There are rules of the game, well-documented and time-tested, by which hostile networks, domestic and foreign, spread across the developing world when they can’t win at the ballot box.
The goal is to never win a single argument. Rather, it is to create a permanent sense of national unease, a slow, creeping suspicion that the country is failing, its leadership is corrupt, and its institutions are broken beyond repair. To its credit, India has proven more difficult to penetrate than any other country.
After failing to defeat Prime Minister Narendra Modi across three consecutive electoral terms, these forces have turned their attention to a more accessible target: the smartphones of Indian youth who form their political opinions almost entirely through social media.
What appears to be a meme page is often something much more intentional. Realizing that gap between appearance and intention is the first act of resistance.
India’s neighboring countries provide us with the clearest and most realistic lessons in what happens when these processes continue unchallenged.
In Sri Lanka, a coordinated social media campaign turned real economic frustrations into a revolutionary moment. A mob stormed the presidential palace, the elected government fell, and the growing economy collapsed into chaos, with foreign-funded civil society networks feeding this narrative at every stage.
Bangladesh followed a near-identical scenario in 2024, when an organic student protest was systematically hijacked by external megaphones and turned into a full-scale political transition, toppling a government that had achieved two decades of growth.
Nepal has been going through artificial crises for more than a decade, keeping one of Asia’s most resource-rich countries permanently distracted from its own potential.
The formula is identical every time: identify the complaint, give it an attractive face, flood social platforms until the narrative looks like a national consensus, and then harvest the instability that follows.
India now faces a calculated version of this formula, aimed squarely at the huge, digitally active youth population.
The most visible recent example is the so-called “Cockroach Janta Party” (CJP), an Instagram-centric campaign that has rapidly gained momentum in recent weeks.
Its founder, Abhijit Deepki, is a Boston-based strategist who held official responsibilities in the AAP’s social media and communications work between 2020 and 2023, including work reportedly linked to former AAP leader Manish Sisodia. While Debke has distanced himself from those affiliations, the background raises legitimate questions about whether the AKP is acting as a digital tool for the organized opposition, using satire as cover for a larger political project.
The page’s publicly available Meta audience insights tell a revealing story: Only 30% of its followers are under 25, which flatly contradicts its claims of being a spontaneous Gen Z uprising. Its actual follower profile reflects a carefully groomed base of politically engaged older users. This is the imprint of directed political communication, not the anger of youth at the grassroots level.
Ultimately, what these obstructionists are betting on is the reality of the path that India is taking.
It is the only major economy in the world to record GDP growth consistently above 7%, and it is widely expected to maintain this pace through the decade. Transformation on the ground is neither invisible nor abstract. Highways, airports, digital public infrastructure and rural connectivity have measurably changed the lives of hundreds of millions. Schemes like PM-KISAN and Mudra have created real economic pathways for those who had nothing a generation ago. Declining poverty, rising access to digital technology, and a thriving startup ecosystem are not government talking points. These are numbers documented by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and independent rating agencies.
It is this story of growth, and the national trust it builds, that coordinated campaigns are designed to interrupt.
India’s youth are not just witnesses to this story. They are the next chapter, and the policy architecture being built today is designed specifically for them to step into it.
India’s AI Mission, launched in 2024 with a dedicated public computing cluster, positions the country as a serious player in the global AI race. The rapid expansion of data center capacity is attracting some of the world’s largest technology investments to Indian cities. Production-linked incentive schemes in electronics and semiconductors are creating industrial depth that did not exist a decade ago. Startup India has backed tens of thousands of ventures, and the number of young founders building their businesses in Bharat and globally continues to grow.
These are funded, operational and accessible opportunities.
A nation that had spent more than three centuries under foreign rule, watching its wealth systematically drained and its ambitions deliberately suppressed by colonial powers, rebuilt itself from that point on to become the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
This journey is supposed to make India’s youth the most discerning consumers of information in the world.
The forces trying to create doubt about India’s future are in many cases offspring of the same strategic interest that did not want India to rise in the first place.
The threat is institutional in size and must be responded to institutionally.
According to government statements during Operation Sindoor, foreign-linked networks spread large numbers of fake accounts on Indian social media, designed to portray Indians from every caste, community, religion and region, spreading misinformation and amplifying divisions to push Indians towards internal conflict. India needs a dedicated social media monitoring and rapid response cell equipped with advanced analytics to identify and counter these campaigns in real time.
A cross-functional task force should force platforms to label AI-generated content and remove networks of fake accounts coordinated using technology that already exists on these platforms and is simply not being applied.
A country that designed and scaled a digital payments system used by half a billion people, and ran one of the largest vaccination campaigns in human history, has all the capabilities needed to build this infrastructure. The forces trying to pull India back have always underestimated it. They are making this mistake again.
(The author, an MBA from IIM Lucknow, is a national member of the Policy Research Training of Bharatiya Yuva Janata Morcha, the youth wing of the BJP. The views expressed in the article are personal.)
