Gen Z gets called “too sensitive” a lot. Turns out that’s also a decent description of a generation that knows exactly how to name a problem and organize a following around it. The last few weeks are the case study: emotionally literate, boundary-setting, extremely online — and just as capable of building a movement as any generation before it. This time the trigger is accountability, over a leaked exam paper and an education system a lot of young Indians have decided they’re done tolerating.
The 2026 NEET-UG exam, sat by more than 2.28 million students competing for a medical seat, got scrapped on 12 May after investigators found a guess paper circulating before the test that matched the real questions almost line for line. The paper has been re-conducted, but the question is: why does it keep happening over and over again, and when will the authorities take accountability for faulty systems? A parallel mess in CBSE’s on-screen marking process piled on top, leaving thousands more students stuck waiting for board results. An investigation from a 17-year-old student named Sarthak Sidhant uncovered alleged tender manipulation, rule changes, and system errors in the digital On-Screen Marking (OSM) evaluation process.
As a millennial, for such a scenario, the script I grew up with was simple: absorb it, and move on. Gen Z skipped that memo entirely. The same digital natives who get mocked for doomscrolling have turned their feeds into a live feed of dissent — protest footage, memes cut straight from lathi charges and tear gas. And because everyone’s holding a phone, every act of police overreach now comes with a timestamp attached.
But this didn’t happen overnight. It started in mid-May when a Chief Justice of India Surya Kant actually called the youth “cockroaches” encouraging Abhijeet Dipke, sitting in the US at that time, to start the Cockroach Janta Party page on Instagram. Half meme page, half protest infrastructure, it got a boost it never needed with the page hitting 500,000 followers on day one. It’s past 25 million now and a constant source of information from the protest site.
By 6 June, CJP’s founders and a growing crowd of protesters set up camp at Jantar Mantar and made it clear they weren’t leaving. Then, on 28 June, activist Sonam Wangchuk joined with an open-ended hunger strike, demanding Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation. The movement picked up online as people resonated with the call for educational reforms.
Social media emerges as the voice of truth
What’s striking is how little TV has had to do with any of this. Anna Hazare’s campaign and the Nirbhaya protests both ran on prime-time loops for weeks straight. Even the 2019 CAA protests and Farmers Protest got coverage. The NEET protest was blacked out by the big channels when it started and survived almost entirely on social platforms instead. TV did eventually show up, dramatically, for the 20 July “Chalo Sansad” march that ended in tear gas and lathi charges. And then the coverage took a strange turn: channels that had aired the crackdown live spent that same evening’s primetime blaming the violence on the students. Some digging for “hidden toolkits” and “international conspiracies” using footage of the exact same lathi charge they’d broadcast hours earlier.
A Newslaundry columnist has put it more rightly: a generation raised on scrolling was never going to be swayed by what mainstream broadcasters had to say — they’d already built their own channels, their own vocabulary, their own outlet for fury.
Spend any time on independent news platforms and YouTube this past week and the pattern holds: a generation raised on an education system built around memorization, not questioning, is now asking questions anyway, without flinching. The clips circulating keep making the same point, over and over — young people from every part of the country, speaking with a clarity and conviction that doesn’t match the “apolitical Gen Z” stereotype at all.
A movement that memes while it marches
What really sets this apart is the tone. This isn’t the grim, slogan-shouting protest culture of decades past — it’s one where a lathi charge and a meme format get treated as equally legitimate ways to protest. As demonstrations spread to different parts of the country, Instagram effectively became a second protest site. Gen Z’s layered, ironic humor, running through everything from calls for Pradhan’s resignation to jokes about unemployment. Protesters filmed “get ready with me” videos before walking into tear gas. One creator, saying “Delhi Police se maar khaane ja raha hun”. Clips of police barricades set to the Subway Surfers soundtrack were circulating within minutes of being filmed. For this generation, social media isn’t documenting the protest from the outside — it is the protest site, as much as the streets.
Fighting the propaganda
While students, parents and activists hold the ground, a second front has opened up online, where creators are working around the clock to debunk propaganda in real time. Painting protest slogans as anti-India is one of the oldest plays in the book — familiar to anyone who watched the 2019 CAA protests unfold or the Farmers Protest — and this generation seems to have clocked the tactic early, working to keep control of the narrative before it slips. Some creators have reportedly been offered paid deals to speak out against the protests; it’s not hard to guess who benefits from that. But Gen Z, evidently, isn’t as easy to buy as whoever’s sending those emails assumed.
