The Associated Press (AP)

India’s young protesters are mocking their government. And the jokes are landing.

As thousands of demonstrators take to the streets in the Indian capital, they are waging a parallel campaign online, flooding social media with memes, parody videos and self-deprecating jokes.

In doing so, they are also beating Narendra Modi — the powerful but image-conscious prime minister — at his own game.

Modi built his political brand through social media. Now protesters are using that same platform to mock his administration, ridicule pro-government television news coverage, transform confrontation with police into viral content and seize control of the online narrative.

The street protests erupted a month ago, fueled by anger over a string of exam scandals, including the illegal sharing of entrance exams for the national medical program.
Young people say the scandals have jeopardized their futures and eroded trust in the education system. Protesters blame Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and demand his resignation, but the demonstrations have since expanded into a wider anger over government accountability, spreading to other cities.

One 25-year-old protester said the memes are more than comic relief; they’re a way of coping. She sees them as a generational trait.

Unlike older generations, who learned to endure hardship, hers has little patience for “simply putting up with it,” she said.

“If our phone data runs out, we can’t even bear that. So we’re definitely not going to tolerate this,” she said, referring to Monday’s police crackdown on protesters in the capital.

See what protesters have to say about their experiences, and why they chose this form of protest, at the link in our bio.

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