Cockroaches Without Borders: Deterritorialising National Politics in the Modern Age
Allegory of the Peace of Westphalia, 1648, symbolising the foundation of the modern territorial state. For more than three centuries, political authority and democratic participation have been closely tied to national territory. This article argues that digital communications technologies are increasingly challenging this westphalian assumption. Courtesy of Look and Learn Historical Picture Archive. CC0 1.0 Universal (Public Domain Dedication).
On June 6, 2026, news channels across India tuned in to a highly anticipated speech by Nitin Nabin, the president of the world’s largest political party by membership. That party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, experienced a remarkable ascent beginning in 2014, propelled in no small part by its promise of dismantling the systemic corruption that defined the previous United Progressive Alliance administration. It now found itself navigating similarly treacherous waters. Corruption had returned, this time in India’s institutions of higher education.
A litany of unprecedented issues affecting the lives of millions of students had recently come to light, with each one compounding over the last. Most recently, an examination responsible for selecting the country’s doctors (The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test or NEET) was leaked and sold through instant messaging chats, and the Central Board of Secondary Education (the largest high school board in India) awarded a major examination contract to a company with a history of sub-standard work. Following the cancellation of the examination, amid allegations of corruption and malpractice, reports of student suicides mounted, with India Today documenting at least 14 NEET-linked cases by late May.
Nabin’s speech addressed none of this.
What it did address was a herd of social media activists who have organised themselves into a self-proclaimed “pressure group” called the Cockroach Janata Party. At first glance, the controversy appeared to concern yet another online movement. In reality, it raised a deeper question. What happens when a political movement can shape national debate despite many of its organisers living beyond the state’s territorial boundaries? The controversy surrounding the Cockroach Janata Party suggests that digital communication may be reshaping one of democracy’s oldest assumptions: that political communities are fundamentally territorial.
The CJP began, as many modern social movements do, with an Instagram page. Its founding provocation was the remarks of the Chief Justice of India, Justice Surya Kant, who, in the course of a courtroom hearing, referred to unemployed young people who file RTI (Right to Information) applications and Public Interest Litigations as “cockroaches.” Although the Chief Justice has since clarified that his remarks referred only to those who obtained fake degrees, the outrage has been considerable.
The CJP took the slur and wore it. Like the Quakers, whose name originated as a term of mockery before being embraced by the protestant social-reform movement, or the “Deplorables,” a label some supporters of Donald Trump adopted after it was used as an insult, the CJP transformed a pejorative into a badge of identity.
In no time, they found a cause in the education scandals that had dominated newspaper headlines and occupied at least a few minutes of prime-time television for over a week. Much of the mainstream media framed the controversy as a conspiracy attacking the very unity and integrity of the Indian nation. Some outlets went so far as to label a student who complained about receiving the incorrect answer sheet an anti-national and even a Pakistani agent. This created a vacuum that the CJP was quick to fill by reframing the issue around the concerns of students rather than nationalist outrage.
Within a week of its creation, the CJP Instagram page received over 22 million followers, almost triple those of the ruling BJP party. The same government that took over a week to realise that the NEET exam had been leaked took no more than two days to shut down the CJP’s page on X. A few days later, even their website was blocked, although considerable debate has ensued over whether the founder himself shut it down.A peculiarity about this movement, which has been used by its critics to justify the prompt government action that followed, was that a majority of the people leading the party were located outside India. One of the movement's prominent leaders, for example, was Abhijeet Dipke, who had just completed a master's degree at Boston University. Critics contend that since these leaders did not reside in India despite remaining Indian citizens, they must be foreign agents paid or inspired to sow disharmony within India, or, at the very least, they lacked legitimacy to comment on Indian politics.
Despite such contentions, the supporters of the party seem to be unperturbed by such serious allegations of treason. A few hours before Nabin’s speech, they organised a huge protest in New Delhi, demanding the resignation of the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Without a doubt, the CJP appealed profoundly to the hearts of students who see it as a medium to vent their grievances when the “establishment” fails.
