New Delhi, September 24, 2026
The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) on Thursday issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar: resign, or face protests at Jantar Mantar and a nationwide agitation.
The satirical youth movement, which exploded online earlier this year and later took its fight to the streets, has now trained its fire on the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. CJP alleges that more than 13 crore names have been struck off voter lists under the exercise — and that the right to vote is being quietly taken away.
Founder Abhijeet Dipke called the CEC “the biggest traitor in the country,” arguing that reports of a split inside the three-member Commission prove the process has gone off the rails.
“Democracy means the people choose the government,” Dipke said. “Since Gyanesh Kumar became Chief Election Commissioner, the government has been deciding who is allowed to vote and who is not.”
He called “vote theft” the gravest threat to Indian democracy. After the BJP was held to 240 seats in the last Lok Sabha election, he claimed, the political mood shifted and regional parties grew stronger — only for large deletions to follow. He alleged that about 50,000 votes were deleted from Mamata Banerjee’s seat and 40,000 from Arvind Kejriwal’s Delhi constituency. Those figures are the party’s claims and have not been independently verified in this report.
CJP leader Saurabh Das struck a more urgent note. “The system has to change. But how does it change? You have only one tool — the vote. If even that is snatched away, how will anything change?” he asked. “People across the country are asking us: does our vote even matter anymore?”
Das said every young Indian should read the latest reports on SIR. “Through SIR you have deleted more than 13 crore voters. A report came yesterday. Another has come today. In the last 10 months, 14 objections have been recorded inside the Election Commission.”
Those numbers track a recent investigative account that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi formally objected at least 14 times over 10 months — on one day, four times — to SIR-related decisions they say were taken without their knowledge. Draft rolls in 30 states and Union Territories have, according to that reporting, dropped more than 13 crore names.
SIR is the Commission’s intensive clean-up of electoral rolls. Opposition parties have long alleged that the drive is being used to knock out migrant, poor and minority voters. The poll panel has maintained that the exercise is meant to remove duplicates, deceased electors and people who have moved. The Supreme Court has, in related hearings, flagged mechanical notices, mass exclusions and the need for stronger safeguards.
CJP itself began as a joke. On May 16, 2026, a day after Chief Justice Surya Kant’s courtroom remarks likening some unemployed youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites,” Dipke — a 30-year-old communications strategist from Maharashtra and a former AAP social-media volunteer then studying in the United States — asked online: what if all the cockroaches came together? The name parodied the BJP. Within weeks the Instagram account had tens of millions of followers. By June the “cockroaches” were at Jantar Mantar, demanding the education minister’s resignation over exam-paper leaks. The joke had become a movement.
It is now betting that voter rolls will be the next flashpoint. Whether the 48-hour clock produces a resignation — almost certainly not — or a fresh round of street protests is the question for the next two days. The Election Commission has not issued an immediate public reply to the ultimatum.
