Twelve years ago when the India Against Corruption movement was at its peak I was working at LinkedIn and I watched my colleagues pour their salaries into the funding and go to Ramlila Maidan and stand behind Anna Hazare and I was one of maybe two people on the entire team who did not contribute a single rupee not because I was against the idea of holding people accountable but because I was convinced that this was a political movement and nothing real would come out of it and I remember being called cynical and the friend who argued with me the most about it has not spoken a word about politics in the twelve years since while the country has been pushed further down the drain and neither have any of the others who gave so enthusiastically. I think about them every time a new wave of outrage appears because the pattern is so familiar with the surge of energy and the viral slogans and the quiet fade and the system continuing exactly as before with the same politicians making the same mistakes and the same scams and the same silence.

So when the Cockroach Janta Party showed up I dismissed it the same way and I assumed it was just another hashtag trend with unemployed youth calling themselves cockroaches and making memes and riding the next viral hype until the algorithm moved on to something else and I have seen too many of these moments to get excited about another one. But then I watched Abhijeet Dipke speak and I read what the movement was actually asking for and I realized I was wrong because the message underneath the satire was something I have believed my whole adult life which is that we do not need a change of party and we do not need a better partner and we do not need another savior on a stage because none of that matters until accountability is in place. Every single one of us who has held a job knows that if we do our work badly we get called out and we have to fix it and the reason this country is rotten is that the political class and the bureaucrats who work for them have been making one mistake after another and running one scam after another for decades with absolutely no consequences at all and it does not matter which party is in power because this lack of accountability cuts across every party in every state at every level and they all know they can get away with it because they have been getting away with it for so long that accountability sounds like a foreign concept.

What I respect about the cockroach movement is that they are not promising to save anyone and they are not pretending to be heroes and they are not asking for power and the cockroach is the perfect symbol because a cockroach has no ego and a cockroach does not care about being celebrated or recognized and a cockroach just survives and keeps coming back and keeps doing what needs to be done no matter how many times it gets stepped on. They said it themselves that the cockroach is about resilience and the refusal to go away and the willingness to exist in conditions that should be unlivable and I think that is exactly what the accountability movement in this country has been missing because every other movement I have seen started with grand ambitions and ended with people in power or people who became the very thing they fought against. I do not know if the CJP will actually get anything done and I have been burned too many times to be optimistic about anything in this country but I hope they prove me wrong again because the system needs something that does not fade and does not compromise and does not care about being liked and just keeps showing up until the job is done. That said, I am still skeptical of Sonam. His support for splitting of a state and then downgrading them to be union territories is still fresh in my mind.

Tell me if you think the cockroaches will survive. I am @troysk704.