The sudden rise of the “Cockroach Janata Party” across Indian social media over the last few days has revealed something important not only about politics, but also about attention and the changing texture of public life itself. Meme pages, Instagram reels, ironic political branding, and digitally networked outrage rapidly transformed what initially appeared to be another internet joke into a much larger cultural phenomenon. Within days, follower counts surged dramatically, comparisons with Bangladesh and Nepal began circulating online, and many observers started interpreting this as evidence of a new form of decentralised youth politics emerging across South Asia. Yet what interests me is not simply the emergence of these formations, but the kind of political subjectivity digital culture itself is beginning to produce.What strikes me is this contradiction: younger generations remain emotionally hungry for collective belonging. Yet they inhabit societies where public life has weakened, where organisational cultures have eroded, and where individualisation has become structural. Under such circumstances, digitally synchronised outrage becomes psychologically powerful because it temporarily relieves fragmentation and isolation. This is partly why meme-based political formations often generate emotional intensity far beyond what their organisational structure might suggest. The crowd, however temporary, provides relief from atomisation.Even in Tamil Nadu, the rise of Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam reflects aspects of this transformation. Fandom, mediated personality, digital participation, and political emotion are becoming increasingly difficult to separate.Part of what makes the “cockroach” symbol so powerful is that it already carries a deep literary and political history. Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis famously begins with Gregor Samsa waking up transformed into a monstrous insect. Kafka never explicitly identifies the insect as a cockroach, but popular imagination has long associated it with one. The symbolism matters because Kafka’s insect was never merely grotesque. It represented alienation, humiliation, invisibility, and the condition of becoming socially disposable within modern life. The moment Gregor could no longer function productively within the logic of work and social obligation, he ceased to be fully recognisable as human.Perhaps that is partly why the metaphor resonates today, even unintentionally. Beneath the humour and irony surrounding the meme lies a generation increasingly experiencing exhaustion, precarity, invisibility, and emotional fragmentation. The cockroach survives hostile environments. It persists despite repeated attempts at elimination. It becomes a symbol not simply of disgust, but of survival under conditions where many people increasingly feel politically unheard and socially exhausted. That emotional identification matters because contemporary politics increasingly functions not through ideological depth alone, but through symbolic immediacy and affective recognition.A man browses the Instagram account of the Cockroach Janta Party on social media, in Siliguri, Thursday, May 21, 2026. The account has reportedly surpassed the BJP in Instagram followers. Photo: PTI.Digital culture reorganises the very temporality of political lifeAt the same time, what we are witnessing cannot be separated from the larger architecture of reel culture itself. Politics today increasingly unfolds through short emotional bursts: reels, memes, viral clips, outrage cycles, and rapid symbolic identification. The issue is not merely that attention spans are becoming shorter. The deeper issue is that digital culture reorganises the very temporality of political life. Serious politics historically required slowness, continuity, repetition, memory, and long-term emotional investment. It required people to remain attached to institutions and collective structures even after emotional intensity faded. Reel culture increasingly pushes in the opposite direction. Participation becomes organised around immediacy, stimulation, novelty, and constant emotional turnover.Somewhere, a theory of change also stopped working: provide information, rational critique, scientific education, and people will naturally become secular, egalitarian, democratic, and environmentally conscious. But politics has never operated through rationality alone. Fear, humiliation, aspiration, loneliness, resentment, belonging, and the search for meaning shape political behaviour just as deeply.This creates a deeper political problem. The more social life becomes organised around rapid emotional circulation, the harder it becomes to sustain durable forms of collective engagement. Political participation increasingly resembles synchronised reaction rather than organised commitment. Millions can suddenly feel emotionally aligned around a symbolic image, a meme, a controversial statement, or a common enemy within hours. Social media platforms are extraordinarily effective at generating this temporary sense of collective belonging among otherwise highly individualised subjects. But synchronisation is not the same thing as solidarity. One produces intensity; the other requires endurance and emotional investment.This distinction matters because contemporary politics increasingly operates through emotional acceleration. Algorithms reward outrage because outrage sustains engagement. Visibility depends upon circulation. The result is a political culture where stimulation often becomes more important than continuity itself. The crowd appears suddenly, moves intensely, trends briefly, and then disperses toward the next emotional cycle. Even political dissent increasingly risks becoming emotionally charged, and dependent upon algorithmic visibility rather than long-term organisational continuity. The political subject gradually becomes conditioned toward reaction itself.This is why I remain cautious about celebratory comparisons with Bangladesh and Nepal. Even if the socio-political conditions in Bangladesh and Nepal differed in important ways, the eventual trajectory has not necessarily been fundamentally different. In both cases, moments of decentralised political energy were eventually absorbed into more organised and centralised political formations. The swarm rarely remains decentralised for long. The deeper issue is not whether digitally synchronised mobilisations can emerge. They clearly can. The more difficult question is whether contemporary societies still possess the emotional and institutional foundations necessary to sustain collective political life beyond moments of emotional intensity.The crisis, therefore, is not simply political; it is also civilisational. Public life itself has weakened over time. The spaces through which people once experienced slower and more durable forms of collective existence – unions, campuses, neighbourhood associations, reading circles, political organisations, even long conversations – have steadily deteriorated. Increasingly, societies are producing individuals who remain emotionally hungry for belonging while lacking the structures necessary to sustain it. The meme crowd temporarily fills that void. It creates the feeling of participation and emotional connection in otherwise fragmented social worlds. But participation without continuity can quickly become another cycle of emotional exhaustion.‘What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master’At another level, there is also a profound contradiction at work here. The very platforms through which decentralised energies circulate are themselves among the most centralised technological systems in human history. People increasingly desire decentralisation emotionally while inhabiting infrastructures structurally dependent upon algorithmic control and monetised attention. The anti-establishment swarm emerges inside systems designed not for democratic continuity, but for stimulation, circulation, and engagement.This is also where Jacques Lacan’s famous observation during the May 1968 French student uprisings becomes relevant again. At a moment when many intellectuals imagined the protests as radically emancipatory, Lacan responded with a deeply unsettling line: “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.” His point was not simply cynical. Revolt against one symbolic order does not automatically abolish structures of authority. More often, desire reorganises itself around new forms of belonging and symbolic attachment. The common enemy stabilises identity. Opposition creates emotional coherence. But once movements approach governance or long-term organisation, contradictions begin to emerge.The danger, then, is not that these digital swarms lack energy. The energy is unmistakably real. The deeper problem is that contemporary digital culture increasingly conditions people toward immediacy rather than endurance, circulation rather than commitment, and reaction rather than sustained political imagination. Kafka’s insect survived, but it also remained trapped within a world incapable of recognising its humanity. That may ultimately be the more unsettling metaphor for our political moment. Beneath the irony, humour, and meme circulation lies a generation searching for visibility and dignity inside systems that continuously fragment attention while transforming politics itself into an endless cycle of emotional acceleration.Dr. Soumyajit Bhar is Senior Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean, Admissions and Outreach, School of Liberal Studies, BML Munjal University, Gurugram.