NEW DELHI — On May 21, 2026, X (formerly Twitter) added a notice to the CJP's official X account: "This account's content has been withheld in India in response to a legal demand." This means someone — the government, a private party, or some combination — filed a legal request and X complied, making the CJP's X account invisible to users accessing it from Indian IP addresses. The account remains visible to users outside India, which means it remains visible to the global media that was already covering the CJP extensively, which means the withholding was covered by CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and the Guardian within hours. The coverage of the withholding reached more Indians than the X account had, because the coverage ran on platforms that are not withheld in India, and the coverage's primary content was: "India's government has tried to silence a satirical cockroach party." This is not the message the withholder intended. The withholder has not explained their reasoning. The cockroach has not been silenced.

The Streisand Effect — named for Barbra Streisand's 2003 attempt to suppress aerial photographs of her Malibu home, which resulted in the photographs being viewed 420,000 times in the month after the suppression versus six times before — is one of the most documented phenomena in internet culture. Attempts to suppress information in the digital age reliably produce more attention to the suppressed information than would have existed without the suppression. This effect has been documented so many times, in so many contexts, that any government or organisation that suppresses information without expecting this outcome must either not have internet access or not have internet literacy. The CJP X withholding has produced, as of this writing, 3 million additional Instagram followers and international headlines. The cockroach is now on the front page of the Guardian. The cockroach has never been on the front page of the Guardian before. The withholder put it there.

The CJP's response to the X withholding was, characteristically, a meme. The meme showed a cockroach with a padlock on it and the text: "You can lock us on X. We're still on Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, and your nightmares." The meme received 1.8 lakh likes in six hours. The meme was shared in groups that had never shared CJP content before. Three television journalists outside India covered the meme specifically. This reporter would like to suggest, gently but firmly, to whoever filed the legal demand: the cockroach is not going away. The cockroach never goes away. This is documented zoologically and is now also documented politically.