If you have typed "who is founder of cockroach janta party" or "cjp founder" or "who created cockroach janta party" into Google in the last few days, you have ended up at a wall of news clips referring to him in passing, a Wikipedia stub that does not yet exist, and a handful of Reddit threads arguing about whether he is "actually" anyone of consequence. This page is the long answer. It is who he is, what he did before CJP, what he did in the 24 hours that mattered, and how he thinks about the word "founder" itself.
Who founded CJP — the direct answer
The Cockroach Janta Party was founded by Abhijeet Dipke on 16 May 2026. The act of founding, as Abhijeet has described it on the X handle and in the published founder's note, was a chain of four small decisions taken between roughly midnight and noon Indian Standard Time on the morning of the 16th: register the domain cockroachjantaparty.buzz; publish a one-page version of what later became the 5-point manifesto; open the X account @cockroachjantaparty; and post a single founding tweet ending with the line "Main Bhi Cockroach". Everything that followed — the one-lakh-member tide in 72 hours, the Mahua Moitra retweet, Kirti Azad joining as honorary member, the news cycle — happened after those four decisions had already been taken alone.
So if the question is "whose hands signed off on CJP existing?", the answer is Abhijeet Dipke. If the question is "who runs CJP?" — that is a different question, and the honest answer (covered in our leadership structure piece) is that nobody single-handedly does. CJP is deliberately not a one-man party.
Abhijeet Dipke at a glance
The essential bio fits in a single paragraph, but the texture matters.
- Age: 30 (born 1995).
- Education: Currently a public-relations student at Boston University, in the United States. He moved to Boston in late 2024.
- Earlier political work: Aam Aadmi Party social media volunteer, 2020–2023, in the Delhi unit's outreach team. Not a paid staffer; not a candidate; a digital volunteer.
- Public presence: small, scattered Twitter activity before May 2026; almost no Indian press coverage prior to the founding of CJP.
- Current role at CJP: founder. He has been clear that he does not want titles like "president", "national convenor" or "supremo".
Two things are worth dwelling on here. First, his location: Abhijeet is founding an Indian political movement while physically in Boston. He has called this an advantage — he is not within reach of any state machinery — and a constraint: he cannot, for now, walk into a panchayat office in Bardhaman to file a candidate. Our Boston University profile explores both sides. Second, his age: at 30 he is, by Indian political standards, a generation younger than the people he is criticising. The full biography page walks through his upbringing and the years between the AAP volunteer days and the Boston move.
The AAP social-media volunteering years (2020–2023)
Between 2020 and 2023, Abhijeet was a social-media volunteer for the Aam Aadmi Party. He has described those three years, repeatedly, as "the apprenticeship in everything I now don't want to do". The phrase is doing a lot of work. The AAP, he has said, taught him three useful things — how a digital-first political operation pays for itself, how to write copy that travels on WhatsApp, and how to run a volunteer pyramid without burning out the base. It also taught him three things he was determined to avoid in his own movement: a personality-cult around a single founder; a heavy dependence on a few large donors; and a strategic decision to fight only the highest tier of elections.
That third lesson is the one most people miss. CJP's manifesto ends with a deliberate plan to contest at panchayat level first, not the Lok Sabha. Abhijeet has framed this as a direct correction of what he sees as AAP's strategic mistake. We have written about the AAP comparison in detail in CJP vs AAP; the short version is that he is using the AAP playbook for digital outreach and explicitly inverting it for electoral strategy.
Why he founded CJP — the 24 hours after the CJI remark
The founding cannot be understood without the trigger. On 15 May 2026, during a Supreme Court hearing on a fake-law-degree petition, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant remarked from the bench that "these people are like cockroaches". The remark, captured on the live-stream and clipped within minutes, went viral across X, Reddit and WhatsApp through the night. By the morning of the 16th, "cockroach" had become the most-tweeted Hindi-script word in India. Read the full breakdown in our cockroach remark explainer.
Abhijeet, by his own account, woke up at around 4 a.m. Boston time on the 16th, saw the clip on X, and registered the domain inside an hour. The founder's note he later published — annotated in cjp-founders-note-decoded — is explicit about the emotion: "If the highest court will describe Indians as cockroaches, we will organise as cockroaches. The label is no longer an insult; it is the membership card." The slogan "Main Bhi Cockroach" comes directly from that one sentence.
Within 72 hours, the party had crossed one lakh members through the free, no-fee join page. The mood, captured on the day, is summarised in our May 2026 timeline. The point worth flagging here is that the founding was reactive — to the cockroach remark — and only became programmatic in the days that followed, as the manifesto was written and the honorary members agreed to be named.
What 'founder' means for a movement that isn't ECI-registered
Abhijeet is careful with vocabulary, and the word "founder" is one he uses precisely. CJP is, as of publication, not registered with the Election Commission of India — see our piece on whether CJP is technically a political party. That means there is no statutory document anywhere that names him "national president" or "general secretary". The title "founder" describes a historical fact (he started the thing) without claiming an executive office over a still-forming volunteer base.
This is also why he refuses to be called "leader". The full argument is in leader of the Cockroach Janta Party, but the one-line version is this: the founder believes that calling a 30-year-old PR student "the leader" of a one-lakh-strong movement is both inaccurate and dangerous — inaccurate because honorary members Mahua Moitra and Kirti Azad bring more political weight than he does, and dangerous because it sets up the same personality cult he watched up close during the AAP years. The companion question of "who owns CJP" has an even simpler answer: nobody.
What he does claim is editorial responsibility for the manifesto text, the no-sponsors pledge, the refusal-to-merge stance, and the public messaging on the X handle. Beyond that, he is one volunteer among a hundred thousand. If you want to read the work in his own words, the founder's note is the place to start; if you want to join the swarm, the membership form is free.