Few Indian politicians have crossed as many political dressing rooms as Kirti Azad, the Bardhaman-Durgapur TMC MP and 1983 World Cup-winning cricketer. He has been a BJP MP, a Congress entrant, and now a Trinamool Congress lawmaker. In May 2026, he added one more lanyard to his collection: an honorary card from the Cockroach Janta Party. He is, on paper, India's only sitting MP who is simultaneously a TMC member and an honorary cockroach.
Below is a clean, dated timeline of how a man whose career began in the slips cordon ended up holding a laminated insect.
The career, in brief
- 1983: Wins the cricket World Cup as part of Kapil Dev's India.
- 1990s–2014: Long stint with the BJP, most prominently as an MP from Darbhanga in Bihar. Multiple terms.
- 2015: Suspended from the BJP after taking on senior leaders on corruption allegations. Eventually moves to the Indian National Congress.
- 2021: Joins TMC.
- 2024: Elected to the Lok Sabha from Bardhaman-Durgapur on a TMC ticket.
By the time the CJP came calling, Azad already had a reputation for being unbothered by party orthodoxy. He has burnt three party bridges in roughly two decades. Accepting a fourth, lightweight, no-strings affiliation was not a stretch.
The CJP card timeline
15 May 2026 — The CJI remark
In a Supreme Court hearing on fake law degrees, CJI Surya Kant uses the phrase "youngsters like cockroaches" to describe unemployed graduates who, he says, become "media" and "RTI activists" and "start attacking everyone." Within hours, the line is clipped, captioned, and shared across Twitter/X.
16 May 2026 — CJP is founded
Abhijeet Dipke launches the Cockroach Janta Party as an online membership drive. He has said the idea was "impromptu" — he did not expect the scale of response.
17 May 2026 — First wave of honorary cards
CJP begins extending honorary memberships to opposition figures who have publicly defended the unemployed-youth framing of the cockroach remark. Mahua Moitra is the first to publicly accept.
18 May 2026 — Azad accepts
Kirti Azad accepts an honorary CJP card, posing for a photograph at a TMC office. The card carries his name and the slogan Main Bhi Cockroach. He becomes the second sitting MP to publicly take one.
19 May 2026 — TMC's silence
Mamata Banerjee's office does not formally endorse the card, nor does it instruct any TMC MP to refuse it. The signal is permissive, not directive. See our CJP and TMC explainer for what the silence implies.
The dual-membership question
Is it legal — or even procedurally sensible — for a sitting MP to hold a card in an unregistered movement? Yes, with caveats.
CJP is not yet registered with the Election Commission of India. It does not contest elections, does not field candidates, and has no party whip. As a satirical / public-pressure movement, an honorary card from CJP carries no constitutional weight. It is closer in legal status to a fan-club card than to a political affiliation.
The anti-defection law (Tenth Schedule) is triggered by formal party defection or voting against the whip — not by accepting honorary memberships from organisations that don't have whips in the first place. Azad's TMC membership is unaffected. His Bardhaman-Durgapur seat is unaffected.
For Azad, a honorary CJP card is the cheapest possible signalling instrument. It costs nothing legally, nothing financially, and nothing politically — and yet it buys him a sliver of cockroach-curious goodwill in his urban constituencies.
Why Azad, specifically
Three reasons make Azad a natural second-domino:
- The personal brand. He has spent twenty years describing himself as someone who refuses to be muzzled by his own party leadership. A movement whose founding text is built around the right to be a noisy insect was always going to find him.
- The constituency. Bardhaman-Durgapur has a meaningful student-and-young-graduate cluster, with engineering colleges and tutorial belts. The unemployment-youth framing of the cockroach remark is electorally relevant there.
- The age contrast. Azad is 65+, the founder is 30. A senior MP publicly accepting a card from a Gen-Z movement signals that the cockroach metaphor is not a youth-only joke. It is one of the more deliberate parts of the optics.
What the card does not do
It does not commit Azad to CJP's 5-point manifesto. He has not pledged to introduce the no-RS-seat-for-CJIs private bill, nor to argue the 55% women's reservation demand from the floor of the House. He has accepted a piece of solidarity. That is all.
For now, that is all CJP is asking. It does not want a merger. It wants visible MPs willing to be photographed with its iconography. Azad delivers exactly that.
The bigger picture
Two MPs do not make a parliamentary bloc. But two MPs from different states, both willing to put their faces next to a satirical insect, signal that CJP's iconography has cleared the first credibility bar. The next question — addressed in our 2029 horizon piece — is whether the movement converts that visibility into anything resembling electoral infrastructure.
If you want the broader timeline of every CJP milestone from 15 May onwards, our May 2026 explainer has it dated and sourced.