On the evening of August 4th, a significant political upset reverberated through India, far from the nation’s capital. In the eastern city of Patna, approximately 1,000 kilometers from New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) experienced an unexpected electoral defeat, marking one of its most notable setbacks in 12 years. The constituency of Bankipur, located within Bihar’s legislative assembly, had been a BJP stronghold for three decades. However, the newly formed Jan Suraaj Party, helmed by political strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor, successfully unseated the BJP. This victory was particularly striking as the seat had been previously held by Nitin Nabin, the BJP’s national president, until a few months prior.
This electoral blow followed closely on the heels of another significant event: the resignation of India’s Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. His departure came after seven weeks of sustained student-led protests that had ignited in New Delhi and subsequently spread to various other cities. These demonstrations were spearheaded by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a satirical movement that originated on Instagram in May. The CJP’s formation was a direct response to India’s chief justice, Surya Kant, who controversially likened unemployed young Indians to “cockroaches” and “parasites.” During the Bankipur campaign, Nabin, the BJP chief, had vocally condemned the country’s Generation Z protesters, labeling them as “a virus and a cockroach gang devoted to breaking the country.” Ironically, it was the BJP’s long-held dominance in the constituency that was ultimately shattered. This unforeseen electoral outcome has prompted a wider national discourse, with analysts questioning whether the formidable political machinery of the BJP will be compelled to re-evaluate its strategies.
The BJP’s response to this surge of Gen Z activism clearly indicates that the party perceives it as more than a fleeting inconvenience, evident in the noticeable awkwardness of their counter-efforts. At the peak of the protests, Prime Minister Modi released a series of selfie-style videos on Instagram, directly addressing the exam paper leaks that had ignited the demonstrations. Reports suggest he advised his cabinet colleagues that young people predominantly engaged with “Instagram,” urging ministers to utilize the platform for outreach through reels rather than traditional media briefings. In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, the party initiated a Gen Z outreach program, dispatching civil administrative officers to schools for career counseling sessions. The BJP also released a gym-themed video featuring young individuals exchanging internet slang with an older trainer, who subtly steered the conversation toward the government’s development achievements. The heavy-handed use of slang in the video led to widespread mockery on Instagram, with users jokingly speculating that the party had paid young people to produce propaganda aimed at their own generation. Following an incident where a Modi video briefly disappeared from Facebook, the parliamentary committee on information technology demanded an apology from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Asim Ali, a New Delhi-based analyst, suggests that this sudden and somewhat frantic pursuit of social media relevance reveals much about the party’s current state. He notes that the BJP once effectively cultivated narratives that its own supporters would organically disseminate. Today, however, much of its messaging “feels more managed and paid for,” a mismatch for the decentralized nature of platforms like Instagram, which are less amenable to top-down discipline than the earlier Facebook and WhatsApp. Ali elaborated to Al Jazeera, “The party’s communications machinery remains powerful, given its control over the mainstream media. But on social media, especially Instagram, it is unable to generate the kind of organic emotional identification that it could around 2011 to 2014.”
Gilles Verniers, a researcher at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po in Paris, characterizes the BJP’s outreach as primarily “a battle for perception” rather than a substantive shift in policy. He points out, “There haven’t been any proposals that fundamentally change anything. There’s a new minister for education, but he comes from the same background, an old man from the RSS.” The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) serves as the far-right ideological parent organization of the BJP. Verniers argues that what has truly fractured is the BJP’s established method of combating dissent: routinely labeling protesters as anti-national, foreign-funded, or terrorists, a tactic employed during the 2019-20 demonstrations against the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). This altered citizenship law controversially introduced, for the first time, a religious criterion for naturalized citizenship, offering a fast track to non-Muslim asylum seekers from India’s neighboring countries.
The previous approach to protests faltered this time for several reasons. Firstly, the movement itself preemptively undermined state attempts to ridicule it, and secondly, its pluralistic nature made it harder to stereotype. Unlike the anti-CAA or farmers’ protests, this movement could not be narrowly attributed to a single religion or community. It also drew in young people from what is considered the BJP’s own traditional “upper-caste” Hindu base, making it a “truly caste-blind movement,” according to Verniers. The episode also significantly eroded the BJP’s carefully cultivated image of Prime Minister Modi having a natural connection with the youth. For the first time, Verniers observes, the 75-year-old Prime Minister “appears his age.” He added, “What the movement has done is really turn him into a boomer in the public imagination, and that must really, really hurt.”
