<p>A week ago, I was chastising my twenty-year-old daughter for never having gotten into “good trouble”: she had not protested, had not marched, had never fought the man. At her age, I already had a respectable rap sheet and threats of school expulsion for refusing to be a brick in the wall, à la Pink Floyd. The joke, it turns out, was on me. She was in the process of buying $CJP, the memecoin launched by anonymous actors riding on the coattails of the viral Cockroach Janta Party (CJP).</p>.<p>The revolution, it seems, has a ticker symbol. The $CJP token unironically evokes Pink Floyd’s 1973 song ‘Money’ from The Dark Side of the Moon:</p>.<p>‘Money, get away. Get a good job with good pay and you’re okay. Money, it’s a gas. Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.’</p>.The cockroach has survived extinction events. Can it survive Indian politics?.<p>The press, national and international, has been asking the obvious questions. Can this go offline and become a real political party? Is it merely slacktivism, all noise, no action? Commentators have drawn parallels to Nepal’s Gen Z uprising, to Sri Lanka, to Bangladesh. I’m not interested in rehearsing those arguments. What troubles me is whether CJP has already become something else entirely: a pump-and-dump scheme disguised as generational awakening. And here, the story takes a turn that the draft manifestos and the #MainBhiCockroach hashtags do not quite prepare you for.</p>.<p>‘Money, get back. I’m all right, Jack, keep your hands off of my stack. Money, it’s a hit. Don’t give me that do goody-good bullshit’.</p>.<p>Now, we have to note that the $CJP token was not issued by Abhijeet Dipke or the party, but by anonymous third parties on Pump.fun, a permissionless Solana platform. Dipke has publicly distanced himself from the token. The $CJP coin is thus not an institutional social token but a speculative memecoin issued by opportunists who recognised that a viral political moment was, above all else, a market.</p>.<p>This means that the movement’s very success – its leaderless, decentralised, meme-driven virality – rendered it instantly exploitable. The brand was so loosely held that anyone could monetise it before the founders had even decided what they wanted to do with it. My daughter, it turns out, was not trying to buy into a revolution, but into a market.</p>.<p>‘Money, it’s a crime. Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie. Money, so they say is the root of all evil today. But if you ask for a raise it’s no surprise that they’re giving none away’.</p>.<p>To acquire $CJP, you need disposable income, access to cryptocurrency exchanges, a smartphone capable of running wallet applications, and the financial literacy to navigate a speculative jungle. This immediately excludes the millions of poor Gen Z youth who are equally betrayed by the current economy, equally disillusioned with the political status quo, and equally deserving of a voice in whatever movement claims to represent their generation.</p>.<p>The CJP’s rhetoric speaks to precarity, to being left out to dry, to a generation that has been promised everything and delivered nothing. The party’s five-point manifesto is, for all its satirical packaging, a serious indictment of institutional failure. Yet the speed with which its brand was colonised by a memecoin reveals a weakness in the movement’s architecture: its symbols are powerful, but loosely defended. The very people who most need a movement – the unemployed youth in tier-two and tier-three cities, the daily-wage workers in their twenties struggling to survive, the rural young and especially the socially marginalised who lack access to formal banking, let alone crypto wallets – are locked out from the start.</p>.<p>The CJP now stands at a fork in the road. It can either become a genuine electoral force – requiring offline organising, coalition-building with the poor, and material demands backed by sustained pressure – or it can remain a digital spectacle for the laptop class, a meme that briefly captured attention before fading into the archives.</p>.<p>Occupy Wall Street, which I witnessed from Zuccotti Park in the autumn of 2011, fizzled because it had no concrete demands and no mechanism for translating energy into power. The CJP has demands – specific, institutional, and largely sound – but it risks fizzling because its brand has been captured by forces it cannot control. A movement that cannot protect its own name from anonymous crypto opportunists is not yet ready to take on the State.</p>.<p>This revolution will not be televised. It will be tokenised.</p>.<p><strong>(The writer, as Dr Jekyll, is a Professor of Philosophy, Politics and Law, author and editor of over 20 books and counting, and as Mr Hyde, one of India’s top-ranking Ironman triathletes.)</strong></p>.<p><em>Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.</em></p>
