Where the epithet came from.
It begins with one oral observation in open court, on 15 May 2026, from the sitting Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, while hearing pleas on senior-advocate designations. The next day, he said he had been misquoted. The remark and the clarification are a matched pair, and they belong together; both are reproduced verbatim below. They are the origin of the name, not an editorial weapon.
“There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don't get any employment and don't have any place in profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, some of them become RTI activists, some of them become other activists, and they start attacking everyone…and you people file contempt petitions!”
— Chief Justice of India Surya Kant · oral remark in open court · 15 May 2026
The next day, 16 May 2026, the CJI issued a clarification: "I am pained to read how a section of the media has misquoted my oral observations made during the hearing of a frivolous case yesterday. What I had specifically criticised were those who have entered professions like the Bar with the aid of fake and bogus degrees. Similar persons have sneaked into the media, social media, and other noble professions as well, and hence, they are like parasites." That same day, a satirical outfit took the insult as its name — the Cockroach Janta Party, a pun on the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Remark to court order, in two weeks.
A courtroom aside becomes a live constitutional question at the Delhi High Court, and the whole arc fits inside two weeks. On this rail the formal state action touches exactly one object: the X account, withheld on 21 May. The website and Instagram losses two days later were reported by the founder, not confirmed as formal orders.
Growth accelerated through the takedown.
Plot the following against the state-action markers, and the shape of the story inverts. Look at where the block lands: not at the top of the curve but on its steepest stretch, the moment the account was most visibly worth talking about. The dates are encoded on the axis as month-day, the percentage as share of the ~22 million peak. The series is approximate and sources vary; the milestones are the load-bearing part.
How a national block works — and where it stops.
The instrument here is Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, the substantive power to block public access to content, with the procedure set by the IT (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking) Rules, 2009. It is not the IT Rules of 2021; that is a separate, parallel takedown track. Which lever was pulled tells you exactly how far it reaches.
The power works through confidentiality. A Section 69A direction goes to the intermediary, here X, which must comply, and the order carries a secrecy obligation: the platform cannot disclose it. The Supreme Court examined this design in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India in 2015, struck down the vague Section 66A, and left Section 69A and the 2009 Rules standing. So the architecture the account ran into is the part the Court already blessed a decade ago.
On 21 May, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued the direction on Intelligence Bureau inputs, and X withheld the account inside India. The stated ground was that the content was a threat to the sovereignty of India. A national authority leaned on a national platform obligation and got a national result, which is the system working exactly as designed. The reach is national too: withholding makes the account invisible from inside India's borders, and nowhere else.
This is also the broader direction of travel. The same machinery cut platform compliance windows from a day or more to three hours in February 2026, and a government censorship portal logged more than 2,300 blocking orders to nineteen platforms between October 2024 and October 2025. A territorial instrument has been getting faster and busier. None of that moves the line the rest of this issue keeps returning to: the lever reaches the account's visibility in one jurisdiction, and stops at the edge of it.
The block ran on Section 69A of the IT Act, 2000, with procedure under the IT Blocking Rules, 2009. The Supreme Court upheld that power in 2015. The order is confidential: the platform must comply but cannot disclose it, and in this case the Delhi High Court noted it was not even on the court's record. That machinery can compel a US platform to withhold an account inside India. It cannot delete the account, reach the servers, or touch followers who already have the posts.
One lever held, four out of reach.
Here's the grid: the levers of control down one side, the actors who might pull them across the other. The Indian executive holds the first row, and only the first row. The account is a borderless object, hosted on US platforms, run from Boston, already screenshotted by millions, so every other lever sits with someone the order can't command.
The order is secret — and that is the case against it.
The cleanest evidence here is not an opposition slogan. It is the court's own minute. A national security block reaches the bench, and the bench discovers it cannot see the very thing it has been asked to weigh — an admission, entered on the record, that quietly turns suppression into amplification.
A territorial tool against a non-territorial target.
The episode in figures. One formal order, one jurisdiction reached, and a following the order helped advertise to everyone outside it.