A political movement's slogans are its sheet music. The Cockroach Janta Party — at four days old — already has more than most parties acquire in their first decade. Four lines, in particular, have done the structural work of turning a CJI remark into a national chant. Read them in order, and you can almost hear the verses build.
Verse 1 — Main Bhi Cockroach
The opening line. Three words, two languages. Main means I; Bhi means too; Cockroach is borrowed from English the way Indian Hindi has always borrowed when no domestic word will do. The result: I too am a cockroach. In our slogan explainer, we trace how the line travelled from a courtroom, through a tweet, into a t-shirt, and onto the lapels of two sitting Members of Parliament.
Three things make it singable. It scans well in any Indian accent. It rhymes the speaker into solidarity with the slur. And it asks no permission — you can wear it whether you are 19 or 49. The Main Bhi Cockroach tee exists because the line was already there.
Verse 2 — Secular. Socialist. Democratic. Lazy.
The official CJP tagline. It is a deliberate inversion of the Preamble's four-word identity — Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic — with the last word swapped for the one the CJI used. We unpack the wordplay in detail, but the short version is this: the line accepts the framing of an entire generation as lazy and refuses to apologise for it. It does to "lazy" what Verse 1 does to "cockroach".
"Secular. Socialist. Democratic. Lazy."
— CJP tagline, on every footer of the community site
Like all good political phrases, it works at two reading levels at once. Read straight, it is satire. Read sideways, it is a constitutional argument: that being "lazy" is not the disqualification political elders pretend it is, and that the country's framing document already covers a lot of secular socialist democratic ground that the lazy can legitimately occupy.
Verse 3 — We Don't Get Employment, We Get Organized
The line that turns the slur into a political identity. The CJI's remark named two things in one breath — unemployment and attack. The slogan owns the first and reframes the second. If we don't get jobs, we get organised. We don't squash; we organise. The fork-in-the-road structure is what makes it work: the listener is given a problem and an action in the same sentence.
You will find this line on the official CJP tees and — more importantly — on volunteer call posters across at least three cities now. The line has migrated from t-shirts to volunteer recruitment briefs, which is the litmus test of a slogan that is actually doing work.
It also tracks the manifesto's fifth demand — political literacy and civic infrastructure for the young — almost word-for-word. Where the manifesto is administrative, the slogan is mnemonic. See the political-literacy explainer for the policy version.
Verse 4 — We Don't Squash Ideas
The closing line. The cockroach metaphor naturally invites the squash-it response — and CJP has used the inevitability of that response as the slogan's punchline. We don't squash ideas is, at the same time, a defence of dissent (we don't shut you down), a critique of institutional behaviour (you tried to shut us down and look how that worked out), and an internal value (we don't shut each other down either).
The hoodie that carries the line exists — see the "We Don't Squash Ideas" hoodie story — and the slogan has been adopted as a soft moderation principle by at least a few of the CJP-aligned community spaces online. Mainly: argue, don't ban. It is also doing the polite institutional work of telling judges, ministers and editors that the next remark will be answered with a slogan, not a contempt petition.
The structural pattern across all four
Read together, the four verses share a single grammar. Each takes a hostile framing — cockroach, lazy, unemployed, squash — and turns it into the speaker's own banner. The technical name for this is reclaiming, and there is a long Indian tradition of it: from Dalit reclaiming of identity markers to feminist reclaiming of slurs that need not be named here. What CJP has done is import the technique into youth politics at scale, and arrange four reclaimed words into something that scans like a verse.
The slogans are the manifesto, in shorter form
Notice how each line maps to a piece of the 5-point manifesto:
- Main Bhi Cockroach — the identity layer. Every other slogan rides on this one.
- Secular Socialist Democratic Lazy — the values layer. Maps to the constitutional framing.
- We Don't Get Employment, We Get Organized — the youth-political-literacy layer. Maps to manifesto point 5.
- We Don't Squash Ideas — the institutional layer. Maps to the manifesto's broader stance on dissent and accountability.
The slogans are not decorations on a manifesto. They are the manifesto wearing a t-shirt.
Variants you'll hear in the next month
Expect a few remix lines to surface. The most common already in circulation:
- Cockroach Hoon, Vote Doonga. — turning the identity into a voter-registration push.
- Tu Bhi Cockroach. — the call-and-response form for meetups.
- Lazy, Loud, Logged In. — a tertiary slogan used by online volunteers.
If the verses resonate, the simplest path is the obvious one: read the manifesto, take the card, or wear a line on a tee. The lyrics are free; the chorus is yours.