Will India's 'Cockroach' movement force Modi's BJP to change?

New Delhi, India — On the night of August 4, at a counting hall in Patna, eastern India, about 1,000 km from the capital, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) suffered one of its most stunning political defeats in 12 years.

Bankipur, a constituency in Bihar's legislative assembly, had been held by the BJP for three decades. But the fledgling Jan Suraj party, led by political strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor, ended that reign by defeating BJP president Nitin Nabin, who held the seat until a few months ago.

The defeat came less than two weeks after India's Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, yielding to seven weeks of student-led protests that shook New Delhi and spread to several cities. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a satirical group born on Instagram in May after India's Chief Justice Surya Kant compared unemployed youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites,” has led these protests.

Mr. Nabin, the BJP president, spent his entire campaign in Bankipur denouncing Gen Z protesters as “a virus and a gang of cockroaches that destroy the country.”

But instead, it was the BJP's grip on this constituency that was broken. According to analysts, this unexpected election result raises a larger question for India: Is the BJP—India's most formidable political machine—being forced to change?

The clearest sign that the BJP views the Gen Z uprising as more than a passing nuisance is the clumsiness of the party's response. At the peak of the protests, Mr. Modi posted a series of selfie-style videos on Instagram to address the exam paper leaks that triggered the demonstrations. He reportedly told cabinet members that young people are “only on Instagram,” encouraging ministers to reach them on the platform with short videos rather than press conferences.

In Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, the party launched a Gen Z outreach initiative, directing administrative officials to visit schools to provide career counseling.

The BJP also released a video in a gym, where young people exchange internet slang with an older coach who steers the conversation toward the government's development achievements. The slang was so dense that many Instagram users mocked the party, joking that they seemed to have paid young people to write propaganda against their own generation.

Analyst Asim Ali in New Delhi says this rush to establish a social media presence reveals a lot about the party itself. The BJP once created narratives that its own supporters spread organically. Today, much of their messaging “feels more managed and paid for”—a mismatch with a decentralized space that rewards top-down discipline far less than Facebook and WhatsApp did in the past.

“The party's media machine remains strong through control of mainstream media. But on social media, especially Instagram, they cannot generate empathy and identification naturally as they did in the 2011–2014 period,” Ali told Al Jazeera.

Gilles Verniers, a researcher at CERI at Sciences Po Paris, describes the BJP's outreach as “a battle for perception” rather than policy change. “There is no proposal that changes fundamentally. There is a new education minister, but he comes from the same background, an older RSS man,” he said, referring to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP's ideological parent organization.

Mr. Verniers argues that what has really broken is the BJP's familiar script for dealing with dissent: labeling protesters as traitors, foreign-funded, or terrorists, as they did during the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests of 2019–2020. The act introduced religious criteria for naturalization: non-Muslim asylum seekers from India's neighbors were fast-tracked to citizenship.

The previous approach to protests failed this time partly because the movement mocked itself before the state could do so, and partly because it is pluralistic. Unlike the anti-CAA or farmers' protests, this movement cannot be attributed to any specific religion or community, and it also attracts youth from the Brahmin upper castes, who are a core BJP support base. According to Mr. Verniers, this is a movement that is “truly caste-neutral.”

The event also shattered the BJP-promoted notion that Mr. Modi has a natural appeal among the youth. For the first time, the 75-year-old prime minister “looks his age,” Verniers said. “This movement has turned him into a 'boomer' in public perception, and that certainly pains him a lot.”

The BJP lost two of three by-elections in early August in states it governs: Bankipur in Bihar and Datia in Madhya Pradesh. However, they held the third seat in Manjalpur, Gujarat, Modi's home state. Opposition leaders directly link the defeat to the student protests, but analysts are more cautious. Mr. Ali warns against reading too much into the Bankipur vote. Mr. Verniers notes that by-elections are often decided by a small fraction of voters, “less than a third of the population turns out,” and the BJP's power system “has shown a great capacity to absorb defeats.”

The change is not in the vote count but in the narrative around it, which is now “growing into a larger story of challenges to the BJP.”

Few politicians have visited Jantar Mantar, the epicenter of the Gen Z protests in New Delhi, as often as Pushpendra Saroj, 27, a Samajwadi Party lawmaker from Kaushambi, Uttar Pradesh. He saw the crowd of a few hundred swell to thousands after activist Sonam Wangchuk was hospitalized following a 20-day hunger strike. He attributes this to “the aggression of the government” – weeks of silence, alleged cuts to electricity and water, and a lathi charge on protesters on July 20 in New Delhi. The crowd went beyond students, including military veterans and even serving police officers.

“Nobody likes to see children being beaten,” Mr. Saroj said. He also pointed out that the education minister's resignation only came after “fingers were pointed at the prime minister.”

For many marching in New Delhi, the story is bigger than a satirical Instagram page called “Cockroach” or a single resignation. Anjali, a research scholar and secretary of the All India Students' Association (AISA) at Delhi University, a group with a long left-leaning history, reads the protests as the surfacing of long-simmering anger. “We know for sure that this does not stem from a specific comment or a specific leak. It is the accumulated anger of the youth of this country over the last 12 years. As long as communal politics, casteism, and misogyny do not end, this is not a victory milestone in any form,” she said.

Anjali also criticized who pays the price after the protests subside. Muslim and Dalit students, she said, are “the first to be jailed,” the first to face threats and police complaints, echoing the 2019 raid on Jamia Millia Islamia university in New Delhi, which was at the center of the anti-CAA protests. In the western state of Goa, police arrested two young men for allegedly supporting jailed activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam while celebrating Mr. Pradhan's resignation – an incident she reads as part of a similar pattern.

Analysts agree that the CJP is unlikely to enter formal politics. Mr. Verniers calls the group's restraint “tactically smart,” citing the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a protest movement that built a successful party but after a decade in power is now “seen as a disappointment” and “on the verge of disappearing” in some former strongholds. A national campaign requires money, volunteers, and organization that a young, often unemployed movement lacks. Its longer-term influence will be on the agenda of other parties, “as an interest group, rather than a separate political force,” which the opposition has been unusually receptive to. Anjali describes AISA's stance similarly: present at Jantar Mantar, but not wanting to narrow the fight to a single resignation. The group, she says, plans to continue building its anti-government case on university campuses across the country.

Al Jazeera contacted 18 BJP national spokespersons for comment on this story but received no response.

Mr. Ali says he does not expect the BJP to abandon its exclusivist Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) in favor of the jobs and education issues demanded by the CJP-led Gen Z protesters. “I don't think the BJP will dilute the Hindutva agenda; if anything, they will pursue it more strongly, making religious identity the most prominent issue in every election.”

Perhaps, but what has changed, according to Mr. Verniers, is not the BJP's raw political strength but its legitimacy. “Electorally, they dominate as ever, maybe even more so,” he said, citing their winning ability, co-opting rivals, and spending power as evidence of their continued success and how the BJP has pushed “the boundaries of what is democratically acceptable.” But it is the authority behind that dominance that the protests have eroded. The gap “between the BJP's actual power and its ability to make people comply and submit” is unlikely to be healed by a by-election victory or a polished video. That gap, according to Mr. Verniers, is “the really important, interesting disconnect” the party now has to live with.