However, what is more interesting and striking than the movement itself is the debate it has given rise to. Nabin’s speech and his criticism of the CJP centered around the founder, Abhijeet Dipke, and his team not being physically in India. But his criticism was somewhat misguided, as the aforementioned members of the team had arrived in India before his speech.
The debate opens the door to the question of the role that territory plays in national politics and democracy as a whole. Nabin’s decision to devote a nationally televised speech to the movement further underscored the significance of the question.
The issue confronting these political elites was not simply that criticism existed but that a political community had emerged whose influence appeared increasingly detached from physical presence within the nation’s territory. The CJP’s ability to shape public debate despite the geographical dispersion of its organisers suggests a broader transformation in the foundations of democratic politics.
For more than three centuries, democratic politics have been organised around the territorial logic of the Westphalian state. Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, political authority has generally been understood to derive from a state’s exclusive jurisdiction over a defined territory, making political participation closely tied to physical residence within national borders.
However, democratic participation does not occur exclusively through state institutions. Alongside formal representative mechanisms such as elections, legislatures, and electoral constituencies, democracy also operates through informal channels including protests, advocacy campaigns, civil society organizations, and transnational social movements. Unlike representatives institutions, these forms of participation are less dependent on territorial boundaries and can increasingly mobilise individuals across jurisdictions
While it would still be far-fetched to say that territory plays an insignificant role in the more formalistic forms of representative democracy (i.e., constituencies, elections, and legislatures) the CJP illustrates the deterritorialisation of the body politic in the less institutionalised, movement-based dimension of democracy.
This transformation has been driven in large part by the rise of digital communications technologies that have begun to unsettle many of the assumptions underpinning the territorial organisation of political communities inherited from the Westphalian state.
One of the most influential accounts of how political communities are constituted is offered by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities. Anderson argues that nations are "imagined communities" because their members perceive themselves as belonging to the same political community despite never personally knowing most of their fellow citizens. This sense of shared identity is sustained through common narratives and communication technologies, particularly print capitalism.
However, Anderson's account remained tied to territorial logic. The newspaper, the census, the map, and the institutions of the modern state all reinforced a sense of community that was ultimately bounded by national territory. Digital communication technologies have increasingly weakened this territorial constraint by enabling political communities to form, deliberate, and mobilise across borders.
Contemporary technologies appear to be disrupting this relationship. Social media platforms, livestreams, online forums, and instant messaging networks allow political communities to emerge and sustain themselves independently of geographical closeness. Individuals separated by thousands of kilometres can participate in the same conversations, consume the same content, and develop a shared sense of identity. What binds these communities is not territory but rather shared communication and identity.
This phenomenon where the relationship between political community and territory is weakened has been referred to as “deterritorialisation” by scholars such as Arjun Appadurai. Social, cultural, political, and economic life becomes progressively detached from the territorial containers that historically organised it. The significance of deterritorialisation is not that territory ceases to matter. States continue to control borders, conduct elections, levy taxes, and exercise definite coercive authority. Rather, what changes is the location from which political influence is generated.
The significance of this development extends far beyond the CJP itself. If political participation can be exercised effectively from outside the national territory, then geography may no longer serve as the sole basis upon which political communities are constituted. Increasingly, political affiliation may emerge through shared ideological commitments, common narratives, and participation in digital networks. If this trend continues, political communities may come to be defined less by territory than by information flows and shared identities.
The significance of the CJP itself does not lie in whether the allegations made against it were true, nor even in whether it survives as a movement. Its importance lies in the fact that it exposed an assumption that has underpinned democratic politics for centuries: that political communities are necessarily territorial. The question, therefore, is not whether deterritorialisation is occurring, but how political institutions built for a territorial age will respond to citizens whose political communities increasingly exist in networks rather than places.
Hriday Singh Antal is a first-year student (GS '30) in the Dual BA Program between Sciences Po and Columbia University School of General Studies. He studies at the Sciences Po Le Havre Campus, where he is pursuing a major in Politics and Government with a geographical minor in the Asia-Pacific region.