Until a couple of weeks ago, Abhijeet Dipke was one of thousands of Indian students in the United States with a fresh graduate degree in hand, seeking a job. Then, a cockroach changed his life.

It started with a question that Mr. Dipke, a 30-year-old graduate of the public relations program at Boston University, posted on X on May 16: “What if all cockroaches came together?” He was responding to comments a day earlier from India’s chief justice, Surya Kant, who referred to young and unemployed Indians as cockroaches who, failing to secure jobs, end up complaining on social media or becoming activists and criticizing the system.

Encouraged by thousands of replies endorsing his call to action, Mr. Dipke started the “Cockroach Janta Party” — janta means “the public” in Hindi — as a joke, with its own website, built in two hours with help from A.I. and friends. The goal was to create a movement for young people “who keep getting called lazy, chronically online, and — most recently — cockroaches,” the mission statement read. “The rest is satire.”

Tens of millions of young people joined the movement, eager to turn a perceived insult into an emblem of pride. Within days, some of the C.J.P.’s accounts had more social media followers than India’s biggest political parties. But beyond the laughs, the instantaneous embrace of Mr. Dipke’s message tells a bigger story of the bleak mood of many young Indians who are struggling to find jobs, even though the country has been the world’s fastest-growing large economy four years in a row.

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The rate of unemployment for people aged between 15 and 29 — more than a quarter of India’s population — was roughly 10 percent last year, far higher than the overall unemployment rate of around 3 percent, according to India’s 2025 Periodic Labor Force Survey.

Competition for jobs is fierce in both the private and government sectors. In 2022, 10 million people competed for 35,000 railway jobs, according to the state-owned Indian Railways.

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Last week, Indian government officials directed X to block the “Cockroach Janta Party” handle, citing a threat to national security, according to Indian media reports. Mr. Dipke created a second handle, “Cockroach is Back,” which remains active. (Under Indian law, social media companies operating in the country must take down content that could pose a risk to national security.)

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As its first action, the party is circulating a petition calling for the resignation of India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, under whose watch the recent medical school exam was allegedly mishandled. As of Thursday, the petition had gathered around nearly 800,000 signatures of the targeted one million, according to the C.J.P.’s website.