Does CJP have a physical card?

No. The CJP membership card is digital only — delivered as a PDF and a PNG by email the moment you sign up. There is no posted physical card. This is a deliberate choice driven by the no-sponsors pledge (no money to print and ship lakhs of plastic cards) and a climate-and-cost calculation. Members are free to print their digital card at home if they want a physical copy.

Is the CJP membership card free?

Yes. The card is free. Membership is free. There is no joining fee, no card-issuance fee, no annual renewal fee, no premium tier. CJP's no-sponsors pledge rules out monetising membership in any form. The only paid items on the site are merch in the /shop, and those are optional.

How do I download my CJP membership card?

Two ways. First, on the confirmation screen immediately after you submit the join form, there is a 'Download card' button — click it. Second, the same PDF and PNG arrive in the welcome email within 30 seconds of signing up. If you lose access to either, you can re-download by entering your email at cockroachjantaparty.buzz/join — the form recognises existing members and lets you re-issue the card.

Can my CJP card expire?

No. The card is lifetime. There is no renewal date printed on it. The only situations in which a member ID is deactivated are: (1) the member requests it via the /contact page, or (2) the member is found to be using the card to impersonate another individual. Both are rare. Otherwise the card you download on day one is the card you keep for the life of the party.

CJP Membership Card — Free, Digital, Lifetime: How It Works (2026)

One of the most-asked questions in the CJP inbox this week is some variant of: "what does the card look like?", "is it free?", "is it physical?", "how do I download it?". This post answers all of them at once. The card design, the contents, the download flow, and the deliberate decision not to ship a physical card — explained as plainly as possible.

What the card looks like

The CJP membership card is a single landscape rectangle, designed for both screen display and home printing on plain A4. The dominant colour is the amber of the party brand (#b8860b); the background is a subtle paper-texture cream. The cockroach silhouette logo sits in the top-left, and the CJP wordmark in the top-right. Underneath, in three lines: your name, your member ID, and your home state. On the back of the PDF (page 2 if you print double-sided): the full 5-point manifesto in 12pt type, signed at the bottom by the founder.

The card is intentionally not a credit-card aspect ratio. It is 16:10, sized to fit naturally as a phone-wallpaper background or a Twitter/X header crop without trimming the logo. Members who post their card on social — and a surprising number do — find the wider crop reads better than the standard ISO/IEC 7810 ID size would.

What's on the card

Five pieces of information are printed on the front, plus one QR code. Nothing else. The card is designed to be shareable on social media without leaking anything sensitive.

Full name. The name you entered on the CJP form. Editable once every 90 days through your profile link.
Member ID. Format CJP-2026-XXXXX. Five-digit serial, padded with zeros until we cross 99,999, after which it expands to six. By 20 May, the IDs had crossed CJP-2026-140000.
Home state. What you picked in the form dropdown. Used to allocate you to a state chapter — see the state chapter rollout. For NRIs, this prints the country instead.
Joined-on date. The day you submitted the form. Printed as DD MMM YYYY (e.g. "16 May 2026"). Early-joiner dates have become a low-stakes status symbol in CJP-X circles.
Member tier. "Member" for 18+, "Supporter" for under-18 sign-ups, "Honorary" for the two MPs (Mahua Moitra, Kirti Azad).
QR code. Resolves to your public profile page on cockroachjantaparty.buzz — which shows only your name, member ID, state and joining date. No email, no phone, no IP. Designed for use at offline meet-ups so people can swap CJP handles by phone scan.

The card does not print: your email, your phone number, your address, your Aadhaar, your PAN, your date of birth, or anything else CJP doesn't ask for in the first place. The form does not collect those fields; the card cannot print what doesn't exist.

How to download / save to wallet

There are three ways to get your card onto your device, and they all work.

Immediate download. Right after you submit the join form, the confirmation screen shows your card with a "Download PDF" and "Download PNG" button. One click each.
Welcome email. Within 30 seconds of submitting, you receive a welcome email from newsroom@cockroachjantaparty.buzz with the card attached in both formats. Check spam if you don't see it — office mail systems sometimes filter the first delivery.
Re-download anytime. Lost the card? Switched phones? Go back to /join, enter the same email you signed up with, and the form recognises you and offers a "Re-issue card" button. No password, no OTP — the email match is enough.

For Apple Wallet / Google Wallet pass support, the rollout is on the 12-month roadmap but not live yet. For now, the cleanest mobile workflow is to download the PNG and add it as a contact-card image, or use the iOS Files / Android Drive option to keep it in offline storage.

Why no physical card

The decision not to issue a physical card is a deliberate one, and one of the most asked-about choices CJP has made. Three reasons, in descending order of weight.

The no-sponsors pledge. Printing and posting 1.4 lakh plastic cards across India would cost roughly ₹35–40 per member, which adds up to ₹50–60 lakh in materials and India Post alone. The no-sponsors pledge rules out the kind of corporate underwriting that would normally pay for that. Charging members to recover the cost would break the "membership is free" rule.
Climate cost. Plastic ID cards have an embodied carbon footprint of roughly 50g CO₂e each, plus the courier emissions. At 1 lakh+ members and growing, that's a measurable amount of avoidable emissions for a card most people would put in a drawer.
Speed. A digital card is in your hands 30 seconds after sign-up. A physical card would take 2–3 weeks to print and ship. For a movement whose first 72 hours moved at the speed they did, that's a fundamentally wrong cadence.

Members who want a physical card can print the PDF at home on a colour printer; the back-of-card manifesto is designed to read clearly on plain A4. Several state chapters are also experimenting with bulk-printing laminated cards at meet-ups for members who attend in person — that's a state-chapter initiative, not a national programme, and is paid for by the attendees themselves.

Card design for honorary members

The two sitting MPs who have endorsed CJP — Mahua Moitra and Kirti Azad — carry an "Honorary" tier card with the same design but a small gold border and an extra line printed underneath the member ID: the constituency they represent. The cards are otherwise identical to a regular member's. The decision to keep them visually almost the same was deliberate — it underlines the Main Bhi Cockroach slogan: nobody, including the MPs, gets a fancier card.

Two clarifications on honorary cards: (1) they are not endorsements of TMC by CJP, or vice versa; the MPs continue to sit in Parliament as TMC members. (2) The honorary card does not give voting rights in any future internal CJP poll — that follows the same one-member-one-vote rule as a regular card.

That's the card, end to end. Free, digital, lifetime, downloadable in 30 seconds, printable at home if you want a paper copy, and visually identical whether you signed up on day one or whether you're an MP. If you don't have one yet, the join form is the only place that issues one. And if you want to see who else has signed up — see CJP followers and members for the public counter breakdown.