Cockroach Janta Party Gives the CEC 48 Hours. One of Its Three Demands Deserves a Longer Look

The youth outfit whose sit-in ended with an education minister’s exit wants Gyanesh Kumar gone in 48 hours. The ultimatum has no force, but its call to change how the EC is picked is already in court.

On **24 September 2026**, at a press conference in New Delhi, **Abhijeet Dipke**, founder and national convener of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), gave Chief Election Commissioner **Gyanesh Kumar** 48 hours to resign. If he did not, Dipke said, the CJP would launch a nationwide agitation and then return to Delhi for an indefinite sit-in. “Jantar Mantar 2.0 will definitely happen,” he said.

The deadline falls on Saturday. Nothing in law obliges the CEC to respond, and nobody expects him to. The CJP holds no seats, is not registered as a political party, and has no formal role in any process that could remove a constitutional officer.

Dismissing it outright would still be a mistake, for two reasons. The outfit has shown this year that it can keep a protest going long enough to matter. And its three demands, stripped of the rhetoric around them, range from the unworkable to the genuinely important. The most important one reached the Supreme Court the day before the press conference.

The CJP began as a joke. On **16 May 2026**, after Chief Justice of India Surya Kant made a courtroom remark likening some unemployed young people to cockroaches (he later said he meant people with fake degrees), Dipke posted on X: “What if all cockroaches come together?” He was 30, a communications professional and former Aam Aadmi Party social media strategist then studying in Boston.

Within days, the parody party had a website, a manifesto and millions of Instagram followers. The government withheld its X account in India on 21 May. By then the movement had latched on to a real grievance: the cancellation of the NEET-UG medical entrance exam after a paper leak. It demanded the resignation of Education Minister **Dharmendra Pradhan**, who dismissed the protesters as a “B-team of disruptive elements”.

The CJP’s first sit-in at Jantar Mantar began on 6 June. On **25 July**, as a 37-day protest continued, Pradhan resigned. The CJP withdrew “in good faith”, and Dipke told supporters not to make him a hero. The outfit still describes itself as a pressure group rather than an electoral party. A Haryana lawyer has separately applied to register the name with the Election Commission; Dipke has not endorsed that move.

That record is why the new ultimatum has drawn attention. “Jantar Mantar 2.0” is a deliberate reference to a campaign that ended with a Union minister leaving office.

The trigger was the disclosure, a day earlier, that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had objected on record at least 14 times in ten months to decisions issued in the Commission’s name during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls. The Commission maintains that all its decisions were unanimous.

Dipke, flanked by co-conveners **Saurav Das** and **Ashutosh Ranka**, went much further than the documents. He called Kumar “the biggest anti-national of this country” and “the biggest threat to India’s democracy”, and accused him of undermining voter rights. “This is not democracy, this is autocracy,” he said. When millions of names can be removed from draft rolls, he argued, the burden lies on the Commission to show that every deletion is lawful, transparent and open to review.

The outfit said more than 13 crore names had been dropped from draft rolls across 30 states and Union Territories, which it put at about 13 to 14 per cent of the electorate at the draft stage. Ranka alleged that the SIR was being used as “a weapon” and that some BJP-ruled states had linked welfare benefits to it. The CJP also launched a campaign it calls “Election Commission Thik Karo”, or Fix the Election Commission.

The first demand is that Kumar resign, that criminal proceedings begin against him and anyone who directed him, and that any such directives be disclosed.

This is the least achievable. A CEC can step down voluntarily by writing to the President, but no one can make him. Removal requires a motion passed by both Houses of Parliament on grounds of proven misbehaviour or incapacity, the same procedure used for a Supreme Court judge. No CEC has ever been removed. The opposition tried in March, with notices signed by 130 Lok Sabha and 63 Rajya Sabha MPs; the Speaker and the Rajya Sabha Chairman refused to admit them on 6 April.

Prosecution runs into a statutory barrier. Section 16 of the 2023 law governing the Commission bars courts from hearing civil or criminal cases against a serving or former CEC or Election Commissioner for acts done in the course of official duty. A challenge to that immunity is pending in the Supreme Court, which has declined to suspend it. Separately, an advocate has asked the Attorney General for consent to begin criminal contempt proceedings against Kumar, arguing that sidelining his colleagues defied the court’s rulings on collective functioning. That request is at a preliminary stage.

In short, the first demand works as pressure, not procedure. Its most useful element is the least noticed one: disclosure. If anyone outside the Commission shaped the contested orders, the file record would show it.

The second demand bundles four asks: put all upcoming elections on hold, halt the SIR, restore the rolls to their **January 2025** status pending verification, and have the Supreme Court take custody of all SIR files or hand them to an independent, judicially supervised inquiry.

The freeze is the hardest to square with the Constitution. Legislatures have fixed five-year terms, and the Commission’s core duty under Article 324 is to hold elections on time. Courts have been reluctant to halt polls once the process is under way, and a blanket freeze would leave states without elected legislatures.

Rolling back to January 2025 sounds tidy but carries costs of its own. That was the roll in force before the SIR began in Bihar, and reverting would wipe out every change since, the good with the bad. Bihar alone added about **21.5 lakh** new voters through Form 6 during its revision. Young people who turned 18 in the meantime would drop off, and deaths and duplicate entries already removed would return, along with any wrongly deleted voters.

