Gen Z catches a lot of flak. They’re told they’re too unserious, too entitled, too reliant on technology. But in India, the Gen Z-led Cockroach Movement is reshaping the world’s largest democracy. |
The criticism and challenges facing this 14-to 29-year-old cohort—and their demands for democracy—are at the crux of the standoff between young protesters and police. In May, a chief justice described unemployed young people who complain about their circumstances on social media as "cockroaches." The insult sparked massive protests, forcing India’s Education Minister to resign. |
For TIME’s Weekend Essay, Asim Ali explores how India’s young people are even gaining ground on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has controlled the country for 12 years. |
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WEEKEND ESSAY |
How Gen Z protesters took on India's aging Prime Minister |
By Asim Ali |
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In the final segment of Creepshow, the horror anthology series written by Stephen King, Upson Pratt, a ruthless old businessman, lives alone in a penthouse fitted with surveillance screens, control panels, and alarm systems. He has a pathological phobia of germs and contamination, is obsessed with exercising complete control over his environment, and regards every competitor as little more than a bug to be squashed. |
One night, a cockroach breaches his citadel, and Pratt swiftly dispatches it. But the cockroaches keep appearing in ever-greater swarms, creeping out from air vents, drains, cupboards, and electrical panels until they are everywhere. Despite his manic efforts to smash and spray them out of existence, the ever-multiplying cockroaches eventually overwhelm him. |
Over the past 12 years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has single-mindedly gone about building an extensive machinery of control to tame India’s raucous democracy. He has gradually managed to bring the entire architecture of normal, institutional politics under his sway. The American watchdog Freedom House, for example, ranks India as “partly free,” and the country’s press freedom ranking on a Reporters Without Borders index of 180 countries has sunk from 140 in 2014—the year Modi came to power—to 157 in 2026. Elsewhere, the V-Dem Institute in Sweden, which monitors democracy and its variants, has described India as an “electoral autocracy,” where, despite the occurrence of multi-party elections, there is a corrosion of true democracy because of a decline in core liberties.
Asim Ali is an Indian political analyst and a columnist for The Telegraph, a newspaper based in Kolkata. |
Read the full essay here… |
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