The most common question CJP gets in its first week is also the simplest: who actually made this thing? The answer is one name. This piece walks through who Abhijeet Dipke is, the 18 hours that produced CJP, the tools he used, why he did it alone, and the volunteer team that joined him before the second sunrise.
The single creator — Abhijeet Dipke
The Cockroach Janta Party has one creator: Abhijeet Dipke, 30, originally from Nagpur, currently enrolled in a graduate Public Relations programme at Boston University. He is the sole named founder on the leaders page, the domain registrant on the .buzz WHOIS record, the author of the first manifesto draft, and the person who first posted the words "Main Bhi Cockroach" online on the night of 15 May 2026.
His background — laid out in detail on the LinkedIn profile piece — explains why CJP exists in the form it does. Three years as an AAP social-media volunteer between 2020 and 2023 taught him how Indian political content moves online. A PR degree at one of the better American journalism schools taught him how to frame a message before it can be misframed for him. The combination is unusual, and it shows in the speed with which the party went from a tweet to a movement.
The 18-hour creation timeline (15 May night → 16 May morning)
The CJI's remark broke around 14:00 IST on 15 May 2026. Within the next 18 hours, Dipke did everything that now sits on this website. Reconstructed from his own public statements and the timestamps of the original tweets and registry records:
- 15 May, 14:30 IST. Dipke sees the CJI clip on X via a reshare from a friend in Delhi.
- 15 May, 17:00 IST. He posts the first version of "Main Bhi Cockroach" as a standalone tweet from his personal account. It crosses 1,000 retweets by midnight.
- 15 May, 23:45 IST. He registers cockroachjantaparty.buzz via a budget Indian registrar. The .com, .in and .org variants are already taken, parked or sitting with squatters; .buzz costs less than ₹400.
- 16 May, 02:30 IST. First version of the cockroach logo finalised in Figma — six legs, two antennae, the silhouette inside a saffron-green-blue tricolour border. Read the logo decoded for the symbolism.
- 16 May, 04:00 IST. The 5-point manifesto's first draft is written. The manifesto explainer covers each point in detail.
- 16 May, 06:00 IST. The landing page goes live on .buzz. The X handle @cockroachjantaparty is registered.
- 16 May, 08:30 IST. First reshare of the .buzz site by a popular Mumbai-based political meme account; momentum begins compounding.
- 16 May, 17:00 IST. Membership count crosses 1,000. Twelve volunteers DM the X handle asking how they can help.
That 27-hour window is what the full May 2026 timeline calls "Day Zero of Day One". Everything since has been growth on top of that scaffolding.
The tools he used
One of the under-discussed facts of CJP's launch is how little it cost. Dipke has been transparent about the stack:
- Domain. A .buzz top-level domain — < ₹400 from a budget Indian registrar. Read the website explainer for why .buzz and not .com.
- Logo. Figma's free tier. The cockroach silhouette is a heavily simplified open-licence vector with the antennae redrawn.
- Landing page. A static HTML template, hosted on the same registrar's free Lite plan. The current site is more elaborate; the launch version was a single page.
- Join form. Google Forms — replaced by the current custom form on /join within four days, once volume justified it.
- Social. A free X account, plus a placeholder Instagram and Telegram presence run by community moderators.
- Press kit. A Notion page, later migrated to the current /press route.
Total cash outlay to launch: under ₹500. The no-sponsors pledge made that constraint a virtue, not a hardship.
Why he created it alone
Dipke has said in two separate public posts that the decision to launch solo, in those exact 18 hours, was made for three reasons:
- Speed. A committee would have spent three weeks deciding on a name. A single person can register a domain at 23:45 the same night.
- Ownership of tone. Satirical political branding only works if the satire is tight. A team would have softened the "cockroach" framing to make it more "palatable"; one person could keep the joke sharp.
- Personal risk. "If this fails I want it to be my fault." A solo founder with a clear name on the WHOIS record cannot dilute responsibility — which mattered for credibility in a country full of anonymously-run "movements".
The volunteer team that joined within 48 hours
By 18 May morning, CJP had a 12-person volunteer team, all unpaid, all coordinated through a single Discord server. The composition gives a sense of how the movement scaled past its founder:
- Three moderators — running the X handle and DM responses through the first 72-hour spike.
- Two designers — refining the logo, building the first batch of merch mockups for the shop.
- Two writers — drafting the blog explainers; one of them eventually wrote the Hindi explainer.
- One press liaison — answering the wave of media queries about who Dipke was.
- Two state-chapter coordinators — kicking off the Bengaluru and Pune chapters that would later seed the rollout.
- Two researchers — feeding the team source material on satirical political parties globally and historical comparators in India.
By 21 May 2026, that group has grown past 60 active volunteers, and honorary MPs Mahua Moitra and Kirti Azad have lent their names to the cause. But the founder line on the .buzz site is still, intentionally, a single name. See Dipke's LinkedIn piece for the formal side of the story and how CJP got 1 lakh members in 72 hours for the growth chapter.