Claims Used To Discredit Cockroach Janta Party Don’t Hold Up

The Cockroach Janta Party launched on May 16 after Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, while dismissing a petition, called unemployed youth who had turned to activism "cockroaches" and "parasites of society". Founder Abhijeet Dipke put up a Google Form. Within days, the website had ten lakh registrations, the Instagram page had crossed 20 million followers, and the X account had over two lakh.

Then things started going wrong.

The X account was withheld in India. The website went offline globally. Claims spread that the majority of its Instagram followers were from Pakistan. Meanwhile, Dipke alleged death threats and hacking attempts.

Two weeks in, the movement is fighting on several fronts at once. We looked at the claims and the evidence behind each.

The Follower Count

As the CJP's Instagram page surged past 20 million followers, overtaking the reigning Bharatiya Janata Party’s count, political leaders and users on X began claiming that 90% of the followers were from Pakistan, implying the numbers were fake or manufactured.

Decode found no credible data backing this.

Dipke shared a screen recording of the page's Instagram analytics showing 94% of the audience as Indian.

Independent verification either way is limited.

"There is no reliable way to determine where Instagram followers are from," said Sundeep Narwani, co-founder of Narrative Research, an AI research Lab. Unlike YouTube, Instagram does not make geographic audience data publicly available.

Decode checked two third-party tools, MoDash and HypeAuditor, which work by scraping user bios rather than accessing platform data. Both showed different data but still pointed to a predominantly Indian audience—over 95% in one estimate, over 75% in another.

Neither supports the Pakistan narrative.

The X Account

Five days after launch, the CJP's X account was withheld in India "in response to a legal demand."

The account remains accessible outside India.

What legal demand triggered the withheld order has not been made public. Dipke has moved the Delhi High Court challenging the block.

The Website

This is where the most contested claims are.

The CJP website went offline globally on Saturday. Dipke accused the Indian government. Within hours, users on X had an alternative theory: the party had taken it down itself. Screenshots of DNS errors, server responses, and a "clientHold" domain status were shared as evidence.

The censorship narrative, they claimed, was a farce. The technical record doesn't support that reading.

The central claim rested on the domain showing a "clientHold" status in public WHOIS records. Users argued this proved an internal shutdown. Researchers Decode spoke to said that it doesn't.

"This status can only be applied by the domain registrar, in this case, Hostinger," said Narwani. "It's not something a website owner can switch on themselves."

Technology researcher Karan Saini noted that a clientHold can also be triggered by unmet verification requirements, but the timing rules that out. The domain was registered May 16, and registrars typically allow a 15-day grace period, which wouldn't expire until May 31.

Could the owner have requested the hold?

Technically, yes. But it doesn’t make sense practically.

If someone wants to take their site offline, the simplest way is to just turn off hosting or delete the content. The process is quick and reversible.

On the other hand, a clientHold status wipes the domain off the internet entirely. The site then does not open anywhere in the world, and even related services like email can stop working. Reversing it can take time and involves dealing with the registrar.

“It is not a practical way to shut your own website,” Narwani explained. “This status is usually applied in cases involving legal, policy or security issues, and not as a voluntary switch-off.”

The other signals cited as evidence were similarly misread.

The global shutdown claim—that government action would only block the site within India— isn’t entirely accurate. As Narwani explained, while authorities often restrict access locally through internet providers, they can also go a step further by issuing legal orders directly to domain registrars.

The NXDOMAIN error—meaning the domain doesn't exist—was taken as proof the owners had deleted their own DNS records. Refuting the claim, researchers explained that when a registrar puts a domain on clientHold, it removes its DNS records.

DNS records are the basic routing instructions that tell the internet where a website lives. Once those are stripped, the domain stops working everywhere in the world. When that happens, NXDOMAIN is exactly the kind of error one sees.

A "403 Forbidden" response that briefly appeared, shared as evidence of tampering, is in fact consistent with a suspension in progress. Narwani explained that when a registrar begins the suspension process but hasn't completed it, traffic can briefly route through the registrar's own systems, producing exactly this kind of response.

Each piece of evidence that was being read as proof of an inside job aligns more closely with what a registrar-level suspension actually looks like.

So, what could have triggered the registrar to act?

According to Narwani, there are a few possibilities: a legal order, a significant security incident, or non-payment. The latter two seem unlikely here, as domains are usually paid for at least a year, and abuse attacks of that scale are rare for the site in question.

That leaves the legal and regulatory route.

“Domain registrars function as intermediaries,” said Saini. “If they operate in India, they are expected to comply with lawful orders. Not doing so can have consequences.”

Courts in India have previously made it clear that platforms offering such services must follow local laws if they want to continue operating in the country. In a 2023 Delhi High Court case dealing with fraudulent websites, the bench explicitly warned registrars that compliance is not optional, even for companies based outside India.

Hostinger is headquartered in Lithuania but has a registered presence in India with local infrastructure, which brings it within the scope of Indian regulations.

The website came back online on May 25.

Two pleas have been filed in the Supreme Court—one seeking action over the alleged commercial use of CJI Kant's courtroom remarks, another seeking a CBI probe into the campaign. A bench led by CJI Kant said there was no "grave urgency" and the petitions would be examined in due course.

The Pakistan follower claim has no credible evidence behind it. The inside-job theory of the website takedown doesn't hold up technically. What triggered the registrar to act—and who, if anyone, ordered the X withheld—remains officially unexplained.