A botched medical entrance exam, a judge’s slur, and a young Indian student in Boston turning to satire converged to produce something India has not witnessed in over a decade: a youth movement that punctured the hegemony of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and forced his education minister to resign.

The sparks that ignited the protests came in May. More than two million students took a punishing examination for admission in medical colleges. Not for the first time, papers were leaked, the examination was scrapped, and the government ordered the students to take the test again. Frustrations mounted.

On May 15, India’s chief justice, Surya Kant, disparaged the unemployed youth of India as "cockroaches" who complain about the system on social media. Abhijeet Dipke, an Indian student in Boston, embraced the slur and created the satirical Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), on Instagram, deploying it to forge a new political vocabulary that spoke to India’s youth in a grammar they understood. The CJP page briskly gathered 20 million followers.

What began as an Instagram phenomenon, soon found its voice on the streets. In late June, a prominent educator and activist Sonam Wangchuk, along with student leaders led by Neha Bora, a graduate student, began a hunger strike in support of the CJP and its primary demand: the resignation of the education minister. As the days wore on, the crowds swelled, reaching a crescendo on July 20, after the Modi government forcibly removed Wanghuck from the protest site on the 21st day of his hunger strike.

The government deployed its all-too-familiar playbook to quell dissent: batons, tear gas, pellet guns, internet shutdowns. But the students kept coming. Five days later, the education minister resigned, forcing an imperious government, that had never dismissed a minister under public pressure to be accountable to the people’s demands and reducing the prime minister, a man accustomed to controlling the narrative, to posting uncurated midnight Instagram videos to reach out and connect with the protesting youth.

A rising power without jobs

The examination scandals at the heart of........

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