With little in the Gen-Z campaign that the Modi government could turn against it, a State-ordered take down of content seemed the only option to limit reputational damage
How women protesters became targets after the Jantar Mantar protest
Bharat Bhushan
A highly curated image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the supreme leader of the nation is central to his style of governance and to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This has led to a concerted attempt to remove satirical memes from social media, which erode that image.
Unfortunately for them, social media algorithms prioritise precisely high-engagement content like the parody videos created by Gen Z protestors. By forcing platforms to pull down such content, the Delhi Police and the IT ministry are attempting to stop algorithmic compounding before they reach a larger audience and older age groups that have traditionally supported Modi. The government clearly wants reputational management while free-speech activists are arguing against the take down.
The government is also framing the removal as an issue of national security, digital sovereignty, and maintenance of public order by suggesting that certain inimical foreign powers were involved in propagating the memes, parody videos, and deep-fake content. The police claim to have identified 480 social media handles allegedly originating in Pakistan for spreading deep-fakes, and another 450 accounts that were sharing deep-fakes.
However, it is nearly impossible to erase such content entirely from Internet archives and from peer-to-peer chat systems. Geo-blocking may succeed within India, but the same content will be available outside India’s borders and to those using VPN. It can resurface on anniversaries or the emergence of new protest issues.
Personal attacks on prime ministers are not new. ‘Gali gali mein shor hai, Rajiv Gandhi chor hai’ was a direct personal attack on the then prime minister after the Bofors scandal broke. During and after Emergency, Indira Gandhi was subjected to personal vilification. Even Modi faced the slogan ‘Chowkidar chor hai’ after the controversial French Rafale fighter jet deal. Modi himself personally targeted Manmohan Singh by calling him ‘Maun Mohan Singh’.
However, Gen-Z’s memes and slogans targeting the prime minister are different in their scale, speed, and crudeness. In the past, slogans, cartoons, and posters were generated and spread by organised political parties and spread through reportage on traditional media platforms. Today’s memes against Modi are user-generated, decentralised, and are re-mixable. They spread on peer-to-peer chat systems at viral speed.
Earlier, slogans calling the prime minister thief (chor hai) or a ‘dictator’ opposed specific policy decisions and used the idiom of political corruption. The most viral of the Gen-Z memes and slogans are, on the other hand, personally derisive or mocking and use crude, sexualised, and even scatological images and language. As a result, the personal ridicule of Modi has gone deeper than in previous such campaigns.
The older slogans were generated by opposition political parties and were okayed top-down by party ideologues and managers. Gen-Z memes and slogans came from unaffiliated, apolitical youth protesters who do not observe the boundary between accepted norms of political messaging and profane missives. This creates an additional political difficulty for the regime.
Earlier, Modi could reclaim the word chowkidar, flipping the ‘Chowkidar chor hai’ to say “I am the nation’s watchman” and his supporters could follow with ‘Mein bhi chowkidar’. The Gen-Z slogans cannot be reclaimed in the same way because they are not centred on a single word or phrase. They are difficult to flip and re-signify because their content is profuse and based on images which are not malleable.
Their form of criticism exceeds what the prime minister can address by reversing policy failures and administrative decisions. The idiom of mockery cannot be countered through rational responses or factual counter-arguments. This leaves the government with no ground to counter them except by resorting to the legalese that ridiculing constitutional public figures is punishable under the law.
Bollywood actor and MP Kangana Ranaut tried to retaliate in Gen-Z’s own style by mocking it as the “gutter generation.” She is being trolled on social media by those whom she tried to cancel. Modi’s attempt to copy Gen-Z’s methods by uploading a midnight selfie-video on Instagram also came a cropper.
It intensified the mockery, making him out as an Instagram novice with young persons questioning his camera angle (which he duly corrected in a subsequent video). However, his serious message did not carry. It seemed inauthentic to the genre, becoming material for further memes. The BJP’s attempt at ‘Friends-themed’ Instagram reel, invoking a 1990s US TV sitcom to connect with Gen-Z, also went belly up.
The BJP and Modi’s dominance in the social media up to now, was built on top-down content — the party’s and PMO’s IT cells produced videos, content for WhatsApp forwards, and ran hash-tag campaigns, using the infrastructure of the party and the government. However, Gen-Z did not rely on any party’s infrastructure, nor did it need one — its meme culture and its transmission through peer groups, speed, irony, and in-group humour could not be replicated convincingly by the government or the BJP.
With little in the Gen-Z campaign that the Modi government could turn against it, a State-ordered take down of content seemed the only option to limit reputational damage.
The Modi government can only hope that political memory is issue-bound, and that once the NEET grievance is resolved, the campaign will lose its importance. The Gen-Z cohort is not permanent, ideologically coherent or permanently aligned against him. It may, therefore, not become a durable political entity unlike the sardonically named Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), which led the movement. This also means that the CJP may not be able to once again trigger support with the same fervour as it has threatened if protestors continue to be harassed.
However, the Modi government has not fully recovered from being forced on the backfoot and fear of the revival of the CJP-led protests. They may also fear copycat campaigns as other aggrieved sections of society have now seen how a decentralised, meme-driven mobilisation around a specific demand can lead to a quick win.
The Delhi Police, meanwhile, far from dismantling the barricades has chained and welded them together at Jantar Mantar and added extra layers at vulnerable points. This is to hinder the CJP from remobilising and sending out a signal to other imitators. These measures will raise the logistical costs of mobilisation but they cannot blunt grievances, reduce turnout, or buy time for the government as they do not address the causes of protest.
When grievances are resolved, the energy of the protest dissipates; when ignored, protests shift sites and formats. Curbing social media content to shore up a leader’s image or strengthening crowd dispersal techniques are inadequate responses to public expressions of anger.
https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/why-genzs-satire-will-outpace-state-control-4094169
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