The saying goes that if you happen to see one cockroach, it means there are many more you can’t see yet. But when India’s topmost judge likened unemployed youth to cockroaches, he had no idea how many were about to swarm.

His condescension provoked one young man into creating the satirical Cockroach Janta Party last week online with the question: “What if all cockroaches come together?”

Within a day, more than 3 million people had joined the party. Within a week, over 22 million had followed it on social media. That’s double the number who follow India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The judge soon recanted, but it was too late. A new youth protest campaign had been born.

Thirty-year-old Abhijeet Dipke invited “the lazy and unemployed” to join the movement with the hashtag #MainBhiCockroach, or “I too am a cockroach”.

Humanoid cockroaches in suits and ties were soon speaking at lecterns in AI-generated videos. In the campaign emblem, a cartoon cockroach in sunglasses munches into a lotus flower, symbol of Modi’s BJP. “The government is going to be shaken,” said the upstart party.

And the government of India was worried. Its Intelligence Bureau raised “national security concerns”, evidently fearing an uprising, according to The Indian Express newspaper.

BJP leaders tried to discredit the movement by saying that most of its followers were from Pakistan, “the anti-India crowd”, as they called it. Dipke responded by posting analytics showing that 94 per cent of followers were from India.

At the weekend, the authorities took down Cockroach Janta Party’s website and prevailed on social media sites to block its accounts, only to see new ones spring up. “You forgot what cockroaches do best,” posted the group. “Survive.”

“It’s funny,” says Dr Teesta Prakash, a research fellow at the Australia-India Institute, “but it’s based on the real problems facing India’s Gen Z” – people born between 1997 and 2012.

“It brings up the key policy that the BJP campaigned on in 2014, 2019 and 2024 – creating jobs,” she tells me. “There’s massive youth unemployment, there’s so much labour pressure, and they haven’t been able to produce jobs at the rate at which people turn 18.”

India’s unemployment rate for people aged 15 to 24 is 16 per cent. Graduate unemployment is a startling 40 per cent. The country produces 5 million graduates a year but only 2.8 million jobs for them.

“The BJP has seen this, and it’s got them a bit worried. They’re not worried about Congress,” the ineffectual main opposition party, “but what worries them is the mobilisation of India’s youth.”

India’s government is not at risk. But it is haunted by developments in its region. Governments in three of India’s neighbours have been forced out of power by massive youth-led street protests since 2022 – in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. In all three, high youth unemployment was a central cause, aggravated by inflation, gross inequality and corruption. All three of these uprisings have been described as Gen Z revolutions.

There’s a debate about the usefulness of generation labelling in studies of sociology and politics. Today is the fifth anniversary of a notable rejection of the practice. An American sociologist, Philip Cohen, complained that it’s an arbitrary categorisation that “promotes pseudoscience”.

Yet to the authorities in South Asia, the tagging of the Gen Z demographic carries real relevance as the shock troops of political change. As youth has been in many countries over the centuries – the bearers of social conscience and the vanguard of reform.

Beyond the subcontinent, in South-East Asia, Gen Z has led mass political protests in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines in the past few years, although none of these resulted in a change of government.

In China, Xi Jinping has led a denunciation of the Gen Z protest movement known as “lying flat”, or opting out of the economic mainstream in despair. He accused them of endangering the social order, the ultimate fear of the Chinese Communist Party. Last month the country’s chief spy agency publicly fretted that such people have been “brainwashed” by hostile foreign powers.

Pakistani activist and researcher Usama Khilji certainly thinks that Gen Z carries a distinct political character: “Armed with digital technologies that can mobilise massive numbers of young people, they have catalysed unprecedented levels of public discontent,” he wrote for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in March.

He argues that governments can’t “survive by doubling down on digital repression and keeping youth excluded from power. As Nepal and Bangladesh’s experiences have shown, these assumptions are wrong.”

Will Modi’s government in India become another a victim of a Gen Z revolt? A restive youth is a troubling phenomenon for the authorities in India because most of the population is under the age of 30.

“In Australia, where the median age is 38, I’m young,” says Prakash, 33 years old. “But in India, I feel old because there are so many young people everywhere.” The median age is 28. And the problem of unemployment seems set to worsen as AI is “taking away a lot of the things Indians have been good at”, as Prakash puts it.

But she points out that India is larger and more culturally diverse than Sri Lanka, Bangladesh or Nepal “so it’s not impossible but it’s a lot harder to mobilise” national protests of a scale to overthrow the government.

The particular provocations may be different, but the Gen Z discontent roiling the Indo-Pacific has some resonance with today’s Australian concern about “intergenerational inequity” and the Albanese government’s efforts to shift incentives for home buying from investors to first-home buyers.

Indeed, Gallup in February published polling across 107 countries probing the “world’s most important problem”. What is it? Personal economic circumstances. And it found that Gen Z is more acutely worried about this than older people worldwide.

And that “this generational divide is most pronounced in wealthy nations. These disparities highlight how younger people in many high-income countries may feel the economy is failing them, despite living in relatively prosperous societies.”

The three standouts, according to Gallup, are Ireland, Australia and Canada. Their main concern, of course, is unaffordable housing. Gen Z here, as in India, is concerned for their material wellbeing. Not so different, after all. Are we all cockroaches now?

Peter Hartcher is both international and political editor. His political column appears on Saturdays.

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