July 31, 2026

The International Action Center would like to bring information to its readers about the development of a mass youth movement in India, which at this moment in self-defense is mobilizing opposition to the reactionary government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his billionaire-friendly Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). 

The writer, Neha Dixit, is an independent journalist living in New Delhi, India, whose short biography describes her as an experienced writer with a focus on intersections of gender, politics and social justice, in multiple mediums including online, print and television in South Asia. She has been a contributing reporter for Al Jazeera, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other media. 

This article was published by Fausto Giudice on July 25, 2026, on his substack site in English, where it has also been translated and published in French, German, Italian and Spanish. Workers World leaves it in the original style. Since then India’s Union Minister of Education, Dharmendra Pradhan, has resigned, which is a victory for this movement.

“IN MY MEMORY, I have only heard that people who speak against the Indian government are ‘anti-national’,” Pragya Gautam, a 20-year-old Dalit student from the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, told me at a protest site in Jantar Mantar, in the heart of Delhi. She had taken an overnight train to the national capital, without informing her parents and carrying only INR 200 and her smartphone. “In the last week, I have realised that it is not those people but the Indian government itself that is anti-national.”

Gautam wants to become a doctor. For the past three years, she has been preparing for and trying to crack the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), India’s unified examination for medical studies. She took the exam in 2024 and 2025, and appeared for it again on 3 May this year. She thought it went very well. “I was sure I would get through this time.”

Nearly 2.3 million students took the test, competing for about 130,000 medical college seats. On May 12, the National Testing Agency, which manages entrance exams and admissions for the ministry of education, announced that the NEET held on 3 May had been cancelled because the exam paper had been leaked. A retake was scheduled for 21 June. The NEET paper had also been leaked in 2021 and 2024.

Gautam’s parents had given her three years after she finished school to secure admission to a medical college or else get married. The retake was her fourth and final attempt at the exam. She had been staying at the protest site for a few days when I met her. “Had I not joined the cockroaches in Delhi,” she said, “I would have killed myself. ”

At least 12 NEET aspirants took their own lives between the cancelled test and the retake.

ON 15 MAY, four days after telling Indian citizens to avoid foreign travel for a year to help the country’s economy weather the effects of the ongoing crisis in West Asia, Narendra Modi, the prime minister, left for a diplomatic tour of five countries.

That same day, Surya Kant, the Chief Justice of India, while hearing a petition in the Supreme Court, declared, “There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment or have any place in the profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, RTI activists and other activists, and they start attacking everyone.” He likened these young people to “parasites in the system.”

Abhijit Dipke, a 30-year-old Dalit graduate, launched a satirical Instagram account for the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), playing on the name of Modi’s own Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He wrote that anyone looking to join the CJP needs to be lazy, unemployed, always online and able to rant like a pro – integral traits in the popular stereotype of Gen Z, the generation that has come of age in roughly the last decade. In India, it numbers roughly 350 million people, and accounts for about a quarter of the population.

Within a week, the CJP’s Instagram account hit 10 million followers, surpassing the BJP’s following on the platform. The CJP launched a campaign demanding the resignation of the education minister, the BJP’s Dharmendra Pradhan. He had begun his career as an activist of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which is the parent body of the BJP, and had himself once taken part in major student protests against paper leaks – an endemic problem in India for many decades.

The campaign picked up speed. Since 2019 alone, there have been 64 known paper leaks involving major competitive exams in 19 Indian states. On social media, people began sharing their struggles and disappointments with the country’s competitive entrance exams and education system. The CJP also asked all “cockroaches” to share videos and photos exposing poor governance: failing infrastructure, official corruption, misbehaving politicians and more. The posts kept coming. When Dipke urged people to unfollow the BJP’s social media handles, the Indian government got X to block the CJP’s account on the platform.

Dipke had launched the CJP from the United States, where he had gone to pursue his education. Earlier, he had worked as a communications strategist for the Aam Aadmi Party, a fierce opponent of the BJP that was born out of an anti-corruption movement in the 2010s before being suppressed and squandering its insurgent appeal. He returned to India in early June to begin the first CJP protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar – a designated site for protest in the capital. Dipke said the goal was to “exercise our constitutional right to seek accountability from the government.”

Sonam Wangchuk, an educator and activist from Ladakh, joined the protest in Delhi. Wangchuk first came to many Indians’ attention via the 2009 Bollywood movie Three Idiots, which featured a character fashioned after him who opposed the prevailing system of rote learning. Last year, he was imprisoned for six months after protesting Ladakh’s treatment at the hands of the BJP-led government. Other CJP protests sprang up elsewhere in the country, including Pune, Jaipur, Lucknow and Bengaluru.

In late June, Wangchuk began a hunger strike demanding Pradhan’s resignation. Six student activists – all members of the All India Students Association (AISA), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation – decided to join him.

Meanwhile, the Jantar Mantar protest inspired several other protests across India on issues of livelihood and constitutional rights. In Uttarakhand, people protested to halt the felling of trees to widen a highway. In Madhya Pradesh, tribal communities protested against the Ken-Betwa river interlinking project, which threatens to displace them. Many prominent activists, academics, artists, writers and political leaders lent their support to the CJP’s growing movement, and Wangchuk’s hunger strike drew increasing attention, especially as his condition deteriorated.

But the government did not budge, or so much as speak on the issue. Like many hypermasculine global leaders, Modi has made it a part of his political image that, with rare exceptions, he does not back down in the face of opposition or protest. Pradhan remained as the education minister.

In the early hours of 18 July, amid mounting concern for Wangchuk’s health, the government forcibly removed him from Jantar Mantar. It was the 21st day of his hunger strike. Visuals of Wangchuk being dragged away on white sheets were all over the internet within minutes. He was placed in a government hospital with a massive police guard and his wife was denied the right to move him.

The same day, a woman threw blue ink at Dipke, claiming that the protest was insulting Hindu deities – a favourite canard of the BJP and its Hindu nationalist adherents. But Dipke turned the incident into a symbolic victory – “Blue is my colour, Jai Bhim” – leveraging the colour’s association with the anti-caste movement and Bhimrao Ambedkar, the iconic Dalit leader who led the drafting of the Constitution of India.

The government’s treatment of Wangchuk fuelled more indignation. The CJP had already issued a call for a peaceful protest march to the Indian parliament on July 20. Thousands of young people boarded buses and trains all over the country in the direction of Delhi. WhatsApp groups were used to coordinate and social media posts listed dos and don’t for first-time protesters. Many of the newcomers slept on the pavements of central Delhi, at a gurdwara that offered them food and shelter, or at the protest site itself.

The government imposed a ban on mass assembly and an internet shutdown across much of central Delhi. Thousands marched anyway. They were met with barricades, water cannons and huge numbers of security personnel equipped with riot gear, lathis and tear gas. They charged at protesters, beat them, dragged them through the streets; many women protesters had their clothes torn off. Many were tear-gassed, and at least three protesters were shot with pellet guns. At least one police officer had a nail affixed to his baton. All of this was recorded on phone cameras and found its way online.

Over 110 were injured, and the police violently broke up the Jantar Mantar protest site. But as footage of the government’s brutality rocked the country, by that evening a crowd had started to gather at Jantar Mantar again. This time young people were joined by more and more of the older generations – parents, neighbours, onlookers, even some celebrities who had long remained silent on anything that could provoke the government. By midnight, the stage where the hunger-strikers had lain was rebuilt and the protest resumed.

It is still there, and larger than before. And, online and in the physical world, the outrage and the protests continue to spread.

TEN YEARS AGO, I published an investigative story that exposed how RSS-affiliated groups had trafficked 31 tribal girls from India’s Northeast to indoctrinate them in Hindu nationalist ideology.

In Punjab and Gujarat, on the opposite side of the country, they were being taught to pray to Hindu gods instead of their traditional deities, to leave behind their native languages and customs, to hate Muslims and Christians, and to commit self-immolation to protect their honour. I discovered that thousands of tribal children from the Northeast had been similarly separated from their parents with the promise of a free education.

These actions broke several Indian and international laws, and flew in the face of Supreme Court orders and legal protocols. The pattern was reminiscent of what has been called a “cultural genocide” in Canada, Australia and elsewhere, with a history of residential schools run by the government and Christian missionaries to “civilize” indigenous children.

My investigation offered a window into the RSS model of education, which the BJP-led government has aggressively pushed in order to homogenise, control and censor India’s diverse pedagogical practices. Shortly after it appeared, I faced two criminal cases: one for criminal defamation and another for inciting communal hatred. I faced rampant online abuse, threats to me and my family, and an attempted acid attack. The cases continue to drag through the courts.

It was two years since Modi and the BJP had won national power, and this was part of what we now know to have been the early phase of the Modi government’s crackdown on independent journalism and all forms of criticism, protest or dissent.

A civil disobedience movement in 2015 had seen nearly 50 writers and artists return their government awards to protest growing communal hatred and attacks on free speech. They were met with vicious slander from Hindu Right trolls online and the government’s acolytes in the mainstream media. The movement began after a right-wing Hindu mob in Dadri, near Delhi, lynched a Muslim man accused of eating beef. Earlier that year, the rationalist intellectuals Govind Pansare and M M Kalburgi had been assassinated by a right-wing Hindu group.

Many others would go on to face harassment and persecution from the government and the Hindu Right. In 2016, around the time that my investigation came out, Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), demonised by the Hindu Right as a den of liberal and leftist thought, faced a disinformation-fuelled crackdown against political activism and free expression. Three student leaders were arrested for allegedly raising “anti-national” slogans. Right-wing repression soon became the norm at universities across the country – including at the University of Hyderabad after a Dalit scholar, Rohith Vemula, took his own life in despair at his treatment by Hindu Right activists and a government-aligned university administration.

All of this bred a fear of standing up to the government and the Hindu Right that gradually crept into every facet of Indian public life. And much more of the same was to follow. Sixteen prominent civil-society figures were arrested on charges of terrorism stemming from government investigations into a 2018 clash between Hindu nationalists and anti-caste activists in the town of Bhima Koregaon, in Maharashtra. Independent forensic analysis has shown that malware was used to plant incriminating evidence on the digital devices of several of these individuals. Stan Swamy, an ageing Jesuit priest and tribal-rights activist, died in prison without trial while the courts repeatedly refused him medical bail.

In August 2019, the government announced the impending revocation of Article 370 of the constitution, meaning an end to the statehood of Jammu and Kashmir – the only Muslim-majority state in the country – as well as its special status within the Indian republic. In the Kashmir Valley, protests were brutally crushed and the internet shut down for over a year and a half. Such shutdowns have since become pervasive: India now ranks highest by internet shutdowns among democratic countries across the globe, and it imposed 65 of them in 2025 alone.

In December 2019, the government passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which for the first time introduced religious criteria into Indian citizenship law by easing the path to naturalisation for non-Muslim minorities from several of the country’s neighbours. Any Muslims deemed to have arrived from these countries past 2014, meanwhile, were to be considered illegal migrants. This, alongside a proposed nationwide National Register of Citizens (NRC) to weed out “illegal immigrants”, sparked fears of the bureaucratic denaturalisation of Indian Muslims. Widespread protests were countered by the now-familiar demonisation of the demonstrators by online trolls and the pro-government media – often called the “godi media”, or lapdog media.

After a spontaneous, women-led anti-CAA protest took root in the neighbourhood of Shaheen Bagh, near Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University, police and paramilitary forces attacked students on the university campus. By January 2020, similar protests against the CAA and NRC had spread across the capital and the country. The protests ended, and the government shelved the NRC plan, after a communal riot in northeastern Delhi in late February that was fuelled by well-documented hate speech from BJP leaders, with the police complicit or looking away. More than 50 people were killed, the large majority of them Muslims. Umar Khalid – earlier arrested in the JNU crackdown – was accused of inciting the rioting and arrested. He remains in jail on terrorism charges, still without trial.

In late 2020, hundreds of thousands of farmers converged on Delhi to protest new agricultural laws. Halted at the capital’s borders, they set up kilometric camps along the highways that endured for well over a year, through sporadic confrontations with the police and a massive vilification campaign. Farmers’ unions recorded more than 700 deaths of people who were taking part. The protests lasted until the government finally withdrew the laws.

I covered many of these stories and protests. In the prevailing climate, each was an astonishing act of defiance. For protest organisers and leaders, targeted persecution and arrest were a constant possibility. For participants, and even for onlookers or journalists there to simply do their jobs, the spectre of state violence was almost constant – though sometimes, as in the throng of the farmer protests, the sheer number of the protesters offered a reprieve. The courage of the protesters sometimes challenged the wider societal sense of fear, but their courage never really spread to other sections of society.

This time, as the CJP protests spread, the mood has shifted – especially as the government, with its tired old methods, is struggling to contain Gen Z expression online, and the traditional media that has been one of its main weapons is confounded by a new generation that has bypassed and lost faith in it entirely. The CJP protesters share many of the best tactics and traits of the earlier protest movements – including solidarity across religion, caste and class – and they have added a biting creativity and online reach that none of those movements ever matched. And steadily – and at least for now – they have shaken the Modi government’s stranglehold of fear.

Neha Bora, a PhD student at JNU and the president of AISA, was one of the six who joined Wangchuk on his hunger strike. “Often, after a state or police crackdown on protesters, there is silence,” she told me. “When the movement stops being afraid of a crackdown, people’s fear goes out the window.”

IN 2021, Modi coined the term andolanjeevi – protest parasites – for the protesting farmers. In 2019, before the protests over the CAA and NRC, the home minister, Amit Shah, called illegal immigrants “termites”. Both were condemned for such dehumanising language but neither faced any consequence. Kant’s remarks about “cockroaches” appeared just as uncaring – but this time, young people claimed the insult as a badge of honour.

“Even though the CJP started as a satirical platform, it was in the right place at the right time,” Bora said. “There was belated anger and frustration over a long time.”

One of Modi’s promises when he came to power in 2014 was to create 20 million jobs a year. The country never hit those numbers, and many of the jobs that have materialised – in gig work, for example – have been precarious, with terrible conditions and pay. Youth unemployment is massive, and increased educational enrollment has produced more graduates looking for good jobs that simply don’t exist.

Less than 7 percent of Indian graduates have permanent salaried jobs. There were more than 220 million applicants for the 722,000 appointments to positions with India’s central government between 2014 and 2022. Meanwhile, the richest one percent of the country’s population holds approximately 40 percent of its total wealth, and the elite – including many government ministers – increasingly opts to bypass Indian universities and send their children to study overseas.

“Competitive entrance exams are one of the few fair shots for Indian students to cross over and secure employment in the formal economy,” Shipra Nigam, an economist who studies unemployment in India, said. “Corporate jobs often require class and caste privileges and connections. That is why government jobs command a premium, and competitive exams to secure them appear to be a level playing field.” With paper leaks, even this small promise of a decent life is gone.

This affects not only working-class students but also the middle classes, whose household incomes have not kept pace with inflation. Studying for competitive exams takes a lot of time, effort and resources, and many spend years in preparation. According to Dipa Sinha, a development economist, “In the last few years, there has been stagnation in Indian family incomes. Families cut corners to support aspirants to prepare for these exams. Cancellation and re-examination after paper leaks makes another round of preparation difficult.”

Sinha added that “many young people can’t afford to wait for their dream jobs,” so they “end up going back to agricultural, casual, or similar work. ” Many can relate to the CJP’s cause because of their lived reality. “All their ambition for a better life has been blocked and sealed. This is their outlet.”

But this is not the only frustration driving the CJP movement. Many have pointed out its similarities to the recent wave of Gen Z-led protests across Southasia and the world. Students in Bangladesh sparked a revolt in 2024 that toppled the autocratic government of Sheikh Hasina. Protests broke out in Indonesia, the Philippines and Nepal – where the entire old political order was swept away in 2025 – and more followed in the Maldives, Madagascar and beyond. These movements shared grievances over inequality and corruption, public accountability and government impunity, and the erosion of democratic rights. The CJP protests have swelled with similar anxieties.

Older generations have also nursed similar complaints, but Gen Z protesters – including the CJP – have found new ways to articulate and amplify them, primarily on social media. As India’s first digital-native generation, brought up under a post-truth regime and long exposed to the notorious BJP IT Cell – the party’s social media wing – they understand that emotion can count at least as much as facts in the battle of narratives, that memes and humour spread fastest online, and that these can be the best tools for countering propaganda.

Just as with the earlier protest movements, there has been plenty of pro-government propaganda around the CJP. Television anchors and the BJP’s online army have deployed their usual allegations to try and discredit the protesters – opposition conspiracy, a hidden foreign hand, threats to national security – but none of these have halted the CJP’s momentum. After years of blatant misinformation from these quarters, the movement’s young participants have learnt to ignore them. And while television remains hugely influential among older demographics, and is still perhaps the most potent medium for the BJP in reaching its base, Gen Z discourse has moved almost entirely online, and developed vocabularies and conventions that are entirely its own.

The CJP is even breaking through to parts of the BJP’s base. Bora’s family is a case in point. They support the ruling party, she said, and still trust mainstream television news as well as the WhatsApp forwards that have become notorious for spreading fake news. They dislike that she is a student activist and regularly repeat the propaganda against JNU. They also discouraged her from going on hunger strike. But on 19 July, the 22nd day of her fast, feeling extremely weak, Bora awoke after dozing off to find her mother massaging her legs. She had travelled from Bareilly, their home district, in Uttar Pradesh. “I didn’t expect her to come,” Bora said.Her mother stayed in Delhi for the night before returning home on the afternoon of 20 June. “For years, she has believed in the state narrative that protesters are terrorists and the police are very kind,” Bora said. “I wish she could see the kind of police brutality that followed.”

That day, Bora and two of her fellow hunger strikers finally broke their fasts. She had not expected the number of protesters who came out in the CJP’s support. “It made it clear that the anger was not just against Dharmendra Pradhan but against continued neglect of the youth and unemployment.”

ON 24 JULY, Modi finally addressed the protesters. In his first-ever selfie video on Instagram, with halting language and awkward framing, he promised new legislation, strict action and special fast-track courts to punish any perpetrators. There was nothing on the demand for Pradhan’s resignation.

Within minutes, there was a deluge of reels calling the video “cringe” and Modi “Unc Pro Max” – “unc” being Gen Z slang for “uncle”. Young people said his promises were tokenistic and that their concerns had hardly been addressed. They also offered the prime minister free tutorials on good camera angles and writing better scripts.

A viral social media trend is calling for “spine checks” to see which public personalities have shown the spine to speak up, and encouraging people to unfollow those who have not. More celebrities have come forward in the last few days to express support for the students and protesters.

Selfies taken in police detention and dance reels from police stations continue in circulation. In Bihar, protesters mocked the police for not having tear-gas shells to disperse them. When hit with water cannons, they responded with a “rain dance”. All over the country, running away from baton-charging cops is now called Subway Surfers Protest Edition, riffing on the name of a popular runner game. Protesters have been sharing their “scores” and mocking the poor fitness levels of the police.There are self-defence tutorials and GRWM (Get Ready With Me) reels to prepare people for attending protests. After the government deployed surveillance cameras and facial-recognition tools to track protestors, new reels came up showing how makeup can be used to confuse the technology.

Protests are being called parties, and protesters are putting on open mics, talent shows, jams and dancing. A new crop of protest songs is going viral. Many are encouraging “protest dates” instead of dating apps to find a partner with the right worldview.

Supporters are using delivery apps to send food and other resources to the protesters. During the farmer protests, the media attacked farmers for the supposedly decadent act of eating pizza. Gen Z protesters are making “What I eat in a day” reels showing burgers, pizzas, momos, noodles and protein bars. They are also showing how people from across the country and abroad are sending them resources, unfazed by accusations of foreign interference.

Adherents of politicians and political parties – whether they are spreading conspiracy theories or demanding ideological purity of the movement – have been labelled “park-wale uncle and aunty” – the ubiquitous old uncles and aunties who haunt India’s neighbourhood parks. There are calls to “child lock” the television to stop parents from watching the compromised news, and news channels are being mocked for their poorly edited or AI-generated clips.

Where earlier protesters put their demands across through memorandums and petitions, now the demands are coming through memes and reels. And these have grown far beyond just exam reforms or Pradhan’s resignation, which finally came the day after Modi addressed the protesters. Words like “responsibility” and “accountability” are frequently heard. There are calls for Modi himself to go, signalling discontentment with the government as a whole.

The Jantar Mantar protest site, reclaimed after the 20 July crackdown, has turned into a cultural space for resistance, solidarity and understanding. There is artwork, music and langar sewa – a community service to feed and care for the protesters. Much of this echoes the best of the earlier protest movements: community kitchens and langar sewa were a big part of the farmer protests, and the protest site at Shaheen Bagh came to resemble a streetside art gallery. Another echo of those earlier protests is how participants are openly criticising the BJP’s ties to big-money corporations such as the Adani Group and Reliance Industries, and speaking out against the godi media. There are calls for unity with farmers and workers, discussions on issues of caste and class.

There are other solidarities too. There is empathy for Manipur, the northeastern state where the government’s apathy has let communal violence run on for three years, and for Kashmir. Women and queer people have posted reels on how the protest site is a safe space. People of multiple faiths and backgrounds have been visiting the site in solidarity, support and concern.

There is solidarity with gig workers on the delivery apps, many of whom are also part-time students. “Gig workers represent the lack of social security and decent work available to young people once they enter the labour market,” Nitesh Kumar Das, the organising secretary of the Gig Workers Association, told me. “Through these protests, there are conversations to ensure that young people not only have pathways into work but also access to work that is sustainable, secure and dignified.”

A wall of shame at Jantar Mantar documents police brutality. Graffiti adorns the surrounding walls. One wall reads, “A whole protest because a manchild won’t take hint.” Another demands a ban on the RSS, raises the Ambedkarite call “Jai Bhim”, and declares “Jal jangal zameen and jobs hamari hain”, asserting the people’s ownership of jobs in addition to the water, jungles and land long claimed by India’s beleaguered tribal communities.

There are slogans of “Modi is a diva”, and “Jab jab Modi darta hai, Hindu-Muslim karta hai” – Each time Modi is scared, he starts dividing Hindus and Muslims. Pragya Gautam has met three other young women from Prayagraj at the protest site, and is now volunteering to coordinate resources there. Her mother is in regular touch with her via video call. “She was initially angry with me,” she said, “but promised to let me sit for the NEET again next year if I go back.” She plans to return home, “but only after Modi resigns.”