Abhijeet Dipke thinks he’ll be arrested when he lands in Delhi on June 6. He’s flying back anyway.
The Cockroach Janta Party founder announced on Sunday that he’s returning from Boston to lead a peaceful protest at Jantar Mantar — and to deliver a demand 800,000 students have already signed: Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation over the NEET paper leak. “I will most likely be arrested at the airport,” he told reporters. “How long can we live in fear?”
Two weeks ago he was a 30-year-old grad student at Boston University running a satirical movement named after a judge’s insult. Today CJP has 22 million Instagram followers — more than the BJP’s official handle. Now he’s the closest thing India has to a face for the NEET-UG paper leak fallout, and the government has spent the last fortnight trying to keep the Cockroach Janta Party offline.
The Crackdown Created the Comeback
CJP’s X account was withheld under Section 69(A) on May 21. The website went down on May 23, hours after it started the Pradhan petition. The Delhi High Court declined to order the X account unblocked. Dipke received death threats on WhatsApp telling him to shut down the party or be killed in the US.
Each suppression amplified him. The harder the state tried to silence him, the more followers signed up to be cockroaches with him. By definition, the cockroach survives.
What the Supreme Court Did Not Fix for NEET
The same day Dipke announced his return, the Supreme Court refused to shift the June 21 NEET-UG re-exam to computer-based format. 2.28 million students will retake the test in the same pen-and-paper system that was already leaked. The government’s fix: deploy the Indian Air Force to transport question papers.
That’s the gap the Cockroach Janta Party founder is walking into. The exam format hasn’t changed — another education policy the government pushed through without asking students. The minister hasn’t resigned. The petition has 800,000 signatures and counting. Mahua Moitra, Shashi Tharoor, and Akhilesh Yadav have endorsed the demand from three different parties.
A judge called him a cockroach on May 15. On June 6 he’ll be at Jantar Mantar, asking who is actually the parasite.