Opinion: The Modi government doesn’t understand Gen Z’s protest memes – but that doesn’t matter

IKEA, declared a placard at the student protests in Delhi, had a better cabinet than the Narendra Modi government. Another claimed that the protester’s ex had ignored them less than the government had. In Bengaluru, pop singer Taylor Swift appeared on a sign to note that theIndian exam papers had leaked– but photographs of her recent wedding singer had not.

The same zany spirit infused online reels and memes. Videos of demonstrators running from the police were edited to the soundtrack of the mobile game Subway Surfers. Others shared their Strava maps and celebrated meeting their daily step targets during marches.

This internet-native language drew from dating terminology, work, gaming, anime, celebrity culture and several layers of previous jokes. It assumed an audience that has spent enough time online to recognise the template before reading the words imposed on it.

The unfamiliar language had done little to weaken the political force of the protest. That was obvious on Saturday, when the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan was announced. As the protestors achieved their main demand, celebrations broke out at Jantar Mantar and the movement declared victory before ending its agitation.

For someone outside that audience, a placard or meme of this sort can seem silly or obscure. Familiar words are used ironically, an insult becomes a badge, a relationship joke carries a complaint about public administration. Several references can be packed into one sentence, with little assistance for anyone arriving late to the party.

The political demands, however, required much less interpretation: protesters had asked for the resignation of the education minister, compensation for families of students who died by suicide, protection against criminal cases, transparent investigations into examination failures and broader reform of the system.

By Saturday, the principal demand had been met and the government promised that the others would be honoured. The humour was opaque but the demands carried into the negotiating room were straightforward.

This difference is important because protest language serves several purposes. It tells the state what people want, it explains a grievance to the wider public and it allows participants to develop a sense of belonging as they communicate in a language that only they seem to share.

A single placard does not need to perform all three tasks equally well.

The protests speak especially fluently to the third function. Someone who understands the reference also understands that it was made specifically for them. Sharing the joke becomes a small act of participation. A person can reproduce it, change the text, add a local reference, send it back into circulation.

A formal slogan asks to be repeated but a meme often asks to be altered.

In fact, the Cockroach Janta Party itself emerged through such an act of alteration. A disparaging comparison involving unemployed young people was taken up by the very people it described. A social media post asking what might happen if all the cockroaches came together eventually gave the protests a name, a symbol and an organising identity.

The insult became useful once its meaning passed into other hands.

Political movements have always used humour and popular culture. India has a long history of political cartoons, street theatre, adapted film songs and slogans that acquire meanings beyond their literal words. The current form moves faster and depends less on a central organisation. A joke can begin on an anonymous account, reach a protest site and return online as part of a reel within a few hours.

This has changed the direction in which political communication travels. Citizens seeking a hearing once relied on petitions, memoranda, elected representatives and coverage in newspapers or television. These forms still matter, especially when a movement begins negotiations with officials.

But online networks now allow protesters to build an audience and set the terms of a public conversation before an institution agrees to recognise them.

The 2026 youth movement speaks sideways as much as it speaks upwards. It builds solidarity among people who share a grievance and a cultural vocabulary. The state remains the audience with the power to concede the demands, but it is no longer the only audience that gives a protest public meaning.

In this case, horizontal communication helped create the degree of public pressure required to produce a vertical response. The same language that puzzled some officials and television anchors or audiences also helped the movement find the audience that made it difficult to ignore.

There are of course limits to what can be inferred from the most widely shared placards. Algorithms and photographers favour clever signs, particularly those written in English or Hinglish. But many students affected by examination failures would have had little interest in fandoms or internet humour.

Many officials will miss the allusions, irony and deliberate absurdity. Older commentators interpret the new language for television audiences that often share their bewilderment, while young protesters reply on platforms those audiences rarely use. Each group discuss the other without speaking to it.

This time the loop was eventually broken: the online public became a street movement large enough to force formal talks, where their demands needed little translation.

At protest sites, memes of this sort have appeared alongside older political slogans such as “Jai Bhim” and “Inquilab Zindabad”, portraits of Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar, lines from Faiz, national flags and direct calls for the minister to resign. The movement used several political languages at once.

Several forces produced the outcome – street mobilisation, negotiations, Opposition support, Sonam Wangchuk’s fast and public anger over the brutal police response. The humour supplied a shared identity and unusual reach. Its contribution is easier to recognise now that the movement appears to have secured a result.

Even so, a wider shift in communicative power is visible. An official statement no longer arrives with an assured audience and a shared interpretation. It can be quoted, cut, parodied and returned to its author almost immediately, as was the case when Modi issued a midnight video about the protests. It was immediately parodied and mocked.

The prestige of an office may secure coverage but it does not guarantee attention on the terms the office would prefer.

The assumption that protest language should primarily aim to persuade those in power belongs to an earlier media environment. Today’s movements – as also seen in other countries recently – often begin by persuading one another. They build publics before they seek concessions. Governments remain the audience capable of granting demands, but they no longer determine whether a movement finds an audience in the first place.

The jokes at Jantar Mantar and its online mirrors represent a shift in where political communication begins: among protesters themselves, before it reaches those in power. They helped build the public that made a formal response necessary, even if the demands were eventually resolved in the older language of negotiations, resignation and official assurances.

The government did not have to understand the jokes. It has had to recognise what those jokes revealed, that the public conversation no longer unfolds entirely on institutional terms.

Rishiraj Bhagawati is a Bengaluru-based public health policy researcher and writer.