BJP's Machine Met Its Match: Gen Z

In partnership with

Just before midnight on July 23, the Prime Minister of India posted a selfie video on Instagram. A reel — the same format the protesters camped out in Delhi had been using for weeks to livestream their own movement.

It was Narendra Modi's first public comment after weeks of silence on the protests convulsing the capital, and he'd chosen to break it in their language. He called the paper leak "not a trivial matter" and promised fast-track courts to prosecute those responsible.

Within hours, the internet had taken it apart. One parody kept Modi's opening line — he'd addressed the protesters as "friends" — and cut to three young women staring into the camera: "No, we are not." Other edits spliced his pauses and hand gestures into meme templates, set to trending audio, dragging up promises they said he'd never kept.

Twenty-four hours later, Modi posted a reel again. Same format, same hour — this time thanking "the youngsters" for watching the first one and sending "insightful suggestions." 

That same day, at a Cabinet meeting called to toughen penalties for paper leaks, he turned to his ministers and asked how many of them ran active Instagram accounts. Not enough, apparently — because he then told them, according to people in the room, to stop treating X as the whole internet and start making reels of their own.

Watching the man who built one of the most sophisticated political social media machines in the country — a decade of WhatsApp forwards, X armies, an IT cell trained to move fast — get outpaced on a platform, was one of the stranger subplots of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protests. 

For a few weeks in July, the government was visibly playing catch-up.

The protests trace back to a single Supreme Court remark in May, when the Chief Justice compared unemployed young Indians to "cockroaches" and "parasites" — a line the internet turned, within a day, into a satirical political party. The Cockroach Janta Party's Instagram page crossed 10 million followers in under five days, overtaking the BJP's own handle, and eventually climbed past 22 million — more than double what the ruling party had built over a decade. But the CJI's remark was only ever the spark. 

What kept the movement burning through a month of protests, arrests, and a hunger strike was something else — a shared native language, the vocabulary of Instagram itself, deployed as the protests.

At Jantar Mantar, that language showed up everywhere. Protesters filmed GRWM videos — Get Ready With Me, a format built for skincare routines and date nights — except the ritual being prepped for was a police barricade. 

One woman narrated: "Get ready with me to witness the downfall of the government. I am wearing a spine, some jhumkas, and my constitutional right to — oh, never mind!" Others posted "fit checks" featuring helmets, goggles, and homemade protective gear — the influencer aesthetic applied to riot gear.

When police gave chase, protesters narrated the run for the algorithm, joking about their Strava streaks, cutting footage to the Subway Surfers soundtrack. One reel, captioned "Bro thought he can outrun me," crossed 54.8 million views: a baton charge, repackaged instantly as a video-game reference, watched by more people than most Indian news broadcasts reach in a week.

The placards weren't slogans borrowed from older movements. The captions were: "Can't See Your Democracy, My Lashes Are Too Long." "Every joke is a [tiny] revolution."  A poster of the education minister asking "When will AI take his job?" 

A 23-year-old protester told the Associated Press: "We find speeches boring, we are the summary generation. We have a habit of consuming things in a short span of time, so we are using the same ways to put our message across."

I've covered protests before this one. In 2020, I spent nights at Shaheen Bagh, where women in their sixties and seventies sat under tarpaulin through Delhi's winter, reading the Preamble aloud in rotation. Most of them didn't want to be photographed. Being identified there meant a face that could be used against you — by a troll army, by a TV anchor, by a neighbour. 

The protest ran on presence and patience. It took the better part of a year, and even then, the pandemic ended it before the government did.

Jantar Mantar flipped that risk without erasing it. Delhi Police parked vans running live facial recognition at the protest site; officers wore AI-enabled smart glasses. Students started masking their faces at the very protest they wanted photographed, worried a database entry today could cost them a job years later. 

At the same time, being seen was also the entire currency of the movement — you needed to be counted to matter, and being on the gram was how you got counted.

There was, unmistakably, a current of FOMO running through— a pull to show up not only because you believed in the cause, but because your feed was already full of people who did, and because the story you'd tell about this year of your life needed a scene from the frontline. Commentators reached for an old word for this: slacktivism, performance dressed up as politics.

When Rhiya Ahir, a Mumbai model, showed up at the protest site, she had close 100,000 followers. That follower count doubled after a photograph of her standing in front of a police van became one of the movement's defining images.

But a protest that hands out followers is not automatically a lesser protest.  This one got a minister’s resignation in five weeks. 

That fluency — the reels, the followers changing hands, jokes moving faster than any press release — is exactly what the government didn't have.

The BJP knows how to run a decade-old machine: WhatsApp forwards, X threads, an IT cell built to get talking points trending fast. What it doesn't know is how to sound unrehearsed. Instagram runs on irony and self-deprecation, the opposite of a party line. 

Modi's two selfie videos were less a communication strategy than an attempt at translation — take the government's position, strip the formality, post it at the hour Gen Z is actually scrolling. It half worked. But the protesters had already shown they could take his exact words and turn them around faster than his own team could track the engagement, and translation only gets you so far when the other side is faster and funnier than you.

So the government reached for its other hand too — the one holding tools it actually understands: control, restriction, surveillance. On July 22, the CJP's own Instagram account, by then over 20 million followers strong, was geo-blocked following what Meta called only "a legal request." It was restored within minutes, but the account had been down long enough to prove the point. 

Individual protest reels by journalists were geo-restricted; mobile internet was cut in parts of central Delhi during the July 20 march.

The CJP won, in the sense that can be called one: Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, police cases against protesters are being dropped, and families of students who died by suicide after the exam leaks are being compensated.

But there are questions worth pondering over: Can a movement built on trending audio and a five-week attention span outlast the trend? Or does it dissolve the moment Instagram moves on to the next thing? And what happens to everyone who showed their face at Jantar Mantar, now that the cameras — theirs and the government's — have both moved on, but only one side deletes its footage?

The government has learnt, this July, that it needs to speak fluent Instagram.  But can it do that without also reaching for the censored button? 

On My Bookmarks

See you every other Wednesday.

Try the AI that knows your customers. No commitment.

Most platform evaluations start with a demo request and end three weeks later in a conference room. This one takes 15 minutes and puts you directly inside Gladly's interface — navigating it on your own terms.

See how AI surfaces real-time customer context before a conversation starts. Watch how a single conversation thread pulls in purchase history, channel history, and account details without a handoff.

No installation. No commitment. Start the interactive demo and see the platform for yourself.

See it yourself

Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe