In recent weeks in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s profound insecurity has resulted in the deplatforming of college students who came together to form a satirical parody account called “Cockroach Janta Party”.
The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) came to be after India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant compared unemployed young people drifting towards journalism and activism to cockroaches and parasites. The harmless joke quickly attracted millions of online followers across Instagram and X, formerly Twitter, which resulted in even more media coverage from BBC, CNN, The Guardian and France 24, making India’s geriatric government pay attention.
Instead of engaging with the discontent meaningfully, the Modi administration has framed it as jeopardising the country’s “national security” and “posing a threat to the sovereignty of India”. The group’s page is no longer accessible in the country. In fact, the government began a multiplatform pressure campaign against the satirical account to push it into oblivion. Its website was taken down, ministers accused the founder of being under “foreign” influence, and a petition was filed in the Supreme Court seeking action against the CJP founder, Abhijeet Dipke.
Going after online accounts with such fierce indignation is like using a cannon to kill a mosquito.
The imaginative prank signals the distress among India’s youth, who enter a market with no jobs, survive extreme weather ranging from heatwaves to unbreathable air, and are constantly lectured about the sacrifices demanded of them. Last month alone, the national entrance exam for undergraduate medical students was found to have been compromised after papers were leaked, while school students were hit by a separate marking scandal. Students who expressed their disappointment on social media were termed “Pakistanis” by our state-sponsored television channel, Doordarshan. We are now a country that accuses our own children of treachery when they express genuine concern. The exam scandals have resulted in a spate of suicides among students, but did not move Prime Minister Narendra Modi to offer a few words of solace.
The same indifference is visible elsewhere. One of the patterns of Modi’s leadership is that his sympathy for the sufferings of humanity tends to increase in direct proportion to the distance of those suffering from Indian borders. He has not acknowledged the alarming deaths from heatwaves – 67 people died in Telangana in a single day – but has taken the time to grieve for the lives lost in China’s Shanxi province in a mining accident.
Modi rules India like a cruel taskmaster, and every task is also a test of loyalty.
His latest order is to work from home, not spend fuel unnecessarily, avoid foreign travel, reduce consumption of cooking oil, abstain from buying gold, work longer, consume less, and be patient. At this point, if you have a job, own a fridge, can afford an air conditioner as well as a foreign trip, the Modi administration considers you to be living in an abyss of decadence. None of it would pinch as much if he did not jet off to Europe right after his sermon about our patriotic duty to tighten our belts.
This time, Modi went on a European tour while refusing to engage with Europe’s free press. In Norway, Helle Lyng Svendsen, a journalist, dared to ask him why he did not take questions from the “freest press in the world”. Modi avoided eye contact and walked away without responding, his body language noticeably sheepish. Watching from India, it seemed absurd that such a person existed in the world who could shout a question at Modi. After 13 years, watching her ask a simple question and expect an answer felt like watching a whole new species that knew how to breathe underwater. It was exhilarating and humiliating at the same time. It does not help that Norway is rated number one while India is ranked 157 in the World Press Freedom Index.
The Indian embassy in Oslo then took to X, announcing a news conference out of spite, in which Sibi George, a diplomat, had a 13-minute outburst filled with boilerplate responses to almost any question about India’s declining freedoms, with a word salad of “140 crore people”, “5,000-year-old civilisation”, “yoga” and “Gandhi”.
For Svendsen, this experience ended with a dose of reality the Indian press has to deal with. She was called a foreign spy and doxxed by Indian right-wing troll armies. Her address and phone number were made public, and, finally, she was deplatformed from Instagram.
Faced with the free mind – be it online with the CJP or with the free press in Norway – Modi, his administration and his trolls tend to go into a physiological, existential shock, and lash out like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum in the chocolate aisle of the supermarket.
A regime that gets so terrified of simple questions or prank tweets by young people tells us very little about the questioner and a lot more about the ruling government. The truth is, the sheen maintained by a formidable propaganda machine has been wiped clean by world events. As war, inflation, H-1B visa restrictions, and tariffs imposed by the United States expose Modi’s ineptitude, his skin grows thinner.
The last few years have been a time of pervasive tragedy.
Modi’s policy misadventures have left deep, gaping wounds in the country – demonetisation, the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir, and the handling of COVID-19 may be the big failures, but the everyday failures: Bridges falling, communities running out of water, paper leaks that damage students’ academic prospects, are what have jolted the youth more. All of them reflect how much this government has failed the common people. Despite a lot of well-financed publicity, it has become difficult to mask this loss of hope in India.
Every nation requires a modicum of material prosperity, hope and confidence in the future. Today, we live in a country where no one trusts what the prime minister says. He is as unpopular as he has ever been, and is running a government with no mandate – the last two election results have been contested by opposition parties, journalists and transparency activists. India has been declared an “electoral autocracy”.
At this point, the BJP is an election-winning machine with no capacity for any other form of political work, much less skilful governance. Pierced by every meme, tweet or question from a journalist, the giant balloon that is Modi’s self-esteem is leaking from a thousand cuts. Agitated, he and his bureaucrats, like George, make increasingly incoherent statements which even his lapdogs cannot spin to make him look good.
Satire has long been a pressure valve in democracies, and suppressing the grievances of India’s youth will not eliminate dissent; it will radicalise them. The government has reasons to be rattled, as regimes across South Asia have fallen after waves of Gen Z protests that began just as innocuously as CJP.
The only joy in this misery is that the intoxication of Modi’s success has evaporated. In the teeth of so many things that might prevent it, the CJP thrives. So do other forms of dissent. In contrast to the temporary balloon of the last two terms, this one, likely to be his final term as prime minister, is already unprecedentedly heavier. One day, soon enough, his government will fall — outlived by India’s ‘cockroaches’.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
