India’s leader vexed by satirical party

France’s violent student uprising has captured headlines in recent weeks. Yet India’s strongman Prime Minister Narendra Modi is struggling to tame an upstart gen Z challenge of his own — and it shows no signs of slowing down.

Youth-led protests beginning on Oct. 10 paralyzed central New Delhi for several days as demonstrators called for India’s election commissioner to resign over unexplained database changes that deleted 130 million people from voter registries. Many accuse Modi’s Hindu-first ruling party of ramming through the changes for its own benefit. Mass arrests were carried out by the 25,000-plus security forces brought in to lock down the capital.

It’s just the latest headache the Cockroach movement has caused for Modi.

At a court hearing in May, India’s top judge called jobless youth “cockroaches” and “parasites” for criticizing the country on social media. His offhand comments triggered instant fury, as Indian graduates often struggle to find work in their field in an economy dominated by low-skilled sectors. Their unemployment rate is three times higher than the country’s average — 40 per cent for graduates under 25.

“What if all cockroaches came together?” mused Abhijeet Dipke, an Indian student living in Boston. Responding to an ensuring flood of memes, he launched a parody website the next day for the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) — “a political party for the people the system forgot to count.”

The group’s Instagram profile has now racked up 27 million followers. Dipke has returned to India too, joining the movement’s vanguard, which has developed five policy demands to make the country’s notoriously tiered education system more transparent and equitable.

Tens of thousands of student protesters then filled the streets of New Delhi in July. Clashing with baton-wielding police under a shroud of tear gas, they demanded Modi’s education minister quit.

The demonstrations were sparked by an exam leak scandal that forced two million aspiring medical students to re-do their entrance tests to compete for just 130,000 spots. The stress reportedly led to multiple suicides; working-class families in India often pool their savings and pin their hopes on their sole academic high-achiever to deliver for everyone.

Initially defiant, Modi eventually bowed to public pressure. By the July’s end, he accepted the resignation of his cabinet member — a capitulation unheard of in the strongman’s dozen-year rule.

It’s not the first time Modi has faced adversity. In mid-2024, many pundits believed the populist leader was doomed. He and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) struggled to adjust to governing in a coalition for the first time. And both Ottawa and Washington were irate over India allegedly targeting Sikh nationalists on their soil.

Meanwhile, a billionaire tycoon close to Modi faced allegations that his conglomerate, the Adani Group, one of India’s corporate champions, was defrauding investors and faking its financial data — possibly with the prime minister’s knowledge.

Yet India’s 76-year-old leader weathered that storm. The country is now on pace to surpass Germany as the world’s third-largest economy in coming years. In part because Modi himself has successfully convinced U.S. tech companies to relocate some of their Chinese factories to India and set up enormous data centres to serve India’s online market of 1 billion-plus internet users.

Ironically, the Cockroach movement is riding this same wave of digitization to make itself heard.

“Many youth flocked to Mr. Modi during his rise to power, given his digital savvy, sheer energy and promise to create millions of good jobs,” writes Sanjay Ruparelia, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and senior fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. “Twelve years later, they are demanding better prospects, competent institutions and government accountability with creativity, humour and defiance.”

The ruling party cannot dismiss them as anti-national or foreign puppets, Ruparelia adds. “Its political authority has cracked.”

“They in effect beat Modi at his own game,” Bloomberg echoed in July after India’s leader was forced to accept his education minister stepping down. “India may be poor, but it has the internet connectivity — and mobile-phone penetration — of a much richer country.” The BJP leveraged this early on in Modi’s tenure, harnessing social media as a means to grow his cult of personality and reach voters outside major urban centres.

For now, the CJP bears surface-level resemblance to other youth-led movements in recent years that have brought down governments in Bangladesh, Nepal, Madagascar and Sri Lanka. But, it’s extremely unlikely they’ll oust Modi from power.

However, like their namesake, the CJP won’t be easy to get rid of either.

Kyle Volpi Hiebert is a Montreal-based political risk analyst focused on globalization, conflict and emerging technologies