The movement isn’t just an urban story
Social media’s reach has pulled in young people well outside the big cities, plenty of them now traveling to Delhi to join in. Dheeram, 25, a final-year medical student at Government Medical College in Pali, told the PARI Network he came because he doesn’t want kids from villages like his to stop believing in a future here. He made the trip with his friend Ashu Ram, 24, a humanities student — a 15-hour overnight journey that got them into Delhi at noon on 19 July.
Prankshit, 17, from Barhsera village in Uttar Pradesh’s Aligarh district, is on his first trip outside his village. He says he came to remind Parliament that people like him exist — most people back home have never seen it in person, but growing up, they were taught it represented them anyway.
Logged in and showing up
Not everyone could physically get to Jantar Mantar and other protest sites in the country — jobs, exams of their own, or, as one widely shared piece of commentary pointed out, a real fear of surveillance that lands harder on young women deciding not to travel to a protest site. So the solidarity went digital, and it turned punitive fast. Celebrities who stayed quiet paid for it in follower counts, and now their forced solidarity posts are being called out as well. The unfollow button has become something like a ballot — audiences who couldn’t march instead treated their attention as currency, telling influencers to speak up or lose them. Celebrities aren’t the only target, either; plenty of creators called for mass unfollows of PM Modi and other ministers as a form of protest in its own right.
Support pours in through food delivery
For the protesters on the ground, online food delivery platforms have become an unlikely extension of the same instinct. After the 20 July Sansad march, delivery riders started showing up at Jantar Mantar with orders nobody on-site had placed. People sympathetic to the protest, from Bangalore, Mumbai, Guwahati, even overseas, are using Zomato and Swiggy to send food to protesters they’d never met, and delivery partners said such orders had nearly tripled. One rider, arriving in the rain, explained on camera that a man in Mumbai named Anuj had simply told him to hand the food to whoever needed it. Another order came through with no name and no details — just “Jantar Mantar” as the address, meant for whoever showed up hungry. Eventually the protest’s own account had to ask people to stop, posting gratitude for the outpouring while noting they’d already received more food than they could use that day. As one viral caption put it, it was proof that even when democracy feels shaky, something more basic hadn’t broken.
The other side of the feed
None of this is happening in a vacuum, and the movement’s online strength has drawn an online counter-offensive to match. A police complaint alleges that CJP’s Instagram account listed its operating location as the United States at one point and Ireland at another, and calls for a cyber-forensic probe into where the account is actually run from. Separately, some government-aligned commentators have accused Meta’s algorithm of “coordinated amplification,” arguing that pro-protest reels were being pushed to people who’d never followed or engaged with CJP content at all. CJP has made the opposite accusation — that the BJP sent outsiders to the protest site to throw stones and discredit an otherwise peaceful, month-long demonstration, with Delhi Police allegedly letting the disorder happen. Whichever version turns out closer to the truth, the fight itself says something: both sides now treat the algorithm, not the street, as the territory actually worth contesting.
The state’s response has since moved from narrative control to infrastructure. Following clashes on 22 July, authorities have ordered telecom providers to suspend internet service in a roughly 1.5-kilometre radius around Jantar Mantar, with residents getting a government SMS informing them that services had been “temporarily stopped” on official instructions. A day earlier, CJP’s official Instagram account had briefly gone dark for users in India — withheld following a legal request, then restored within minutes — one more flashpoint in what Dipke describes as an ongoing pattern of takedowns, alleged hacking attempts, and death threats.
Conclusion
Whether this movement eventually forces reforms in India’s education system remains an open question. Whether those in power choose accountability over assurances is another.
But something has already changed.
For years, Gen Z has been dismissed as the generation of memes, short attention spans and endless scrolling. This protest is challenging that caricature. It is showing that irony and conviction can exist in the same breath. That someone can film a “Get Ready With Me” before heading to a protest and still demand institutional accountability with absolute seriousness. Humour, after all, doesn’t dilute dissent — it often makes it more accessible, more resilient and harder to ignore.
The cockroaches, it turns out, aren’t logging off anytime soon.