<p>A week ago, I was chastising my twenty-year-old daughter for never having gotten into “good trouble”: she had not protested, had not marched, had never fought the man. At her age, I already had a respectable rap sheet and threats of school expulsion for refusing to be a brick in the wall, à la Pink Floyd. The joke, it turns out, was on me. She was in the process of buying $CJP, the memecoin launched by anonymous actors riding on the coattails of the viral Cockroach Janta Party (CJP).</p>.<p>The revolution, it seems, has a ticker symbol. The $CJP token unironically evokes Pink Floyd’s 1973 song ‘Money’ from The Dark Side of the Moon:</p>.<p>‘Money, get away. Get a good job with good pay and you’re okay. Money, it’s a gas. Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.’</p>.The cockroach has survived extinction events. Can it survive Indian politics?.<p>The press, national and international, has been asking the obvious questions. Can this go offline and become a real political party? Is it merely slacktivism, all noise, no action? Commentators have drawn parallels to Nepal’s Gen Z uprising, to Sri Lanka, to Bangladesh. I’m not interested in rehearsing those arguments. What troubles me is whether CJP has already become something else entirely: a pump-and-dump scheme disguised as generational awakening. And here, the story takes a turn that the draft manifestos and the #MainBhiCockroach hashtags do not quite prepare you for.</p>.<p>‘Money, get back. I’m all right, Jack, keep your hands off of my stack. Money, it’s a hit. Don’t give me that do goody-good bullshit’.</p>.<p>Now, we have to note that the $CJP token was not issued by Abhijeet Dipke or the party, but by anonymous third parties on Pump.fun, a permissionless Solana platform. Dipke has publicly distanced himself from the token. The $CJP coin is thus not an institutional social token but a speculative memecoin issued by opportunists who recognised that a viral political moment was, above all else, a market.</p>.<p>This means that the movement’s very success – its leaderless, decentralised, meme-driven virality – rendered it instantly exploitable. The brand was so loosely held that anyone could monetise it before the founders had even decided what they wanted to do with it. My daughter, it turns out, was not trying to buy into a revolution, but into a market.</p>.<p>‘Money, it’s a crime. Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie. Money, so they say is the root of all evil today. But if you ask for a raise it’s no surprise that they’re giving none away’.</p>.<p>To acquire $CJP, you need disposable income, access to cryptocurrency exchanges, a smartphone capable of running wallet applications, and the financial literacy to navigate a speculative jungle. This immediately excludes the millions of poor Gen Z youth who are equally betrayed by the current economy, equally disillusioned with the political status quo, and equally deserving of a voice in whatever movement claims to represent their generation.</p>.<p>The CJP’s rhetoric speaks to precarity, to being left out to dry, to a generation that has been promised everything and delivered nothing. The party’s five-point manifesto is, for all its satirical packaging, a serious indictment of institutional failure. Yet the speed with which its brand was colonised by a memecoin reveals a weakness in the movement’s architecture: its symbols are powerful, but loosely defended. The very people who most need a movement – the unemployed youth in tier-two and tier-three cities, the daily-wage workers in their twenties struggling to survive, the rural young and especially the socially marginalised who lack access to formal banking, let alone crypto wallets – are locked out from the start.</p>.<p>The CJP now stands at a fork in the road. It can either become a genuine electoral force – requiring offline organising, coalition-building with the poor, and material demands backed by sustained pressure – or it can remain a digital spectacle for the laptop class, a meme that briefly captured attention before fading into the archives.</p>.<p>Occupy Wall Street, which I witnessed from Zuccotti Park in the autumn of 2011, fizzled because it had no concrete demands and no mechanism for translating energy into power. The CJP has demands – specific, institutional, and largely sound – but it risks fizzling because its brand has been captured by forces it cannot control. A movement that cannot protect its own name from anonymous crypto opportunists is not yet ready to take on the State.</p>.<p>This revolution will not be televised. It will be tokenised.</p>.<p><strong>(The writer, as Dr Jekyll, is a Professor of Philosophy, Politics and Law, author and editor of over 20 books and counting, and as Mr Hyde, one of India’s top-ranking Ironman triathletes.)</strong></p>.<p><em>Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.</em></p>
