Revolt of the Cockroaches: How India’s Gen Z Humbled Modi
· Time
In the final segment of Creepshow, the horror anthology series written by Stephen King, Upson Pratt, a ruthless old businessman, lives alone in a penthouse fitted with surveillance screens, control panels, and alarm systems. He has a pathological phobia of germs and contamination, is obsessed with exercising complete control over his environment, and regards every competitor as little more than a bug to be squashed.
One night, a cockroach breaches his citadel, and Pratt swiftly dispatches it. But the cockroaches keep appearing in ever-greater swarms, creeping out from air vents, drains, cupboards, and electrical panels until they are everywhere. Despite his manic efforts to smash and spray them out of existence, the ever-multiplying cockroaches eventually overwhelm him.
Visit truewildgame.online for more information.
Over the past 12 years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has single-mindedly gone about building an extensive machinery of control to tame India’s raucous democracy. He has gradually managed to bring the entire architecture of normal, institutional politics under his sway. The American watchdog Freedom House, for example, ranks India as, “partly free,” and the country’s press freedom ranking on a Reporters Without Borders index of 180 countries has sunk from 140 in 2014—the year Modi came to power—to 157 in 2026. Elsewhere, the V-Dem Institute in Sweden, which monitors democracy and its variants, has described India as an “electoral autocracy,” where, despite the occurrence of multi-party elections, there is a corrosion of true democracy because of decline in core liberties.
These damning assessments reflect the way Modi has consolidated his grip on all manner of national institutions in recent years: from the media, where pliant owners have repeatedly bent the knee to the administration, to election authorities, which in a recent state poll erased millions of names from voter rolls in a move widely seen as benefiting Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Considering his hegemonic control over power and institutions, one can presume that when Modi first watched hundreds of disaffected young people, describing themselves as cockroaches, trickle into Jantar Mantar, a traditional site of protest in New Delhi, a few miles from his residence, the 75-year-old strongman would have felt fairly confident of squashing them like bugs. The reality turned out to be wholly different—uplifting the spirits of democratically minded Indians and no doubt surprising the country’s longtime leader.
Origins and growth of a Gen Z protest
The call to protest came on Jun. 1 from Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old Indian student in Boston, who had previously worked as a political communications specialist. The catalyst was a comment on May 15 by Surya Kant, the chief justice of India’s Supreme Court, who compared the country’s unemployed youth to "parasites" and "cockroaches." Dipke responded by forming an online parody party, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), whose meme-like name was partly a dig at Modi's BJP. He billed his satirical party as the "Voice of the Lazy & Unemployed," and the CJP's instagram account amassed 20 million followers within days, eclipsing the BJP's following on the platform.
India’s young men and women were already frustrated and angry over recent paper leaks in an examination for admission to medical schools. More than two million students had competed for around 140,000 places to train as a doctor. After the paper leaks, the test was canceled and the government forced the students to repeat the exam on June 21. In despair, reportedly at least 20 students committed suicide.
On the morning of Jun. 6, Dipke arrived at Delhi airport holding a copy of the Constitution of India in one hand, and made his way to Jantar Mantar in central Delhi, where he started the protests with a modest gathering of supporters. On most days throughout June a few hundred people showed up at Jantar Mantar for the protests. On June 28, a prominent educator and activist, Sonam Wangchuk, and a group of student activists began a hunger strike in support of the CJP and its primary demand: the resignation of the education minister.
I thought Modi might just co-opt the protest leaders or ignore them till they were exhausted, but as it turned out, his administration couldn’t tolerate even passive, peaceful resistance. On the evening of July 18, police charged the protest site and forcibly removed Wangchuk and others, who had been on the hunger strike for 20 days by then. Images and videos of Wangchuk being removed from the protest site went viral.
Tens of thousands showed up at the protest site in solidarity. Among the multitudes in Delhi was Prashantkumar Dhramshibhai Patel, a middle-aged lawyer, who had traveled to the capital from Ahmedabad, a city in the western state of Gujarat. He carried a most painful wound inflicted by the failures of India's education system: on Jun.18, Kahaan Patel, his 17-year-old son, who had taken the medical-school test that was scrapped after the paper leaks, jumped from the sixth-floor balcony of their apartment and killed himself. “I have another son. I have to save him,” Patel said, in an interview at Jantar Mantar. “The system has to change.”
On July 20, the protesters marched toward the Indian Parliament. The police attacked them with batons, tear gas, and pellet guns. More than 100 protesters ended up in hospital with broken ribs, fractured legs, head trauma, and other injuries. Viral videos of the police brutality on Instagram and YouTube swelled the crowds even further and transformed the protest site into a zone of occupation with the energy of a carnival. Copycat protests sprang up in other major Indian cities—Kolkata, Mumbai and Patna—lending the Gen Z protests the aura of a nationwide youth resistance that would humble Modi and force his education minister to resign.
