‘Every Joke Is a Tiny Revolution’: How Internet Memes Are Rattling Modi’s Authoritarian Government
- When the government sent riot police, baton charges, and tear gas against India's student protesters, it got back something it was not prepared for — a flood of Gen Z ridicule that has made the most powerful man in India look like he is using a cannon to kill a cockroach.
Narendra Modi built his political empire, in significant part, on social media. He was one of the first major world leaders to understand that the internet was not merely a distribution channel for press releases but a space where political identity, emotional resonance, and mass mobilization could be manufactured and sustained. His digital team is among the most sophisticated in democratic politics. His official X account has more than 100 million followers. The BJP’s social media infrastructure dwarfs that of any rival Indian political party.
None of that prepared him for the cockroaches.
The Government’s Problem With Humor
India’s young protesters are mocking their government. And the jokes are landing. As thousands of demonstrators take to the streets in the Indian capital, they are waging a parallel campaign online, flooding social media with memes, parody videos and self-deprecating jokes. In doing so, they are also beating Narendra Modi — the powerful but image-conscious prime minister — at his own game.
Modi built his political brand through social media. Now protesters are using that same platform to mock his administration, ridicule pro-government television news coverage, transform confrontation with police into viral content and seize control of the online narrative.
The result — documented by a growing chorus of international correspondents who have descended on Jantar Mantar in the past two weeks — is something genuinely new in Indian political life: a protest movement whose primary weapon is not the slogan but the screenshot, not the march but the meme, and whose central insight is that an image-conscious authoritarian is more vulnerable to ridicule than to righteous anger.
The Name Was Always the Point
The political genius of the Cockroach Janta Party — and it is political genius, however satirical its packaging — was apparent from the moment Abhijeet Dipke chose the name.
When India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant compared unemployed young people drifting toward journalism and activism to “cockroaches and parasites” in open court in May 2026, he handed the movement its most powerful asset for free. 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 other outlets. Aruundhati Roy called these netizens “the progeny of the unholy union between a judge and a joke.”
The Reuters report called the party “the largest online expression of dissent against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 12-year rule.” “The lid on the discourse of discontent has been prised open, and the scuttling cockroaches may be hard to contain,” warned France24.
The name contained a complete political argument. If the most powerful judicial officer in India called young unemployed people cockroaches, then cockroaches were what the young unemployed would be — with pride, with defiance, and with the knowledge that every insect-extermination metaphor the government reached for would only deepen the joke. A government that cannot take a joke about cockroaches does not look powerful. It looks frightened.
The government confirmed the fear by acting on it. The accounts were blocked after the Intelligence Bureau flagged them as a national security threat. Dipke created a second handle, “Cockroach is Back,” which remains active.
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. An Al Jazeera opinion column, published June 9, captured the government’s strategic error in a single line that itself became widely shared: “Modi is using a cannon to kill a cockroach.”
The Meme Arsenal: Strava, Subway Surfers, and “Get Ready With Me”
If the name was the movement’s founding insight, the memes that followed were its tactical expression — and they represent one of the most creative deployments of internet culture in the service of political protest that any democracy has produced this year.
Clashes with police have become viral content. Videos showed protesters joking about keeping their Strava streaks alive — a reference to the fitness tracking app used by runners — as they ran from police baton charges. Others edited footage of themselves dodging police barricades to mimic the popular endless runner mobile game Subway Surfers.
The Subway Surfers edit — in which protesters’ footage of running from police was overlaid with the game’s visual aesthetic, transforming a potentially terrifying experience into something that looked like a mobile game challenge — was among the most widely shared pieces of content from the July 20 crackdown. It accomplished something that no press release or political speech could: it made the protesters look cool and the police look absurd simultaneously.
Some women have borrowed influencer culture, posting “get ready with me” videos before marches and “fit check” posts featuring helmets, goggles and other homemade protest gear. The “get ready with me” format — in which social media personalities narrate their preparation routines for an audience — was reimagined as protest preparation, with young women calmly explaining which eye protection to wear against tear gas and how to layer clothing as a buffer against baton strikes. The format’s chatty intimacy transformed equipment documentation into something that felt simultaneously practical, satirical, and genuinely brave.
At the main protest site in New Delhi, that influence was hard to miss. Some protesters marched in Spider-Man masks and Batman costumes, carrying tongue-in-cheek placards. Other protest signs echoed the irreverent tone of social media, with memes and pop culture references woven into the demonstrations. One poster featuring the education minister asked: “When will AI take his job?” Another captured the movement’s spirit with the slogan: “Every joke is a [tiny] revolution.”
One protester, photographed by AP photographer Verda Sabzwari, carried a placard with a portrait of Modi alongside the text: “Can’t See Your Democracy, My Lashes are Too Long.” The line — a feminist inflection on a standard protest message, delivered with the deadpan precision of an Instagram caption.
Mocking the Anchors: Pro-Government TV Gets the Meme Treatment
Among the most consistently productive targets of the CJP’s online campaign has been India’s pro-government television news ecosystem — the network of anchors and channels that have labeled protesters “anti-national” and accused them of being foreign-funded agitators in prime-time broadcasts.
Protesters have created spoof videos mocking pro-government television anchors and their dramatic style of broadcasts that have labeled the protesters “anti-national” and “foreign-f[unded].” These spoof videos — which replicate the visual grammar of prime-time Indian news coverage, complete with scrolling chyrons, dramatic music, and outraged anchor delivery, before pivoting to absurdist punchlines — have found large audiences precisely because their targets are so recognizable. The young people watching the spoofs have grown up watching those anchors. They know exactly which verbal tics and visual conventions are being lampooned.
The effect is a progressive delegitimization of the television news infrastructure that has long served as one of the BJP government’s most effective amplifiers. When a news anchor’s dramatic style becomes the subject of parody, the anchor’s ability to shape public perception diminishes — not because anyone is refuting the substance of the coverage, but because the format itself has been exposed as performance.
“Every Joke Is a Tiny Revolution”: The Political Theory of the Meme
The placard that may best capture what is happening in India right now was photographed on July 23, 2026, at Jantar Mantar by AP photographer Verda Sabzwari. It reads: “Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution.”
The line is not original — it is attributed variously to George Orwell and to the tradition of political satire more broadly. But its appearance on a handmade placard in central New Delhi, carried by a young Indian protester in a country where the prime minister’s image hangs in government offices and criticism of the ruling party can trigger investigations under sedition and national security laws, gives it a freshness and a precision that no think-piece can improve upon.
Satire has historically functioned as the political tool of the powerless precisely because it is difficult to suppress without the suppressor looking more ridiculous than the satirist. You cannot arrest a joke. You cannot charge a meme with sedition. You can ban a social media account — but the ban itself becomes the meme. You can send riot police against protesters — but the footage of protesters editing the confrontation into a Subway Surfers clip and uploading it within the hour demonstrates that the police have not won. They have simply provided content.
India’s young protesters are mocking their government. And the jokes are landing.
The cockroach, as any entomologist will confirm, is among the most resilient organisms on earth. It can survive radiation, decapitation, and weeks without food. It has been on the planet for approximately 320 million years. It has outlasted every empire, every dynasty, and every government that has ever called it a pest.
The Modi government would do well to remember what happened to those governments.