What began as a tweet has snowballed into one of India’s most unexpected political phenomena. Abhijeet Dipke, who spoke to Newslaundry from Boston, is the unlikely founder of the Cockroach Janata Party. Within a week, this satirical movement amassed over a million registered members and about 500,000 signatures on a petition calling for the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

In an interview with Manisha Pande, Dipke recounted how it all started. When Chief Justice Surya Kant remarked that unemployed youngsters who turn to media, social media, and RTI activism are “like cockroaches” who “start attacking everyone,” Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old Boston University graduate, fired back with a tongue-in-cheek tweet: what if all the cockroaches came together?