Gen Z challenges the strongman
The success of India’s Gen Z protests revealed a paradox: while Modi has effectively domesticated institutional politics, his control breaks down when confronted with eruptions of extraordinary, extra-institutional politics. He is forced into a corner when political mobilization originates from the ignored margins, erupts in waves of collective action, and thrives in its own irregular, informal public spaces. India has witnessed such eruptions before: in the protests around a citizenship law led by Muslim women in 2019, in the protests led by Sikh farmers in 2021, and now in the Gen Z protests. These extra-institutional mass upsurges have posed the greatest challenges to the Hindu nationalist political order helmed by Modi.
After the police crackdown, the Gen Z protests in Delhi and other Indian cities gained the energy and tone of a carnival. The people who joined were not there at the behest of a political organization but were drawn, like pilgrims to hip pilgrimage sites, by the promise of an insurrectionary pleasure. Jantar Mantar, the protest site in Delhi, embodied an aesthetic of collective transgression. The crowds ignored the best efforts of the protest leaders to act as disciplinary conductors and reveled in their own playful spontaneity, their slogans and posters heaping colorful profanities on the prime minister. Fundamentally, the protest in Delhi amounted to a carnivalesque bonfire of Brand Modi.
The burnishing of Modi’s political brand traces back to another protest in Delhi, in the summer of 2011. A movement called India Against Corruption—led by a group of tech-savvy middle-class men and fronted by a talismanic Gandhian veteran on a hunger strike—mounted a protest against corruption scandals in the federal government, then led by the Indian National Congress. That movement tapped into, and crystallized, widespread public anger against the “system” and turned it into a crisis of legitimacy for the ruling Congress Party, from which it never recovered.
The social imaginary of the “corrupt system” in India resembles the American populist notion of “the swamp”: it refers to a self-serving nexus of politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen who control the workings of state institutions, much to the detriment of ordinary people with no “connections” within it.
Soon after those 2011 protests, Brand Modi was carefully marketed on television channels and burgeoning social media platforms as the redemptive opposite of the images, associations, and stereotypes attached to the corrupt and feckless system. Modi was the charismatic outsider (at least to Delhi, since he had been a state level leader for years) and decisive executive who could cut through the thicket of vested interests and make institutions work for ordinary people.
In contrast to the wealthy, dynastic politicians who dominated other parties, Modi presented himself as a fakir, or ascetic, free from the usual familial interests and material ambitions—a man uniquely suited to provide a renewed political and moral leadership. And unlike the English-speaking politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists of the old establishment mold, Modi was cast as the authentic son of a tea seller, whose provincial career in the western state of Gujarat had left him untouched by the incestuous courtly culture of the national capital.
Fifteen years later, the Gen Z protests in Delhi and other Indian cities have incinerated Modi’s carefully constructed political brand, delivering death by a thousand burns. The target of the anger and scorn in all the insulting posters, slogans, and graffiti of the protest zone was not the education minister but Modi himself.
A bonfire of vanities in Delhi
It was an exhilarating spectacle to watch a prime minister elevated to the status of a demigod through the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars of public money spent on ubiquitous advertising campaigns, becoming the butt of a torrent of wickedly humorous, profanity-laced slogans from young men and women in the capital. The eminently Instagrammable viral burns of the protesters were deliberate, taking apart and inverting each element of Modi’s political brand.
The weapon of choice was satire. The unofficial anthem of the protest was a call-and-response chant: “Chappan inch ka chhota bandar,” followed by the crowd’s chorus, “Bhaag Narendra, Bhaag Narendra.” (“The little monkey with the 56-inch chest. Run Narendra, Run Narendra!”) The viral reel that originated the chant features two women, who seem to be in their early 20s, dressed in casual streetwear, leading the chant while a man holds a poster depicting Modi as a little monkey.
One could not imagine a more lethal grenade lobbed at Modi’s strongman image—a play on his 2014 campaign claim of being a leader with a “56-inch chest” who embodied the masculine resolve needed to overcome the obstacles and transform India in the decisive manner he had transformed Gujarat, the state he had governed for 12 years.
The chant, which deployed Modi’s first name, quickly spawned the kind of meme-like variations typical of viral reels. The chorus, “Bhaag Narendra, Bhaag Narendra,” (Run Narendra, Run Narendra!”) sometimes became “Bal Narendra, Bal Narendra!” (Baby Narendra, Baby Narendra!) —a nod to the 2014 comic book that mythologized Modi’s childhood, depicting heroic tales like a young Modi helping soldiers during India’s 1965 war with Pakistan and rescuing a baby crocodile. Other chants added new bits lampooning Modi's relationship with friendly oligarchs.
