"Who is the leader of the Cockroach Janta Party?" is the second most-asked question about CJP — only behind "what is CJP?" itself (covered in our beginner's guide). It is also the question CJP is most reluctant to answer in one name. The reluctance is not coyness; it is a stated design choice. This piece walks through what the structure actually is, who occupies which role, and why CJP refuses to do what every recent Indian start-up party has done — appoint a one-and-only "supreme leader".
Founder vs Leader — CJP's deliberate distinction
The most important sentence to start with is this: in CJP's own vocabulary, "founder" and "leader" are not synonyms. The founder's note, published on day three after the founding, draws the line very deliberately. The founder, in that note, is described as "the person who took the first irreversible action". The leader, in the same note, is described as "the role we have not filled, and may never fill in the way you expect". Read together, the two definitions are saying that founding is a one-time historical fact, while leadership is a continuing political role — and CJP has separated the two by intention.
This is unusual. Most Indian parties collapse the two roles into one person and one title — "Bharat Ratna founder-president", "national convenor", "supremo". CJP's argument is that doing so creates a single point of failure: when the leader is co-opted, jailed, bought out or otherwise neutralised, the movement is finished. Splitting "founder" off from "leader" is the first structural step in keeping CJP cockroach-shaped — distributed, resilient, hard to step on.
Abhijeet Dipke as founder, not leader
Abhijeet Dipke is, in every public document, referred to as the founder of CJP. He is 30, a PR student at Boston University, and a former AAP social media volunteer from 2020 to 2023. The full bio is in Abhijeet Dipke Biography; the founding chronology is in Who is the Founder of CJP.
What he is not: the "leader", "national president", "national convenor", "general secretary" or "supremo" of CJP. He has refused all of these titles on the X handle. His own framing — "I lit the match, I am not the flame" — has become a quote regularly recycled in press coverage. Practically, what Abhijeet does is hold editorial responsibility for three things: the manifesto text on the website, the official X account @cockroachjantaparty, and the no-sponsors pledge. Beyond those three, he has no executive authority over volunteers, no power to expel members, and no formal role in setting state-level priorities. Those decisions sit with the volunteer council described below.
The honorary MPs — Mahua Moitra & Kirti Azad
CJP has two honorary parliamentary members. Both came in the first week of the movement, both remain elected MPs of the Trinamool Congress, and both have endorsed but not formally joined CJP.
- Mahua Moitra — TMC MP from Krishnanagar (West Bengal). She retweeted the founding tweet within 18 hours of it going up, an event covered in detail in Mahua Moitra and CJP. Her endorsement carried the slogan "Main Bhi Cockroach" into the parliamentary press gallery.
- Kirti Azad — TMC MP from Bardhaman-Durgapur. His public letter accepting honorary CJP membership is reproduced in Kirti Azad CJP timeline. He has been the most visible elected face at CJP-aligned events in the first two weeks.
"Honorary" is doing some work here. Neither MP has resigned from the TMC. Neither will contest as a CJP candidate in the next general election. What they bring is reputational endorsement — the kind that lets a 5-day-old movement be taken seriously in Lutyens' Delhi — and a working channel between CJP and a sitting parliamentary party. They are not, however, in the chain of command. They do not write CJP policy. The 5-point manifesto was drafted before either of them joined.
The volunteer council & state coordinators
Below the founder and the honorary members sits the working layer of CJP — the volunteer council. As of the third week of May 2026, the council is small (around twelve people, mostly under thirty-five) and rotates by mutual consent rather than election. Five of the seats are reserved by stated convention for women, in line with the manifesto's 55% women's reservation demand. The council meets weekly on a video call and publishes minute-summaries on the website's press page.
Below the council, CJP is organising a thin layer of state coordinators. These are unpaid volunteers nominated by local members and confirmed by the council. As of publication, ten states have a named coordinator; the founder has said he wants every state and union territory covered before the first panchayat candidate is filed (the panchayat-first electoral strategy is unpacked in Is CJP a political party). State coordinators do not speak for CJP nationally; they coordinate local sign-ups, panchayat-candidate scouting and merch logistics, and feed problems back to the council.
And then — the most important layer — there is everybody else. One lakh members in 72 hours, and counting. The join page is free. The digital membership card has no fee. The base is not, in any meaningful sense, "led" — it acts on the published manifesto and on the X account's daily prompts. If the volunteer council were to vanish tomorrow, the base would still exist. This is the cockroach shape, on purpose.
Why CJP refuses to centralize leadership
The simplest version of the argument is that the founder has watched two recent Indian start-up parties — one famously named the "Aam Aadmi Party" — succeed at outreach, plateau at strategy, and then collapse around the unmanageable expectations placed on a single charismatic leader. He has said as much in interviews. The longer version is that CJP's stated commitment to the no-sponsors pledge and the refusal-to-merge stance only works if no single person can be bought, threatened or flattered into changing course. A distributed structure is, in this reading, the precondition for an incorruptible one.
It is also the reason CJP, despite being asked, has no "owner". We have written a separate piece on this — Who Owns the Cockroach Janta Party — because the ownership question is subtly different from the leadership question, and worth a full answer of its own. The short version: no shareholders, no founder-CEO, no transferable title deed.
If you want to see the structure in action, the easiest way is to sign up, watch the X handle for a week, and read the press page updates as they roll in. The structure is on display in the way the movement does — and doesn't — speak.