MUMBAI, India – Last month, weeks after tens of thousands of students took to the streets of New Delhi demanding education reform, Prime Minister Narendra Modi finally broke his silence on the seven-week protests.
He did it through an Instagram reel.
Modi said he was aware of how corruption in India's examination systems had affected them, and he was working to fix it.
The reel — shot chin-first, uploaded at midnight — inspired countless parodies. Undaunted, the 75-year-old leader put up more reels over the next few days addressing his "friends," as he referred to the protesting youth. Over the next few weeks, many of his ministers appeared to increase their frequency of posting on Instagram too.
This was a reaction to nationwide protests by a youth-led movement known as the Cockroach Janta Party, a name that emerged from its origins as an internet meme. It has since become a political force that ousted the education minister and posed the biggest challenge to the Modi government in years.
Over two months, the protesters and their supporters – most who appeared to be digitally-savvy GenZ – used Instagram and Snapchat to connect, organize, and share countless reels parodying the government.
And Modi's efforts to respond spotlight how, for the first time in its 12-year-rule, the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP appears to be playing catch-up instead of setting the agenda – both politically and on social media, where it once dominated.
Even as Modi and his ministers go on a charm offensive, local media report Indian police booked thousands on criminal charges. The digital rights group Software Freedom Law Centre told NPR of unprecedented social media censorship by the government on platforms like Meta and X, mainly blocking of posts critical of Modi and his government. Some critics report being verbally abused, doxxed, and even threatened with rape and death by BJP supporters.
The government is yet to announce any action against security forces involved in violent clashes in July, where they used batons, tear gas, and pellet guns against protesters. The India chapter of Amnesty International called it "state-sanctioned violence masked as crowd control."
Leaders of the Cockroach Party say the prosecution was a betrayal of the government's promise to its leaders to give amnesty to protesters. On Tuesday, India's top court ordered the government to drop criminal charges against the protesters. The Cockroach Janta Party hailed the court's order as "a big victory for the students!" The court's decision came just over a week after the Cockroach Janta Party warned of another protest march.
Reeling in the GenZ
For years, India's ruling party adopted a top-down communication strategy. Its dedicated IT cell used Facebook, X and WhatsApp for voter outreach.
The Cockroach protests showed the "boomers" in the BJP government that the tactic was "antiquated", says Rajat Sethi, a visiting fellow at the conservative think-tank India Foundation.
"The BJP realized that it needs to come out with a new playbook," he says. "If they're not making reels, if they are not speaking in a rap song, perhaps the Gen Z will not hear you."
Since then, India's foreign ministry got onto Snapchat. Some legislators started using slang in Parliament speeches. India's finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, even chided the state-run banks for not being "cool" enough: "Please get some young people to talk to you all," she said, "When they sit in front of the customers, make sure everything is cool."
Around two-thirds of Indians are under the age 35. But the average age of India's Parliamentarians is 56. Sethi says the outreach is a way to bridge this age gap. "It currently appears to be a forceful attempt but I think over time it will normalize," he says.
It would be a steep learning curve.
"For a politician, it is very important not to come across as a kind of dad on the dance floor," says Prof Joyjeet Pal, who tracks political messaging at the University of Michigan. But Pal says BJP leaders need not pretend to be immersed in Gen-Z culture. "And where they're making the mistake is imagining that trying to be like young people is actually going to win them votes."
And any goodwill from the outreach, he says, is undermined by how some protesters have since been targeted.
Take Mumbai-based model Rhiya Ahir, whose photograph of her blocking a police van carrying detained students became one of the movement's defining images. Ahir says she has since faced abuse online, with some falsely claiming she posts naked pictures for subscribers on her Instagram account. And yet, she tells NPR: "The day I filed a police complaint against the online abuse, the cops also filed one against me for joining the protests."
Local media also reports the police filed a complaint against a 15-year-old girl from Noida city, whose video using cuss words against Modi during the Delhi protest went viral. The Times of India newspaper quoted her family lawyer saying they had to move houses three times because people he described as "unruly elements" kept turning up and threatening the girl, "including rape threats."
When asked about the legal cases, BJP national spokesperson Shazia Ilmi said NPR's questions were "nonsense" and "anti-Modi". "Who are these youths? What have they done? What are the cases? There are 'history sheeters' who were there," she said, using a South Asian term for those with a rap sheet.
She accused NPR of bias, and called its editors "hypocrites" for not working on a report on a student protest in the opposition-ruled Jharkhand state. Then she hung up.
Scrubbing off online criticism
Ever since the Cockroach leaders called off their protests last month, activists, satirists,independent journalists and opposition politicians criticizing the government have reported their social media accounts being restricted in India or posts arbitrarily taken down.
Citing government data, the Indian Express newspaper reported that between March and July this year, the government sent nearly 200,000 blocking orders to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube – or more than one order every minute.
The Indian government doesn't publicly disclose reasons for its blocking orders. Angela Thomas, a public policy researcher at the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), a Delhi-based internet watchdog, says under Indian laws, the government can sue social media companies if they don't comply with its takedown orders. "This means the platforms themselves get into censorship, and inevitably turn into mouthpieces of the government," says Thomas.
In some cases, even documentation of the state's excesses invites intimidation.
In July, Shrey Gupta, a software engineer from Ahmedabad city, created a website to compile videos of Delhi police's violent crackdown on protestors. The Unbadged invited people to submit videos of personnel who used batons and tear gas against protestors without wearing a name badge, which police are legally required to wear.
A day after the website went live on July 22, Gupta says people called him from unknown numbers, verbally abusing him and threatening him with violence. On July 24, policemen in plainclothes barged into his house late evening and took him to the Navrangpura police station in Ahmedabad.
Gupta says the interrogation went on for hours, and the officers asked "everything about myself for the last five years," he says. When they were done, Gupta said he wanted to file a complaint about the abusive phone calls he had been receiving. "The officer said, this is a repercussion for you posting. You have to deal with it."
The Ahmedabad police did not respond to an emailed interview request with a list of questions.
Gupta says he had "zero political engagement" before the protests. But the ordeal prompted an awakening.
It spurred him on to his next project: an AI tool that analyses online speech to weed out Hindu nationalist bots and trolls.
Is he worried of being harassed again?
"No," he says. "But my plans definitely do include talking to the lawyers this time."
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