And there were posters tearing apart his otherworldly self-projection as a fakir, or ascetic, depicting him in his monogrammed suits, designer sunglasses, and aircraft. Street skits satirized the myth of Modi’s tea-seller origins. A man carrying a bullhorn wandered through the crowds playing Modi’s viral bloopers on a loop, taking requests from the audience like a disc jockey.
A particular target of attack was Modi’s tactic of preserving his political brand by evading accountability: presenting himself as the supreme leader who sets the country’s political direction and articulates its moral vision while shifting responsibility for the government’s failures onto subordinate officials.
A viral poster showed a young girl deriding Modi’s habit of falling silent whenever the government came under attack: “Ghosting works on dating apps, not on citizens.” The posters bore Modi’s face, not the education minister’s, under the banner headlines, “Leak in India” and “Destroy in India” (a play on “Make in India,” Modi’s signature campaign to build up India’s manufacturing sector).
For India’s youth, Modi has become the symbol of the hated system, the man who bore ultimate responsibility for everything that was wrong with the country’s institutions. He is no longer the crusader against a corrupt and sclerotic system but its prime patron.
Why the Cockroaches won
The cockroach protests overwhelmed Modi’s regime of control because the young protesters were immune to the blackout and the vilification by India’s mainstream media. The protest was anchored in its own alternative digital public sphere, primarily on Instagram, the loopy mimetic cauldron that served as both the lingua franca and the primary driver of the protests.
Platforms such as Instagram and YouTube host a new generation of progressive journalists and influencers who command huge audiences, particularly among the young who hardly watch mainstream news channels at all. Such an alternative digital sphere had already emerged and grown during India’s previous major protest movements in the past decade.
India’s young people live with profound resentment against the current state of affairs. After the police crackdown, that resentment was directed at Modi himself, who was seen as the face of a system that treats ordinary people like cockroaches.
Many of those who had streamed into the capital after Wangchuk was forcibly removed from Jantar Mantar in Delhi had endured long train journeys. Most of them did not have the luxury of air-conditioned coaches. They had traveled in ordinary train cars, which Indians refer to as “general-class” coaches. In those sweltering, poorly ventilated coaches, passengers are routinely packed like sardines and somehow brave the lingering smells of piss and sweat.
The “general-class” coaches in Indian trains exist as visceral reminders to young Indians of what the “general” quality of life feels like. Millions of young aspirants are condemned to ride these moving purgatories every year, traveling to college or job-recruitment examinations that they often find have been canceled.
The essence of the youth protest was a revolt against the persistent denial of education and employment that would enable them to lead the decent lives of people they glimpse in the few air-conditioned coaches most Indian trains have.
Most of these young people never make it to a future of decent employment, given the deepening structural mismatch between the expansion of higher education and the availability of secure, high-quality jobs. The number of college graduates has increased since the education sector was opened to private investment, at a far more rapid pace than the employment opportunities available to them. A recent report by researchers at Azim Premji University showed that while the share of graduates among 20-to-29-year-olds has risen from just 4% in 1983 to 28% today, graduates now account for 67% of the unemployed in that age group.
India ranks near the bottom globally in providing formal salaried employment, according to World Bank data. A mere 23% of Indians hold salaried jobs; the share is double that in countries with more developed manufacturing sectors: Vietnam, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. Worse, many of these salaried jobs in India’s service-led economy are not in high-tech fields such as information technology but in occupations like retail sales, primary school teaching, domestic cleaning, and cooking.
The long “waithood” of young Indians between education and employment, as the anthropologist Craig Jeffrey put it, can turn into a humiliating ordeal. The stigma of unemployment is compounded by the guilt of knowing that your parents had to drain their savings or mortgage their land to pay for the steep fees demanded by colleges and coaching centers. All for nothing.
India’s National Crime Records Bureau estimated that more than 1,23,000 students in the country committed suicide between 2014 and 2024, citing “failure in examinations” and “family problems” as the primary reasons for ending their lives. As many as 15,000 students died by suicide in 2024, the last year for which government data is available, an 80% jump over the past decade.
In the end, the young cockroaches proved so resilient because Modi’s regime of control had no punishment or humiliation to threaten them with beyond what the system already inflicts on them every day. These young men and women had reached a point where they felt they had no voice in the existing order—and nothing left to lose.
These protests pose no immediate threat to the stability of the Modi government. Nor are they bound to seriously damage his BJP’s prospects in upcoming state elections given the extent of the party’s institutional dominance and the fragmented state of the opposition. What is more, the Hindu nationalist BJP maintains its ideological hold over roughly a quarter of the population in many Indian states.
Yet the protests have exposed the limits of the 75-year-old prime minister’s personal appeal to an expanding swath of the population after 12 years in power.