Custody of records is the strongest piece. Keeping disputed evidence out of the hands of the body whose conduct is in question is ordinary practice. Courts have already done a narrower version of it this year: in June, the Calcutta High Court ordered that EVMs, VVPATs and counting-hall CCTV footage from Bhabanipur be preserved while an election petition is heard. The Supreme Court is also hearing several SIR cases. On 22 September, it described notices sent to more than 33 lakh Delhi voters as apparently “machine-generated” and asked the Commission for a status report. A targeted order to preserve SIR decision files, rather than a seizure of everything, is well within what courts routinely do.

The call for an independent inquiry overlaps with what the wider opposition wants: a probe monitored by the Supreme Court. Courts have ordered monitored investigations in other matters, but turning one on the internal decision-making of the Election Commission would be unusual, and the Commission is likely to argue that Article 324 gives it sole charge of the rolls. A narrower review of specific orders, such as the Form 6 change or the Bengal appeals, would stand a better chance.

The third demand is to repeal the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act, 2023, and replace it with a law that brings civil society into the selection process.

This is the only demand that would matter regardless of what happens to Gyanesh Kumar, and it has a long pedigree. The Tarkunde Committee in 1975, the Dinesh Goswami Committee in 1990 and the Law Commission’s 255th report in 2015 all recommended that commissioners be chosen by a panel of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice of India. The Second Administrative Reforms Commission in 2007 proposed a wider panel that also included the Law Minister and the Deputy Chairman of the Rajya Sabha.

In March 2023, the Supreme Court adopted the three-member model as an interim arrangement. Nine months later, Parliament replaced the Chief Justice with a Union Cabinet minister, giving the government two of the three votes. On **23 September**, a two-judge bench split on procedure but asked the Chief Justice to set up a Constitution Bench to rule on the law. Justice Dipankar Datta wrote that the change prima facie hands the government an “effective veto” and fails the “perception test”.

The CJP’s version, with civil society participation, is vaguer than any of these models. India does have a template for something broader: the Lokpal selection committee includes the Prime Minister, the Lok Sabha Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition, the Chief Justice or a judge he nominates, and an eminent jurist. Whether a similar design suits the Election Commission is a fair debate. The CJP has not yet said who would speak for civil society or how they would be chosen.

What is established is that two commissioners objected repeatedly and that the Commission says its final decisions were unanimous. What is not established is that Kumar set out to delete voters to help the ruling party, which is what the CJP alleged.

Calling a constitutional officer “anti-national” adds no evidence. It also invites the other side to dismiss the substance along with the insult. The BJP has already argued that internal disagreement shows a healthy institution rather than a captured one. Those who want the notes examined would do better to point to the specific actions the commissioners called unauthorised, and ask who took them.

The CJP’s press conference landed in the middle of a much larger opposition push. The Congress, AAP, the Trinamool Congress, the RJD, the DMK and others have demanded Kumar’s removal, an inquiry monitored by the Supreme Court and a pause in the SIR. Rahul Gandhi held his own press conference the same afternoon, calling on Kumar to resign and “turn approver”.

What the CJP adds is a different constituency: young, largely online citizens who are not mobilised by party machines. Its NEET campaign showed that such a group can sustain street pressure for weeks. Its risk is the flip side of its strength. A movement built on memes can move fast, but it can also flatten the difference between a question that deserves an answer and an accusation that cannot be proved.

**Is the Cockroach Janta Party a registered party?**

No. It calls itself a pressure group and has said it does not plan to contest elections.

**Can a protest force a CEC out?**

Not legally. Only Parliament can remove a CEC, by a special majority in both Houses on grounds of proven misbehaviour or incapacity.

**What is the January 2025 roll?**

The voter list in force before the SIR began in mid-2025. Reverting to it would undo every addition and deletion made since.

**Is the appointment law already being challenged?**

Yes. Petitions by the Association for Democratic Reforms, Jaya Thakur, Lok Prahari and others have been pending since early 2024, and the case now awaits a Constitution Bench.

**Did Dharmendra Pradhan resign because of the CJP?**

He resigned on 25 July while the CJP’s sit-in was still under way, and the outfit counts it as its biggest win. The government has not linked the two.

**Saturday’s deadline.** Whether the CJP announces dates and cities for its agitation, and whether it can draw crowds outside Delhi as it did during the NEET protests.

**Police permission.** Whether Delhi Police allow a fresh, open-ended sit-in at Jantar Mantar.

**Opposition uptake.** Whether the Congress or the INDIA bloc formally adopts the appointment-law demand, and whether any party puts forward a concrete alternative selection panel.

**The Constitution Bench.** Whether Chief Justice Surya Kant constitutes the bench on the 2023 Act, and when hearings begin.

**The files.** Whether any court orders SIR decision records to be preserved or produced, the narrow and workable version of the CJP’s custody demand.

**Tone.** Whether the CJP keeps its focus on documented decisions or leans further into accusations it cannot prove. That choice will decide whether it widens its support or hands critics an easy dismissal.

**Note on perspective**: {{Based on on-record statements at the CJP’s 24 September press conference, Supreme Court proceedings, the text of the 2023 Act and past electoral-reform reports, as of 25 September 2026. The piece weighs each demand on its legal and practical merits, separately from the rhetoric and the identity of the group making it.}}