“Get ready with me to witness the downfall of a government,” says a young woman in an exaggerated squeaky voice. “I am wearing a spine, some jhumkas and my constitutional right to oh… Never mind!” It’s a GRWM (get ready with me) reel with a bite to it.
For the past week or so, Gen Z and Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protesters have been flooding timelines with memes straight from the protest sites; many are inside jokes only Gen Z will fully get, and even the translations for the older crowd arrive wrapped in more slang. Some of it is darkly funny, some just irreverent and rude, all of it uploaded within minutes of being filmed. And this seems to fox the authorities who are working with an old playbook to shut down protests. Lathi charge the kids. Cut the internet. Block the roads. Arrest the ringleaders. Wait for everyone to get tired, broke, or scared, and go home. It has worked for decades. The only problem? Nobody told these Gen Z protesters that they are supposed to be scared.
In cities across India and increasingly in some cities abroad, thousands of students are out on the streets, and it seems as if an online party has spilled out into the real world. There are memes. There are reels set to absurdly appropriate soundtracks. There are screenshots of step counters, because apparently outrunning a police charge counts as cardio. There are midnight edits of students dancing to film songs, re-appropriated in perfect step to the moment.
Many of us have seen the Nirbhaya protests, the Section 377 movement, the JNU protests, the Shaheen Bagh sit-in, the farmers’ protest… Those were earnest, serious protests, built around deep anger and fear. Today’s protest is no less earnest and serious, but it comes packaged in almost effervescent joy and irreverence. Kids caught in a lathi charge realise running is futile, so they stand and sing the national anthem until the cops are forced to stand at attention. They pop open the latches on police vans to free their friends. They crawl out of the windows of the vans holding them. They casually block vans until the police have to free the detainees. They ask cops to start the water cannons because “it’s too hot”.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi tried the warm, relatable-uncle approach with a homemade-looking video address, where his face loomed in close-up. “Friends,” he began, and the kids swung into action. “We are not friends,” said one content creator. “You’re going to have to do a lot more before we can think of friendship.” One of Modi’s trademarks is the long pause. That is now being mocked mercilessly. Some kids are offering him tips on editing, lighting, background, and content. The speech was a success, in that it gave Gen Z a goldmine of content.
Then there’s deadpan. One protester, faced with tear gas, said he did not care because he lived in “Yamuna paar”, an area in Delhi notorious for its bad air. Another reel shows a protester asking cops not to use tear gas because it is bad for the environment—and they would have to ask for the Environment Minister’s resignation. When a journalist asked if CJP would welcome Dharmendra Pradhan to Jantar Mantar, Abhijeet Dipke replied, “Of course. We will welcome him and make him sign a resignation letter.”
Then, there’s a Bihari subculture, with reels that show the chutzpah with which Delhi’s counterparts in Bihar asked the police when they would start the water cannons, then began a rain dance in it, when they roller-skated the barricades away, and played tug-of-war when cops tried setting up a rope barricade.
Support from the neighbour
There has also been an outpouring of support from across the border. A surprising number of reels are from Pakistan, with young people wishing they were in Delhi, admiring the students, and saying the only thing keeping them away from Jantar Mantar is the closed border. They called upon India to open the gates so they too could participate.
None of this is accidental. It’s the Gen Z aesthetic—self-deprecating and reference-heavy. They are treating the protest as more content. But beneath the memes is a clear list of demands, beginning with the resignation (or sacking) of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. The demands are just in a language that the state is not familiar with and replete with symbols that the government finds mysterious.
What Gen Z has done, quite effortlessly, is to make the government look like an old lady wringing her hands. Governments are built to negotiate with structure; they need a leader to arrest, an office to raid. This movement has none of that. They tried hauling away Sonam Wangchuk, hoping the protest would fizzle out. Instead, more students landed up.
On one side is a growing crowd of young people waiting to turn any insult into a reel. On the other is a government that looks as if it is playing “whack-a-mole”, trying to bludgeon a movement into submission and finding it pop up again faster than they can think.
The state is still using its tired old playbook. It started with delegitimisation. Government voices and the IT Cell tried branding the CJP as foreign. Dipke responded by simply posting the follower analytics, which showed the followers to be overwhelmingly Indian.
A mock call to Xi Jinping
Television anchors—who are incidentally being chased out of Jantar Mantar with choice insults—charged the protest with being funded by China, Pakistan, Soros, all the usual suspects. The students ran with it. They made reels solemnly admitting that China had sent Rs.60 for bus fare and Pakistan was sending Rs.40 for lunch. In one reel, a student makes a mock call to Chinese President Xi Jinping ordering three cups of chai. The standard “Soros-funded” canard has nowhere to land with this lot.
Then came the infrastructure squeeze. The Internet was cut off, the metro was blocked, roads barricaded, and shops told to shut early. Gen Z walked or hitched rides to the site. They got around the Internet issue by shooting reels, then walking the few metres to the BJP office next door, which had full Internet, to upload them. Supporters from around the world used delivery apps to send the protestors vast quantities of food and drink. The students are picking up the garbage themselves, there are dry toilets, and first-aid corners.
Unleashing brute force was the government’s big faux pas. The baton charges, tear gas, and water cannons, mostly did one thing: they handed the students more content. The police brutality this time is fully recorded—and going live in real time. Worse, students turned the lathi-wielding cops into memes. Students came in helmets and padded pants wearing placards that said: “Look, I am back for your beatings”. They went around the next morning offering roses to the cops for their “hard work”.
The government thought it would wait it out. But ignoring the protest for almost two months only allowed it to grow into a movement that is gaining momentum every day, spreading across the country, and escalating the demands. It is no longer about Dharmendra Pradhan alone; the students’ ire has turned against the government and Modi himself. Now, after the lathi charge, as the threatening police presence continues, as there are reports of pellet guns and Google glasses and surveillance cameras, the issue of an Instagram post addressing the students as “Friends” has not quite worked.
On July 24, the government finally did what it had spent weeks avoiding: it sat across the table with CJP leaders at the Constitution Club of India. But with no clear outcomes. Pradhan is still in his job, the protestors are still at Jantar Mantar, and the reels keep coming.
But what is to be noted is that a government that once would not say the movement’s name has been forced to negotiate with it. Does Gen Z count that as a W? Sure, but it’s still demanding Pradhan’s resignation. If there’s one thing this protest has shown, you can outlast tear gas, but not a good meme. Has Gen-Z made humour the new protest weapon?
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