By The Straits Times | Created at 2026-08-13 05:51:54 | Updated at 2026-08-13 07:00:01
1 hour ago
KOLKATA - Protesting students and youths should not be branded as “anti-nationals”. That was the key takeaway from an address to schoolchildren in Mumbai by Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), who was speaking on August 6, less than two weeks after the nation’s largest youth-led demonstrations in decades.
This placatory remark by the head of a highly influential socio-political organisation, which shares close links with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), highlights the ongoing attempts by the governing party and its allies to reach out to the country’s youths.
They are trying to limit electoral damage after the widespread anger displayed during recent protests led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) that highlighted growing frustration among the country’s youths over a lack of job and education opportunities.
Even Modi has enhanced his presence on Instagram recently in a bid to win over young voters, using vertical selfie-style videos, pop-culture references, humour and less formal language to reach out to younger audiences. In one video, he held out an olive branch saying he had forgiven students who had hurled expletives at him during the protests in July.
More than 40 per cent of India’s one billion voters are aged between 18 and 39. Back in the 2024 general election, 39 per cent of youths – those between 18 and 25 – had voted for the BJP, giving it the largest share among all political parties for this voting group.
“The BJP realises that youths make up a bloc that was instrumental in ensuring the party’s win in the 2024 election,” said Sanjay Kumar, a professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. “It is one reason they don’t want to lose support among young voters.”
The party’s youth outreach marks a significant climbdown from its attacks on youth protesters during the CJP-led protests.
India’s former education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who was eventually forced to resign because of public pressure, had described the CJP as “the B team of terrorists”. BJP president Nitin Nabin had also attacked the youth-led outfit, calling it a gang that aims to “divide the country”.
Police also fired pellet guns and used tear gas and batons on protesters in Delhi on July 20. (Want to add a line saying that some CJP-linked people are still being detained in some states?)
Kumar noted that while the turnout of youths in Indian elections has traditionally been a few percentage points lower than the total average turnout, incumbent governments in India have been thrown out by sustained mobilisation of youths.
“I think for these reasons the (BJP-led) government became sensitive as early as they could and decided to enter into a dialogue (with the protesters),” he told The Straits Times.
Tamil Nadu’s May 2026 vote is a recent example of youth-powered change. Fledgling party Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, led by actor-turned-politician C. Joseph Vijay, managed to elbow past entrenched heavyweight political parties to form the government in the South Indian state.
His party won around 68 per cent of the vote among first-time voters and 59 per cent among those aged between 20 and 29, signalling strong youth discontent with the state’s two leading political parties – Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.
More recently, the BJP lost a key Bihar state assembly seat in a byelection in August that was represented by Nabin, the BJP party president, for over a decade and half. The winner was Prashant Kishor and his relatively new Jan Suraaj Party, a surprise victory also attributed in part to youth discontent and their disillusionment with legacy political parties.
The CJP has said it has no plans to become a political party, choosing instead to remain a pressure group for now. Its success has also spawned youth protests in other parts of the country, including by schoolchildren who have demanded better educational and road infrastructure.
General elections are still around three years away but a host of key state elections are due in 2027, including in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh.
In BJP-governed Uttar Pradesh, the government has initiated engagement with youths, including through young bureaucrats who have been asked to interact with school students and guide them on careers and other important decisions.
Tapping into youth angst
Opposition parties have also tapped into youth angst, with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi holding a concert-like outreach programme for youths in Uttar Pradesh’s Prayagraj city on Aug 8, an event where he said shrinking job opportunities had turned youngsters into “21st-century labourers”.
Kumar said the BJP faces the challenge of ensuring the anger of students – “who have gained moral strength” – doesn’t blow up again. “Social media has become a big catalyst and they can regroup again, even if in not such a large number (as seen in Delhi during the protest),” he added.
On August 12, CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke announced the outfit will soon begin the next phase of its agitation, describing it as “Season 2” of its Delhi protest.
A lot of the political engagement is happening online, particularly on Instagram, a platform that has come into sharp focus because of its large Gen Z following. India has more than 550 million Instagram users, with those in the age bracket of 18-34 accounting for more than three-quarters of its total user base.
Satirical content criticising the BJP-led government had gone viral on Instagram during the CJP-led protests. This rallied support among traditionally apolitical young users who consume little of print and legacy broadcast media channels or, for that matter, even text-heavy social media platforms such as X or Facebook.
Sandeep Rao, the managing director of One Source, a Delhi-headquartered marketing consulting firm that has worked with multiple political parties for their campaigns, said the focus on Instagram highlights the growing importance of short-video format content in political communication, especially with youths.
“It is a well proven fact that video content has far higher recall and receptivity vis-a-vis written and audio content,” he added.
The BJP, which has around 9.6 million followers on Instagram, has put out several posts in recent days to reach out to Gen Z, portraying itself as party in sync with the youths’ preferences.
One such video describes Modi as “Our real friend”, while another shows its leaders using slang such as ‘delulu’ and ‘clock it’ in Parliament. There’s also a post featuring a collage of Modi’s images set to hit American rap music.
Modi has also urged his ministers and government departments to put out more video content; India’s Ministry of External Affairs even made its debut on Snapchat, another short video-sharing platform, on Aug 6. TikTok remains unavailable in India because of a ban that has been in place since June 2020.
But the government is not just co-opting Instagram; it is also simultaneously cracking down on it. Many Instagram users have complained in recent days that their Instagram posts critical of the government have been taken down by Meta, raising concerns of growing censorship.
‘End of anonymity’
Tweaking political campaigns for Instagram poses several other challenges for parties that are habituated to a more text-heavy format. This includes the relative inability to use anonymous trolls often deployed on X or Facebook to ensure certain narratives trend on these platforms.
“What’s most remarkable and most important to keep in mind is the end of anonymity,” said Anish Gawande, national spokesperson for the Nationalist Congress Party – Sharadchandra Pawar, a key opposition party from the western state of Maharashtra.
“On Instagram you are focusing on user-generated content where people are literally putting their face to what they believe in,” the 29-year-old told ST.
Posts on video-first platforms such as Instagram also thrive because of spontaneity as well as informality that adds to the authenticity of their content rather than curated messaging that younger audiences can be sceptical of.
“You can’t mimic authenticity… You can’t engineer the kind of genuine format that Instagram prefers, which is this candid chat to a camera,” added Gawande. “That will pose challenges to leaders who like to have carefully curated images of themselves out there in public.”
Modi got a taste of this when one of his early selfie-style videos in July, posted close to midnight where he greeted viewers using the English word ‘friends’ - something he has rarely done - was criticised by Gen Z users who felt it was deliberately crafted to make him and his messaging seem youthful.
The recent successful protests, which led to the first resignation of a Cabinet Minister since 2014 when Modi came to power, have also led to a more fundamental change – it has convinced political parties to give young people a bigger say than what they had earlier, noted Gawande.
He said the biggest problem that existing political parties face is that they don’t have too many young people managing their content strategies.
“And I think this has been a wake up call that ‘nothing about us without us’ is a slogan that applies as much to a social media team as it does to questions of political representation,” Gawande told ST.
“And so you’re going to now see political parties make a beeline to get younger people on board to sort of see how to communicate with audiences that they do not know how to communicate with as of now.”
