"What if all cockroaches come together?”
(Abhijeet Dipke, founder, Cockroach Janta Party)
To control unfolding political crises, state security apparatuses have historically relied on a central vulnerability: the centralisation of information dissemination. Now the script has flipped.
For decades, censorship followed a predictable, heavy-handed script. Regulators issued takedown notices to internet service providers, blocked domain names, and lobbied social media platforms to silence targeted accounts. If a crowd grew too large or a narrative too hostile, authorities simply flipped a switch, suppressing local cell phone coverage and severing fibre-optic lines.
When Indian authorities moved to suppress the rapid and organic surge of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), they reached for this exact playbook under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act. Yet they weren’t able to suppress the movement. Instead, it cloned itself, mutated in real time, and spread across parallel networks faster than regulators could react. This shift from centralised corporate platforms towards hyper-resilient, peer-to-peer architecture marks a turning point in the battle over narrative control.
State enforcement was playing digital whack-a-mole against a crowd armed with an open codebase
The Indian state’s opening move was textbook administrative enforcement. Citing public order and national security, regulators blocked the party’s central domain (cockroachjantaparty.org) and issued top-down notices restricting its primary social media handles, including @CockroachParty on X. In a traditional political campaign, silencing the central megaphone effectively ends the entire operation.
However, founder Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old studying public relations at Boston University, used inspired, out-of-the-box thinking to brilliantly structure the CJP as an open-source digital ecosystem rather than a traditional party machine.
Demonstrating the speed of digital-native organising, Dipke registered the domain at midnight, designed the logo, coined the slogan, and launched a live sign-up form by lunchtime, building an entire platform within 24 hours. Crucially, its website code, graphics, and media templates were made freely accessible online from day one, grounding his defiant philosophical stance: "They think citizens are cockroaches. They should know that cockroaches breed in rotten places."
When cockroachjantaparty.org inevitably went dark, volunteers immediately put up mirrors across alternative web domains like cockroachjanataparty.site and offshore cloud hosts. As soon as a specific web link was blocked, many more duplicates popped up in its place. State enforcement was playing digital whack-a-mole against a crowd armed with an open codebase.
While Indian authorities fell back on suspending localised internet service in major rally hubs, including Delhi's Jantar Mantar, the movement effortlessly adapted from the open web to an off-grid physical network layer.
Supporters turned to BitChat, an off-grid messaging protocol conceived by researcher Doris Lima and founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Needing no cellular towers, internet connections, or central sign-in servers, BitChat builds an ad hoc mesh network using Bluetooth Low Energy chips in standard smartphones, passing encrypted text messages from phone to phone across a crowd. This is a completely new and decentralised system of disseminating information that can multiply as prolifically as cockroaches.
In a dense protest environment, this architecture flips traditional telecom logic on its head. Massive crowds usually overload local cell towers and crash networks, but in this case, heavy user density actually made Bluetooth mesh faster and more reliable.
Even if a single device on the outer edge of the crowd manages to get a Wi-Fi or cellular signal, BitChat connects to the Nostr protocol (an open, decentralised publishing system that routes messages across independent servers rather than a single company's hardware) to project and amplify local off-grid chatter to global networks.
With no central database, no IP addresses that can be blocked, and a panic feature that deletes all local app data with three taps of the logo, localised internet blackouts were rendered virtually useless.
This new system of disseminating information highlights the limits of satellite internet systems, such as Starlink. During major political blackouts in various countries, groups have used Starlink where the US has made it available as a digital lifeline, such as in Ukraine during the war.
However, as seen in the Islamic Republic of Iran, satellite coverage comes with serious vulnerabilities. States can easily jam satellite signals, ban the physical import of satellite dishes, or use radio frequency tracking to locate the satellite dish on a roof and send security forces to raid the building. When the Iranian state blocked the country's internet, pro-American, Pahlavist-supporting Iranian youth and student groups initially tried to use smuggled Starlink terminals, but this backfired on them.
The Iranian government successfully jammed local satellite bands, used signal triangulation to track down active Starlink dishes in cities, and arrested the users. Creatively, Mossad-backed youth groups quickly pivoted to BitChat. Because BitChat operates using short-range Bluetooth rather than beaming high-powered signals to space, there is no tell-tale radio footprint for state forces to track.
Decentralised information technology is politically neutral. While it can amplify the voices of youth activists and citizen journalists, it also presents a new, unprecedented nightmare for intelligence agencies and counter-terrorism units worldwide.
For the last quarter-century, global counter-terrorism doctrines have relied heavily on signals intelligence. Security agencies track terrorist cells by monitoring IP traffic, intercepting cellular metadata, enforcing real-name SIM card registrations, and tapping central messaging servers. Localised network blackouts operate on the assumption that groups must eventually communicate through recognisable digital choke points.
Peer-to-peer mesh networks have rendered that strategy obsolete. If a terrorist cell were to communicate only through local Bluetooth messaging, traditional signals intelligence goes blind. The transmission exists in radio frequencies between hand-held devices, leaving no digital footprint.
Here’s the rub: as serverless communication tools go mainstream, states will have to abandon reactive, top-down, heavy-handed network blocking in favour of alternative strategies.
When intelligence agencies cannot intercept data moving across an off-grid mesh, they may try to compromise devices by deploying zero-click spyware, like Israel’s Pegasus spyware system that is also used by the Indian state. Such lethal and invasive surveillance tools have been designed to silently penetrate a device's operating system, capturing screen reads and keystrokes regardless of what off-grid platform the user is relying on. This is a chilling prospect.
Realising they could not stop BitChat's local radio signals and organic reach, the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre issued formal notices under the IT Act demanding that code repositories like GitHub remove the software's underlying source code. Though GitHub complied with the demand, the takedown was symbolic, as the information had already been cloned and distributed online. They simply couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle.
Governments may also pressure smartphone manufacturers to build kill-switches into Bluetooth chips, enabling authorities to silence local short-range frequencies during declared state emergencies.
Another strategy is to move away from suppressing information towards flooding the ecosystem with noise. When an off-grid signal cannot be muffled, adding noise to drown out the message becomes a viable option. By introducing compromised devices into a local mesh, intelligence agencies can inject disinformation and map the physical proximity of connected users, or flood channels with synthetic noise to disrupt real-time coordination.
The persistence of the Cockroach Janta Party in India is not an isolated event. It is a preview of the future. Like it or not, the era of top-down, heavy-handed censorship and digital control is coming to an end. States can no longer simply pull the plug on a network, because in a decentralised world, the network is everywhere and yet nowhere at once.