India
oi-Prakash KL
Manish Brahmbhatt, an activist from Ahmedabad who has been on an indefinite hunger strike at Jantar Mantar, on Thursday launched a scathing attack on the Cockroach Janta Party’s core committee, alleging it has been reduced to “Team Kejriwal”.
Brahmbhatt’s grievances center around the formation of the 12-member National Core Team, which he claims was arbitrarily handpicked without any consultation with the ground-level workers. “The movement belonged to the nation. It succeeded because people poured their blood and sweat into it. But after it succeeded, it was sold out and politicized. It has now become ‘Team Kejriwal’,” ANI quoted him as saying with a backing of a small gathering of supporters.
Activist Manish Brahmbhatt, protesting at Jantar Mantar, criticized the Cockroach Janta Party’s core committee, alleging it became ‘Team Kejriwal’ and lacked diversity. Brahmbhatt formed the ‘Cockroach Janata Party Democratic’, claiming his ideas were appropriated and the movement was politicized.
The activist detailed his personal attempts to engage with the leadership, claiming he was stonewalled despite traveling to Delhi for a crucial meeting. “We went there, the meeting continued for the entire day, and we were watching everything, but no one called us inside. On WhatsApp, they first claimed we hadn’t shown up. Later, we spoke with Ashutosh, but he didn’t reply either. Some insiders told us that phones were kept outside as a rule, so they didn’t know we were waiting. They asked us to come the next morning,” Brahmbhatt recounted, his voice strained from the fast.
He further alleged that a proposal he put forward for a decentralized campaign called ‘Ek reel Desh Ke Naam’ which envisioned allowing every citizen to become the face of the movement was quietly shelved, only to be repackaged and relaunched later under a different name, ‘Kya Bolti Public’, during a press conference. “They said they would think about it. But we never met again. Then we saw our idea being presented as theirs,” he claimed.
He said out that the 12-member panel, led by Abhijeet Dipke, lacks representation from key demographics. “They did not include a single Muslim male face, no representative from the Sikh community, no one from other religious or caste organizations. They didn’t even include a woman other than the one who was previously the spokesperson. Where is the diversity in that?” he questioned.
The activist also claimed that the leadership actively avoided regions where political sensitivities could hurt their carefully crafted alliances. “When the student movement was taking place in Jharkhand, neither Dipke nor any of the other eleven key figures went there. They traveled everywhere else but avoided that location. Why? Because their boss, Kejriwal, had forbidden them from going, as he intends to strike deals with various opposition parties or with the ruling parties in states where the BJP is not in power,” Brahmbhatt alleged, directly linking the movement’s strategy to the political ambitions of the Delhi Chief Minister.
Rejecting the existing structure, Brahmbhatt announced the formation of a new political entity the ‘Cockroach Janata Party Democratic’. The choice of name appears to be a provocative dig at the current dispensation, which he claims has betrayed the movement’s original spirit.
“We wanted this to be a genuine national team, one that included five people from every state, specifically selecting protesters and volunteers from those regions. We had expressed a desire that the selection process should not be dictated by a ‘high command’ or an arbitrary authority figure; however, they rejected this wish,” he explained, adding that the move was necessary to rescue the movement from becoming a “deceitful” political tool.
