Tavleen Singh writes: Hope in a cockroach

No creature on this planet terrifies me as much as a cockroach. The terror this insect invokes in me is so great that I find it hard to say its name in conversation and usually spell it out letter by letter. My wicked younger sister exploited my dread to her advantage when we were small children. First, full disclosure. No creature on this planet terrifies me as much as a cockroach. The terror this insect invokes in me is so great that I find it hard to say its name in conversation and usually spell it out letter by letter. My wicked younger sister exploited my dread to her advantage when we were small children. Her superpower was to somehow seek out cockroaches everywhere so she could wave them in my face and watch me flee for my life. A scar on my left knee is from one of these episodes when I ran so fast that I fell down a flight of stairs. Last week for the first time ever, I began to take a fresh look at this creature with new eyes and with politics in mind. I have spent the past two weeks in a Swiss village and so it was only when I got back to Mumbai that I discovered that a nascent political outfit that calls itself the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) has caused such incredible political panic that the mighty Home Minister of India asked ‘X’ to kill its account. This order was duly obeyed and within hours it had reinvented itself under a new handle. In the shortest time the CJP has managed to garner so much social media attention that it is has more followers than the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress put together. When I consulted my new best friend Claude about this, it confirmed that, ‘As of May 21, 2026, the Cockroach Janata Party’s Instagram account had over 16 million followers — a staggering 1,400% increase in a single day — along with 200,000 followers on X.’ It is no wonder then that when I posted on X about the CJP, my timeline filled up instantly with abuse from the BJP’s two-rupee trolls. I was warned that I seemed to be supporting a Pakistani plot. That it was funded by the CIA, that Abhijit Dipke who started the CJP was one of Arvind Kejriwal’s proteges. That he believed in violent revolution and reservations for Dalits and opposed the abrogation of Article 370. These charges were accompanied by personal attacks on me that questioned my patriotism. I am used to being trolled so I mention this only to make the point that it is time that our ruling party stopped being so thin-skinned. Under the leadership of Narendra Modi, this party has gone from strength to strength, and he personally is regularly described as the most popular political leader in the world. So, what is there to fear from an entity that has barely been born and that seems more like