New Delhi, India – On the night of August 4, in a counting hall in the eastern Indian city of Patna, some 1,000km (620 miles) from the national capital, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) suffered one of its most stunning political setbacks in 12 years. Bankipur, a constituency in the legislature of the state of Bihar, had been held by the BJP for three decades. But the fledgling Jan Suraaj Party, led by political strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor, ended that reign, winning a seat that the BJP’s national president, Nitin Nabin, had held until just a few months earlier.
The defeat came less than two weeks after India’s Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, bowing to seven weeks of student-led protests that had shaken New Delhi and spread to several cities. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a satirical outfit born on Instagram in May after India’s chief justice, Surya Kant, compared unemployed young Indians with “cockroaches” and “parasites”, had led those protests. Nabin, the BJP chief, had spent the Bankipur campaign denouncing the country’s Gen Z protesters as “a virus and a cockroach gang devoted to breaking the country”.
Instead, it was the BJP’s stranglehold over the constituency that was broken. That surprise electoral verdict has thrust upon India a broader question, say analysts: Will India’s most formidable political machine — the BJP — be forced to change? The clearest sign that the BJP treats the Gen Z uprising as more than a passing nuisance is the sheer awkwardness of the party’s response.
During the peak of the protests, Modi released a string of selfie-style videos on Instagram addressing the exam paper leaks that led to the protests. He reportedly told cabinet colleagues that young people were “just on Instagram”, urging ministers to court them on the platform with reels rather than media briefings. In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, the party has launched a Gen Z outreach initiative directing civil administrative officers into schools for career counselling sessions.
The BJP has also released a gym-set video in which young people trade internet slang with an older trainer who steers the talk towards the government’s development record. The slang was laid on so thick that many Instagram users mocked the party, joking that it had seemingly paid young people to write propaganda aimed at their own generation. After another video of Modi that briefly vanished from Facebook, the parliamentary committee on information technology demanded an apology from Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
New Delhi-based analyst Asim Ali says this sudden scramble for social media relevance reveals a lot about the party itself. The BJP once produced narratives that its own supporters would circulate unprompted. Today, he said, much of its messaging “feels more managed and paid for” – a mismatch for a decentralised space that rewards top-down discipline far less than Facebook and WhatsApp once did.
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