Examining the recent electoral results, the BJP experienced losses in two of the three by-elections held in the first week of August, in states where it governs: Bankipur in Bihar and Datia in Madhya Pradesh. However, the party comfortably retained Manjalpur in Gujarat, Modi’s home state. While opposition leaders directly linked these losses to the student protests, analysts urge caution. Ali warned against over-interpreting the Bankipur outcome. Verniers added that by-elections are decided by a fraction of the electorate, often involving “barely a third of the population voting,” and noted that the BJP’s power structure “has proved very resilient to absorbing setbacks.” He cited the example of Haryana, where the BJP secured a majority a few years after the northern state’s farmers engaged in a year-long protest against three controversial agricultural laws. That election, he explained, was contested “not on farmers, but on caste.” What has undeniably shifted, however, is not just the vote count, but the emerging narrative surrounding these events, which is now coalescing “into a broader narrative of challenges to the BJP.”
Pushpendra Saroj, a 27-year-old Samajwadi Party Member of Parliament from Kaushambi in Uttar Pradesh – where the Samajwadi Party is the primary opposition to the BJP – was among the few politicians who frequently visited Jantar Mantar, the central hub of the Gen Z protests in New Delhi. Saroj observed the demonstrations grow from a few hundred participants into thousands after activist Sonam Wangchuk was hospitalized following a 20-day hunger strike. He attributed this expansion to “the aggression from the government,” citing weeks of official silence, alleged disruptions to power and water supplies, and the baton charge against protesters in New Delhi on July 20th. The crowd expanded beyond its student base to include army veterans and even active police officers. The politician highlighted that the education minister’s resignation only occurred after “fingers got pointed at the prime minister directly.” A more fundamental factor also contributed to the growing sympathy: “Nobody likes to see children getting beaten up,” Saroj remarked.
For many who participated in the New Delhi demonstrations, the underlying issues transcend a satirical “Cockroach” Instagram page or a singular ministerial resignation. Anjali, a postgraduate student and secretary of the All India Students’ Association (AISA) at the University of Delhi – an established left-aligned group that mobilized alongside the CJP – interprets these protests as the visible manifestation of long-simmering resentment. She told Al Jazeera, “We know for a fact that this did not originate from a particular remark or any particular leak. This is an accumulated anger of the youth of this country for the last 12 years. As long as communal, casteist, anti-women politics is not ended, this is not a victory in any terms.”
Anjali also criticized the disproportionate consequences faced by certain groups once the protests subsided. She pointed out that Muslim and Dalit students were “the first to be put behind bars” and the first to endure intimidation and police complaints, drawing parallels to the 2019 raid on Jamia Millia Islamia, a New Delhi university central to the anti-CAA protests. In the western state of Goa, two young men were detained for allegedly supporting jailed activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam while celebrating Pradhan’s resignation, an incident Anjali views as part of the same troubling pattern.
Regarding the future trajectory of the CJP movement, Ali, Verniers, and Anjali collectively agree that a foray into electoral politics is improbable. Verniers commended the group’s restraint so far as “tactically smart,” drawing a comparison to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). The AAP, which emerged from a protest movement and successfully formed a government, is now, a decade later, “seen as a disappointment” and “on the verge of disappearance” in some of its former strongholds. A national political campaign necessitates financial resources, volunteers, and organizational infrastructure, which a young, often underemployed movement typically lacks. Verniers suggests that the CJP’s more enduring influence will be on the agendas of other parties, operating “as an interest group, rather than as a separate political force,” a role that the opposition has shown an unusual willingness to embrace. Anjali described AISA’s approach in similar terms: maintaining a presence at Jantar Mantar, but unwilling to narrow the struggle to a single resignation. The group, she affirmed, intends to continue building a robust case against the government across campuses nationwide. Despite requests, 18 national spokespeople for the BJP did not provide comments to Al Jazeera for this article.
Ali expressed his belief that the BJP is unlikely to abandon its Hindu majoritarian politics – an ideology known as Hindutva – in favor of a platform centered on jobs and education, as advocated by the CJP-led Gen Z protesters. “I don’t think the BJP would dilute its Hindutva agenda; if anything, it would double down on it, so that the most salient issue in any election is religious identity,” he stated. However, Verniers posits that what has fundamentally changed is not necessarily the BJP’s raw political power, but rather its legitimacy. “Electorally speaking, they are as dominant as they’ve ever been, perhaps more,” Verniers acknowledged, citing the party’s consistent ability to win elections, orchestrate defections, and outspend its rivals as evidence of its continued success and its pushing “the boundaries of what is democratically admissible.” Yet, the inherent authority underpinning that dominance has been significantly eroded by the protests. This growing chasm “between the actual power that the BJP has, and its ability to have citizens comply and obey” is far more difficult to mend with a mere by-election victory or a polished social media reel, he concluded. This disjuncture, Verniers stressed, “is the really important, interesting disconnect” that the party must now contend with.
