Quoted

When Abhijeet Dipke registered the Cockroach Janta Party on 16 May 2026 — the day after Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s “cockroaches and parasites” remark — he didn’t publish a party platform padded with the usual promises about infrastructure and GDP. He published five sentences, each built like a punchline with a policy hidden inside it. Read fast, they sound like a meme account roasting the establishment. Read slowly, each one names a specific, real gap in Indian law or practice, and proposes a fix so blunt it forces the reader to ask why the actual fix has never been tried.

That’s the design. CJP is not registered with the Election Commission of India, fields no candidates, and describes itself as a “pressure coalition” rather than a conventional party — so the five demands function less like a governing agenda and more like a diagnostic. Here’s what each one is actually pointing at.

1. No Rajya Sabha Seat For A Retiring Chief Justice

“If the CJP comes in power, no Chief Justice shall be granted a Rajya Sabha seat as a post-retirement reward.”

This is the narrowest and most surgical of the five demands, and probably the easiest to actually implement — it needs no constitutional amendment, just a norm the ruling party of the day chooses not to exercise. The target is a specific pattern: a sitting Chief Justice knows, in the final stretch of their tenure, that a Rajya Sabha nomination or a gubernatorial posting is a plausible reward for a government-friendly final year of judgments. Whether or not any individual judge is influenced by that prospect, the incentive structure exists the moment the possibility does. CJP’s demand doesn’t touch judicial appointments, tenure, or the collegium system — it touches only what happens after the robe comes off, which is exactly why it’s framed as a simple bar rather than a reform package.

2. Arrest The Election Commissioner Under UAPA For Deleted Votes

“If any legit vote is deleted, whether in a CJP or opposition-ruled state, the CEC shall be arrested under UAPA, as taking away voting rights of citizens is no less than terrorism.”

This is the demand designed to make people flinch, and that’s the point. The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act is India’s principal anti-terror law, and civil liberties groups have long criticised how liberally it gets applied to student organisers, journalists, and protesters — while it is essentially never invoked against an official for an administrative failure. Read as satire rather than policy, the joke is precise: it takes the exact legal hammer normally reserved for people the state wants to silence and points it, for once, at the state’s own machinery. Strip away the UAPA framing and there’s a real, unglamorous gap underneath — today, a wrongful deletion from the electoral rolls carries essentially no personal consequence for the officials responsible, however many citizens it disenfranchises.

3. 50% Women’s Reservation, Not 33%, Effective Immediately

“Women shall receive 50% reservation, not 33%, without increasing the strength of Parliament. Additionally, 50% of all Cabinet positions shall be reserved for women.”

The comparison this demand is making is to the Women’s Reservation Act passed in 2023, which set a 33% quota for women in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies — but tied its start date to a future delimitation exercise following the next census, pushing implementation years past the law’s own passage. CJP’s version does two things differently: it raises the number to parity, and it refuses the delay, applying the quota to the seats that already exist rather than waiting on a census and a redrawing of boundaries with no fixed date. The Cabinet clause goes further still — a 50% reservation of Cabinet posts by gender has no precedent anywhere in Indian law, which is what turns this from “a bigger version of an existing law” into a demand with no existing legislative analogue to point to.

4. Cancel Media Licences Owned By Ambani And Adani

“All media houses owned by Ambani and Adani shall have their licences cancelled to make way for truly independent media. Bank accounts of Godi media anchors shall be investigated.”

Two industrial conglomerates, Reliance (Ambani) and the Adani Group, control a large share of India’s television news reach through channel ownership and acquisitions over the past decade. “Godi media” is the slang that grew up around this — a play on “godi” (lap), describing outlets seen as sitting in the government’s lap rather than reporting on it. The demand to cancel licences outright is where the satire is doing the heaviest lifting: revoking a broadcaster’s licence over its ownership structure or editorial stance would run straight into press-freedom protections, and CJP’s own manifesto elsewhere calls for “truly independent media,” which sits awkwardly next to state action against specific owners. The real, unresolved question underneath the joke is one India’s broadcast regulation has never adequately answered — how much of the national news audience one owner, or one pair of owners, should be allowed to reach.

5. A Twenty-Year Bar On Political Defection

“Any MLA or MP who defects from one party to another shall be barred from contesting elections — and from holding any public office — for a period of 20 years.”

India already has an anti-defection law — the Tenth Schedule, added to the Constitution in 1985 — but it is riddled with workarounds that have become routine tools of state-level politics: a legislator resigns and recontests on a new ticket, a bloc of MLAs times a “two-thirds split” to qualify for the law’s own merger exception, or a member simply accepts disqualification, sits out a by-election, and wins the seat back anyway. Each route costs a defecting legislator, at most, a few months out of office. CJP’s twenty-year bar is long enough to exceed most Indian political careers outright, which is precisely the arithmetic it’s attacking — a horse-trading operation that currently costs a bought legislator a single by-election stops working the moment the payoff disappears for two decades.

Why These Five, And Not Some Other List

It’s worth noting that CJP is not the only fan or satire site publishing a “five demands” list — some circulate joke variants with different numbers or entirely different demands. The list above is the one published on the movement’s own official site, cockroachjantaparty.org, and it’s worth reading as a set rather than five unrelated complaints. Two target the judiciary and the election machinery — the referees. Two target representation and media concentration — who gets heard, and by whom. One targets the mechanics of how legislatures are bought and sold. Read together, the five demands aren’t really a governing programme; they’re a list of the exact pressure points a party with genuine power could lean on without passing a single new law — which is also why, as a “pressure coalition” rather than a contesting party, CJP has no obligation to ever implement any of them, only to keep asking why nobody else has.