India’s students found their voice this summer while journalists are losing theirs
By Ritu Kapur
As India marked eighty years of independence this August, I found myself grappling with the very idea of “press freedom”. Because who exactly is the “press” anymore?
Is it an accredited journalist? The creator livestreaming a police crackdown? The village student demanding her right to education on a mobile phone? Press freedom and the citizen’s freedom to speak have begun to bleed into each other.
And for a few extraordinary weeks this summer, in the heart of my own city, I watched a generation test just how much freedom India accords either.
In May, the Chief Justice of India referred to unemployed “youngsters” as being like “cockroaches”. “Some of them become media, some of them become social media… and they start attacking everyone.” He later said his remarks were directed only at people using bogus degrees.
The clarification didn’t matter.
The “cockroach” had escaped its context and landed on a generation that quickly went from frustrated to fearless.
In Boston, Indian student Abhijeet Dipke created the Cockroach Janta Party, a satirical meme for the “unemployed, lazy and chronically online”, playing on the name of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The page soon had over 22 million followers.
But the meme became a movement because the anger was already there.
A leaked medical entrance exam paper had driven at least 17 students to suicide, while irregularities in school board-exam revaluation left thousands more in limbo. This grief and anger filled Jantar Mantar in Delhi for seven weeks. Students went on hunger strike. The internet was cut. Food and water supplies were choked. On July 20, protesters demanding the Education Minister’s resignation tried to march towards Parliament. Police fired tear gas shells and pellets. Batons struck heads. But bloodied faces kept shouting slogans.
A match had been lit.
Large legacy broadcasters and publishers, thriving on government revenue and increasingly becoming megaphones for the ruling party’s propaganda, hot-iron branded the protesters as stone-pelting goondas. Young influencers and reporters from small independent newsrooms strode into the protests with phones and cameras, recording, questioning, livestreaming. Legacy-media journalists crawled back into their tone-deaf echo chambers as protesters pushed back:
“Godi Media waapis jao.” (Get lost, lapdog media.)
The ruling party’s image built over years and crores of rupees was punctured by irreverent memes, rhymes and ditties. Schoolchildren across towns and villages became pretend reporters, holding bottles as “mics”, demanding schools and teachers where there were none. Stand-up comics who had spent years walking on eggshells rediscovered their punchlines.
What happens when the press stops holding power to account and others have to do its job?
And did this historic movement claw back the press freedom India has lost?
Not yet.
Within days, posts and reels from the protests, or those critical of the government, started vanishing from social-media platforms. Section 69A of India’s Information Technology Act gives the government sweeping powers to order platforms to take down content on grounds as elastic as “sovereignty” and “national security”, with the process shielded from public scrutiny by confidentiality rules. The Indian Express reported that from March to July 2026, the Indian government sent one blocking order every minute to social-media platforms.
But takedowns are only one weapon.
First Information Reports. Criminal prosecution. Income-tax and money-laundering investigations. Phone and laptop seizure. Years in courtrooms. A legal system that allows the process itself to become the punishment.
Press freedom isn’t only the freedom to publish information. It is the freedom to get it. The Right to Information Act has been weakened. Access to government records has narrowed.
And then there’s surveillance. A journalist isn’t free merely because she can publish. She needs sources who believe they can speak without their calls or messages being watched. You don’t have to censor a story if you can make it impossible to report.
And who will be left to report?
I visit universities where students studying journalism increasingly tell me they don’t want to become journalists. They haven’t lost the desire to tell stories or question authority. They are doing that furiously on Instagram, YouTube and elsewhere. They have lost faith in journalism as a profession in which they can build a life.
It is not press freedom until a twenty-three-year-old can choose journalism as a career and expect it to pay her rent.
It is not press freedom until readers understand that independent newsrooms survive on their subscriptions and their attention, not on government goodwill.
It is not press freedom when a handful of social-media platforms remain the only distribution network a story has and the state retains the power to take that story down.
It is not press freedom while local journalists are killed for the stories they insist on telling.
It is not press freedom while crony capital owns newsrooms.
The Cockroach Janata Party proved something real this summer: fear has a shelf life. A citizen with a phone can document an injustice. A comedian can puncture propaganda. Students can force power to listen. But they cannot, and should not have to, replace the infrastructure of journalism.
A viral summer of dissent does not make a free press. A free press is built from the boring, expensive, unglamorous work of newsrooms that can survive without flattering power, and journalists who can afford to make reporting their life’s work.
The cockroach may be famous for surviving almost anything. Journalism shouldn’t have to.
Ritu Kapur is an Indian media leader. She is the co-founder, managing director, and CEO of Quint Digital Limited, the parent company of The Quint
This opinion piece was commissioned as part of the World News Day campaign, an initiative to show the value of journalism.
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