For more than a decade, Narendra Modi has mastered the politics of division. Whenever a protest threatened his government, the BJP assigned its participants an identity, isolated them from the majority and portrayed them as enemies of India. The just concluded youth uprising showed that that machinery is failing. Modi now confronts not a community he can marginalise but a generation that grew up under his rule and includes many from the BJP’s own social and electoral base.

The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) began as satire, reclaiming an insult aimed at unemployed young people. But it became a vehicle for anger over examination-paper leaks, corruption, student suicides and the scarcity of jobs. Its immediate demands — including the resignation of education minister Dharmendra Pradhan which came through on Saturday, 25 July — travelled easily across regions, castes and classes.

A leaked examination does not ask a candidate’s religion before destroying years of preparation. Unemployment does not spare a household because it supports Hindutva. The movement turned private disappointment into a shared accusation: a powerful and corrupt system is cheating the same young Indians whom Modi promised to empower.

That distinguishes it from the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Those demonstrations raised a fundamental constitutional question, but the BJP depicted them as Muslim mobilisation against a government supposedly defending persecuted Hindus. Shaheen Bagh was recast as evidence of minority obstruction. Pakistan was invoked, and critics of the law were branded anti-national and anti-Hindu. The propaganda worked because communal polarisation shaped how millions of BJP supporters understood the agitation.

The farmers’ movement was larger, more sustained and ultimately forced Modi to repeal three agricultural laws. Yet the government found an identity through which to contain the political damage. Because many visible protesters were Sikh farmers from Punjab, government supporters labelled them Khalistanis. References to Canada and foreign funding presented a broad agrarian struggle as the work of separatists and overseas conspirators.

The repeal embarrassed........

© National Herald