We, The Sprayed
“We are for democracy, by democracy” and apparently against anyone who shows up to it dressed as a cockroach.
Let us begin where all great national conversations now begin: with an insult, taken literally, and a hashtag, taken seriously. The Chief Justice, in a moment of courtroom poetry, reached for the humble Periplaneta americana to describe a certain breed of unemployed youth the kind that drifts into journalism, activism, RTIs, and other low-paying forms of asking questions.
He clarified later, of course, that he meant only the fraudulent ones, the fake-degree types. A distinction the nation received with its usual calm: it founded a political party.
Within a week, the Cockroach Janata Party had ten million followers, a Google form, and a mascot in sunglasses.
Within two, it had what every Indian movement eventually acquires whether it wants it or not a side.
Akhilesh posted “BJP v CJP.” Mahua approved. Prashant Bhushan nodded from the wings. And somewhere, a strategist who once worked for AAP and now studies in Boston watched his joke get a press cycle, an opposition endorsement, and a withheld X account, all before it could grow up.
So let me oblige. Who funds this? one is meant to ask, in bold. Who really benefits when ten million young Indians are taught to find the State funny? Note and the discerning reader has already noted the founder’s AAP past. Note the suspiciously professional
“spontaneity.” Note that a movement claiming “zero sponsors” has the production values of a Series A startup.
This, dear reader, is not anger. This is anger, packaged anti-national sentiment with a content calendar, handed to a generation too burnt out to check the label.
You see how easy that was?
I wrote three paragraphs of it without breaking a sweat, and half of you were nodding by the second one. That is the trick I want to show you, because it is the only thing in this entire saga worth taking seriously. Not the roach. Not the Court. The reflex.
Because the moment the CJP appeared, nobody in this country was permitted to simply find it funny. It had to mean something. It had to be For Us or Against Them. The right saw a foreign trained operative laundering opposition talking points through memes. The left saw a generational uprising in antennae.
And both were so busy assigning it a jersey that nobody stopped to notice the genuinely strange thing: that a country of 1.4 billion people, half of them under thirty, produced a joke about being unemployed and could not, for even one news cycle, let it remain a joke.
This is the actual national condition, and it is funnier and sadder than any cockroach. We have no neutral. We have no NOTA that means none, sincerely rather than protest vote, please count.
We have no coalition that isn’t a hostage situation in a hotel. We have no institution left that someone, somewhere, hasn’t already decided is secretly working for the other team.
The weather report would trend as propaganda if it predicted rain in the wrong state.
And so even this a movement whose entire pitch is “we are too tired to have an agenda” gets handed one.
The youth said: we are lazy, we are broke, we are chronically online, leave us alone. And the nation’s response, from every direction at once, was: but who put you up to it?
MAATR5CRUX
runs every piece for-and-against. It is our whole religion. We will argue a thing, then turn around and argue its opposite with equal conviction, because we believe the reader can hold two ideas without choosing a team at the door.
And I will tell you what we have learned doing it: in India, the hardest thing to publish is not a controversial opinion. It is a neutral one. There is no market for
“this is just a bit complicated.” There is only the spray bottle, and the eternal question of which insects it is pointed at this week.
So here is my verdict, for those keeping score. The cause is good. Young Indians are unheard, under-employed, and entitled to laugh about it. The cockroach is a fine mascot resilient, adaptable, unkillable, broke.
But the disease the spray claims to kill was never the roach.
It is us. The ones who could not see ten million tired kids make one joke without immediately asking whose side the joke was on.
We’ve built a country where the last forbidden act is to not pick a side.