In recent weeks in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s profound insecurity has resulted in the deplatforming of college students who came together to form a satirical parody account called “Cockroach Janta Party”.

The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) came to be after India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant compared unemployed young people drifting towards journalism and activism to cockroaches and parasites. The harmless joke quickly attracted millions of online followers across Instagram and X, formerly Twitter, which resulted in even more media coverage from BBC, CNN, The Guardian and France 24, making India’s geriatric government pay attention.

Instead of engaging with the discontent meaningfully, the Modi administration has framed it as jeopardising the country’s “national security” and “posing a threat to the sovereignty of India”. The group’s page is no longer accessible in the country. In fact, the government began a multiplatform pressure campaign against the satirical account to push it into oblivion. Its website was taken down, ministers accused the founder of being under “foreign” influence, and a petition was filed in the Supreme Court seeking action against the CJP founder, Abhijeet Dipke.

Going after online accounts with such fierce indignation is like using a cannon to kill a mosquito.

The imaginative prank signals the distress among India’s youth, who enter a market with no jobs, survive extreme weather ranging from heatwaves to unbreathable air, and are constantly lectured about the sacrifices demanded of them. Last month alone, the national entrance exam for undergraduate medical students was found to have been compromised after papers were leaked, while school students were hit by a separate marking scandal. Students who expressed their disappointment on social media were termed “Pakistanis” by our state-sponsored........

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