In July, the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) had a hit on its hands. Born on Instagram, it took anger over NEET onto the streets of Delhi, and Dharmendra Pradhan resigned. For a while, CJP seemed to have cracked digital politics: find a shared frustration, turn it into a movement, and let the internet do the rest.
By October, the sequel was not doing as well.
CJP’s total volume of Insta engagement plunged by nearly 80% between July and October, while average engagement per post fell by more than half. In the past 30 days, the page lost over a lakh followers, according to India Today’s analysis of data extracted using Apify, a cloud-based data extraction platform.
Congress gained 4.8 lakh followers in the same period, and the BJP added another 98,000.
Does that mean CJP’s followers walked over to the big parties? We can’t say that. But the big parties are growing while CJP shrinks. Three months ago, it was the other way round.
So what went wrong? India Today’s OSINT team, using Apify, looked at Instagram data across CJP, its leaders, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, LoP Rahul Gandhi, and 29 Union ministers. We compared two 15-day windows: July 10-25, around Pradhan’s resignation, and October 1-15, when CJP began its demand for the Chief Election Commissioner’s removal.
A STORY EVERY HOUSE COULD SEE ITSELF IN
The first difference was the cause and the movement itself. Students had taken the NEET exam, and parents knew the stakes. CJP, which began as a Gen Z movement, and most of those affected by the paper leak could resonate with the platform. But in October, that relatability seems to be missing; CJP founder Abhijit Dipke was demanding Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s removal over electoral rolls. Here, the CJP came later. It was more of a political question, and the principal opposition party led by Lok Sabha LoP Rahul Gandhi was already on the ground demanding the resignation. With opposition parties taking up the same cause, CJP no longer owned the narrative.
The second reason is the page itself. The CJP posted less than half compared to July’s 90 posts. Each post pulled in roughly a third of what it used to, about 10.7 lakh interactions in July against 3.8 lakh in October.
There is also size. CJP added 47.5 lakh followers in one fortnight in July, and a rush like that is hard to hold. But it cannot explain such a steep fall on its own.
PEOPLE NOW REMEMBER THE FACES
Here is the interesting part. The movement’s faces did better than its page.|
Dipke’s own account drew about 3 crore interactions in July and 2.1 crore in October, a fall of around 30%. That is now more than the main CJP page gets. Saurav Das posted just twice in July and 13 times in October, and his engagement went up nearly four times. Ashutosh Ranka posted 115 times in July, more than the page itself, but only 24 times in October, and his engagement fell 56%.
If we add the three together, their collective engagement fell 36%, against more than 80% for the page. In July, the page was bigger than all three combined. In October, the three together drew about 2.6 times more engagement than the page.
TOO MANY POSTS?
Was this only CJP’s problem? We analysed 30 political accounts, belonging to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and 29 Union ministers.
In July, they published 723 posts. In October, 1,278, a 77% jump. 25 of the 30 people posted more. It shows that the government is pushing to engage the Instagram audience following the July rupture, but that doesn’t itself translate into engagement. The combined engagement of the 30 Union Ministers, including PM Modi, fell by almost half, and average engagement per post dropped 71.4%.
Think of a Friday when every studio releases a film. The multiplex is crowded, but each film gets fewer viewers.
Modi has 10 posts in October, up from eight in July. His engagement still fell 60.2%, from about 5.2 crore to 2.1 crore.
THE LEADER WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO FILL THE GAP
When one film fades, a bigger star is expected to step in. Rahul Gandhi looked like that star. As Leader of the Opposition, he was out front on the electoral-roll fight, and the opposition was pushing the same issue CJP had picked up, even before the Cockroaches. If attention was moving away from CJP, he was the obvious person to gain.
He didn’t. His engagement fell from 2.6 crore to 2.2 crore, about 16%.
That is a smaller fall than Modi’s, and in October his total even edged past the Prime Minister’s. But when you look at the effort, Rahul Gandhi has 59 Instagram posts while Narendra Modi posted just 10. Per post, Modi still drew about five and a half times more engagement. In July, the PM’s total volume of engagement was double that of the LoP.
So the opposition’s electoral-roll push did not clearly become an online lead.
SOME UNION MINISTERS GAINED
While overall engagement fell by nearly half, 19 of the 30 accounts belonging to the Union Ministers recorded an increase in Instagram engagement between July and October, including sharp surges for several Union ministers.
Mansukh Mandaviya and Gajendra Singh Shekhawat saw engagement surge more than sevenfold, while S. Jaishankar and Jyotiraditya Scindia also recorded sharp gains. Amit Shah’s engagement rose 41%. But the trend was far from uniform: Ashwini Vaishnaw and Chirag Paswan saw declines of 60% and 36%, respectively.
Posting more was no guarantee. The audience seems to have rewarded the right post, not the loudest poster.
However, Instagram cannot tell us whether CJP has lost its political meaning. But the shift is clear. In July, CJP made the established players look slow. In October, they were posting more, Congress was adding followers, and CJP was losing them.
- Ends