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.
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).
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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