When Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Oslo recently, it was not an Indian reporter who put him on the spot. It was a Norwegian journalist. The question itself was direct and unremarkable by western democratic standards: why does the Indian prime minister so rarely take unscripted questions from the press?

In another era, the episode might have passed as a minor diplomatic awkwardness. Instead, it landed with unusual force because it captured a larger truth about contemporary India. The country still conducts noisy elections, produces relentless political spectacle, and celebrates itself as the world’s largest democracy. Yet public accountability, especially where the press is concerned, has become strangely fragile.

Modi's Distrust of Media 

Norway routinely ranks among the world’s freest media environments. India now sits at 157 on the World Press Freedom Index, close to countries with long histories of censorship and institutional intimidation. Rankings alone do not tell the whole story, but the contrast was impossible to miss in Oslo. Norwegian reporters spoke to power as if scrutiny were normal. Indian journalists watching from afar understood immediately why the moment felt unusual.

Modi has been prime minister for more than a decade. During that period, he has not had any open press conferences. His communication style is built around control: nationally televised addresses, carefully produced interviews, radio monologues, choreographed rallies. Even his limited media interactions often feel less like conversations than performances with predetermined outcomes.

Some of this reflects political instinct. Modi distrusts unpredictable settings. But the larger issue is what that instinct has gradually done to the broader political culture around him.

“Adrenalised” Public Discourse

Indian television news today is exhausting to watch. Every night, the same ritual unfolds. Anchors shout over guests. Studio graphics flash like wartime propaganda. Dissent is treated as provocation. Nuance survives only in fragments before being drowned out by outrage.

Former Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao recently captured this transformation with unusual clarity. Reflecting on Indian television news, she observed that “every debate feels like a national emergency, every headline like a battlefield dispatch.” She described a media culture driven by “nationalism, grievance, triumphalism, insecurity, outrage, aspiration, wounded pride, civilisational assertion” — fused into what she called a permanently “adrenalised” public discourse.

The cumulative effect matters. Journalism begins losing its ordinary civic function. Reporters stop looking like investigators and start resembling political gladiators performing for ideological tribes.

There are still brave journalists in India. Important investigative work continues to emerge from independent outlets and digital platforms. But the pressure surrounding that work has become impossible to ignore. Tax raids, police complaints, defamation cases, anti-terror investigations and coordinated online harassment now form part of the professional landscape for many reporters critical of the government.

That atmosphere helps explain why an apparently absurd internet phenomenon like the Cockroach Janata Party, or CJP, suddenly struck a nerve with young Indians. At first glance, the movement looked like another chaotic meme culture experiment from Gen Z: satirical slogans, deliberately ridiculous imagery and dark humour ricocheting across social media.

Angry, Frustrated Youth

India’s young people are deeply anxious. Graduate unemployment remains stubbornly high. The NEET (entrance examination for getting into medical colleges) paper leak was particularly damaging because it shattered faith in one of the few remaining promises the Indian middle class still clings to: study hard, succeed honestly and the system will eventually reward you. For thousands of students, that promise collapsed overnight.

The anger was visible online almost immediately. Not ideological anger. Something colder. Humiliation mixed with exhaustion.

That is partly why the Cockroach Janata Party resonated. The symbolism was grotesque and self-mocking by design. Young people were effectively saying: if the system already treats us as disposable creatures scrambling for survival, then we may as well embrace the caricature ourselves.

Tharoor an Exception 

Few mainstream politicians understood the emotional undercurrent behind it. Shashi Tharoor was one of the exceptions. Rather than dismissing the phenomenon as internet nonsense, he argued that democracies need safety valves for frustration and dissent. Suppress satire, he warned, and resentment hardens into something more dangerous.

Satire becomes politically potent when people stop believing conventional politics is listening. Humour fills the vacuum left behind by institutional indifference.

The government’s reported attempts to curb the movement online only amplified its visibility. States secure in their authority rarely panic over memes. Governments become hypersensitive to ridicule when insecurity begins creeping beneath the surface.

One reason the Norwegian exchange attracted attention internationally is because it fitted into a broader global perception already forming around India. Foreign governments still court New Delhi enthusiastically for strategic reasons. India is viewed as a crucial geopolitical counterweight to China, a vast consumer market and an emerging technological power. But outside diplomatic circles, concerns about democratic backsliding are becoming harder to ignore.

Critics Face Online Abuse

The experience of Wall Street Journal reporter Sabrina Siddique illustrated this sharply in 2023. After she questioned Modi during a joint press conference with then US president Joe Biden about minority rights and free expression, she was hit with an avalanche of online abuse from nationalist supporters. The hostility was immediate and intensely personal. For many observers abroad, the episode reinforced an uncomfortable impression: criticism of the Indian government increasingly triggers organised public fury rather than democratic debate.

Questioning Becomes Risky

None of this means India has ceased to be democratic. Elections remain fiercely contested. Opposition parties still govern major states. Courts occasionally push back against executive overreach.

But democratic decline rarely happens in one dramatic moment. The erosion is slower than that. Editors become cautious. Journalists begin self-censoring. Public debate narrows by increments. Citizens internalise the idea that questioning power carries social or professional risk.

Then one day, a foreign journalist asking an ordinary question in Oslo starts feeling like an act of rebellion. That should concern Indians far more than it currently does.

India has survived wars, insurgencies, assassinations and the Emergency because its democratic culture retained enough internal confidence to tolerate criticism. The present mood feels different. More brittle and performative. Less secure beneath the spectacle.

The rise of the Cockroach Janata Party may ultimately fade as quickly as it appeared. Most internet movements do. But the frustrations driving it are real and unlikely to disappear soon. Millions of young Indians feel politically unheard and economically cornered. Increasingly, they are expressing that frustration not through traditional political participation, but through irony, parody and nihilistic humour.

A country should pay attention when its youth stop speaking in the language of hope and start speaking in the language of satire. Democracies ignore such signals at their peril.

(The writer is a former UN spokesperson and a contemporary affairs commentator. Views expressed are personal. He can be reached at edmathew@gmail.com/ tweets @edmathew)