A clip from Kathmandu, September 2025. A young man plants himself in front of a police water cannon, letting the water jet smash into him. Ten months later the same frame is circulating in Indian feeds as fan art, recoloured and captioned: Let's go Indian GenZ.
However many in India, including the Cockroach Janta Party, have tried to say that what happened there this month is fundamentally different from Nepal, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, there are parallels. Especially in the world of memes.
Several genres of reels have gone across the border. In one, an Indian creator walks through Kathmandu praising the civic sense of Nepalis as evidence about his own country’s failures.
In another, a Nepali creator films an Indian tourist cooking on a Pokhara footpath and holds him up as evidence for Indian tourists polluting Nepal.
The same message is coming from opposite directions. Both do the same work — for a certain kind of Indian content creator tourist visiting Pokhara, Nepal is not just a neighbour but a reference image in the feed.
Seventy-six Nepalis died in September 2025. In Delhi's CJP protests there were batons, tear gas, detentions and a 26-day hunger strike, but no one was killed although dozens of earlier suicides were blamed on leaked NEET exam papers.
What interests me is the trade route. Nepal's actual exports to India move through Birganj. They queue at customs, get weighed, pay, and wait. But an Instagram reel crosses in a fraction of a second, pays no duty, needs no transit agreement, and clears Raxaul without anyone at the border knowing it happened.
The only party taking a cut is the Dalal - Meta™. And Meta Sahib takes it in attention rather than rupees. This is the most efficient smuggler on the virtual border between India and Nepal, and the products are memes and meme formats.
During the September protests I made a meme setting the 'who was interested in each other first?' TikTok sound, normally a couples' bit, against a line of riot police. It did about 2 million views. The same sound turned up on Indian feeds this summer, pointed at the same target.
I made one of these, so I know exactly how little effort it takes and how far it goes. The Subway Surfers chase edit crossed too. So did the water cannon. Memes are meant to be shared, remixed, and redistributed. Yet what memes are redistributed, remixed or shared tells us more than the likes, comments or shares.
SUMMONS AND DRILLS
In Nepal, the memes were about showing up, and most of them were made after showing up. The aura shot in front of the water cannon. The silhouette against the burning building. What spread hardest was footage of arrival, of bodies present where they were not supposed to be. Our meme was a summons.
Jantar Mantar in Delhi had a lot of them too. But there was a second layer. Indian memes were also about dodging: how to take a water cannon, finding loopholes so that the police do not beat you. One meme was cut like a film scene, captioned: ‘Me at the protest saving a 10/10 baddie from the water cannon’, showing a hero pulling the heroine clear of the water cannon, saving her from the state’s violence.
That is what watching a neighbour gets you. India's youth did not only replicate our memes, they studied our footage and worked out what a protest against the government actually requires.
COSTUME AND INSIGNIA
Jantar Mantar had Superman, Spider-Man and at least one T-Rex. It had a man dressed as Mahatma Gandhi captioned 'wild card entry', on the joke that things had got bad enough for Gandhi to come back from the dead and protest. That post got 600,000 likes. People carried printed memes as placards.
Kathmandu had the skull-and-bones and straw hat. Straw hats turned up at Jantar Mantar, but as guests. They were not the host language. The costumed appearances were individual bits, each its own post, each competing with the others.
AURA ECONOMY
There is a name for this: aura farming. It works for the movement, in the crudest possible way. An outrageous costume at the protest trends. Trending brings traction. Traction brings the next crowd. The joke is load-bearing.
Look at what it costs, though. The T-Rex flattens the thing it is standing inside. What happened at Jantar Mantar was a generation revolting against a system that has failed it for years and buried some of its peers. In costume, it is photographed as a festival. And people who arrive having seen a festival come to film one.
I think it’s important to understand that we underestimate how badly the young want to go viral. Ask any gen-alpha kid what they want to be when they grow up - they will most likely say vlogger, youtuber, or gamer. This week three Nepali tots walking from school in colourful raincoats were filmed on TikTok, went viral, and they were handed scholarships.
Virality is no longer only social capital. It is a working economic instrument, and for a lot of young people it is the only one available without connections.
That pull gets people to dance in front of a camera. It gets them to say outrageous things on livecam. It is not why anyone marched on Sansad Marg last month or in Baneswor last year. But it was somewhere in the mix, which tells you something about my generation worth sitting with.
IDENTITY SLOT
When the Chief Justice of India called unemployed young people cockroaches and parasites, the next morning there was a graphic reading Main Bhi Cockroach, and within four days the account carrying it had more followers than the BJP.
India is not short of identities on offer. Religion, caste, class, region, language, are all older than the republic and all contested. The cockroach is keyed to none of them. To claim it you need nothing except to be online. Put the emoji in your bio and you are in.
Note the direction, though. Our defining insult pointed up. Nepo kid was the youth naming the elite. In India, it came down from the Chief Justice, the elite naming the youth as vermin, and it was caught in mid-air and worn. What a catch.
ENDINGS DIFFER
None of this explains why one movement took a government and the other only took a minister.
Leaderlessness does. A movement with nobody at its head cannot be negotiated with. It can only be survived or fled from, and K P Oli fled. India’s Cockroaches had a founder who is a professional communications strategist, a manifesto, named spokespersons. On 24 July they sat down with two union ministers. On the 25th Dharmendra Pradhan resigned. That evening they went home.
State capacity matters a lot. Nepal also banned 26 platforms before the protest, India withheld one account and got a replacement titled Cockroach Is Back, with a bio saying ‘cockroaches do not die’.
Delhi had watched Dhaka in 2024 and Kathmandu in 2025 and drawn the obvious conclusion that a ‘GenZ’ movement handled badly does not stay a student movement. Its police were trained for a job ours had never expected to do.
SCAPEGOAT
René Girard argued that a community in crisis resolves it by converging on a single victim. Expel him and peace returns, while whatever caused the crisis stays exactly where it was.
We do this constantly. A rural road washes out in the first monsoon after it is blacktopped. The district engineer is suspended, his name runs in the papers, the anger has somewhere to go. The contractor who has won that tender for a decade bids again in the autumn. Nobody suspends the procurement process. That is the scapegoat, to redirect people’s anger towards a person instead of a system.
A memetic movement is unusually good at producing a mimetic scapegoat, because both run on imitation. A meme is imitation that spreads. A scapegoat is imitation that converges. The format wants one face in the frame.
You could meme the National Testing Agency, but you cannot scapegoat it. It is too abstract a structure. You can meme a minister, and you can scapegoat him. Done and dusted. Guyz, the education minister resigned, all problems fixed! Not.
Pradhan is gone. The leak that made 2.2 million Indian students sit the same exam twice is not addressed by his absence. Neither is the education policy, nor the revolving door between the bench and the Cabinet that the CJP named in its own manifesto. The sacrifice worked and that is exactly the problem.
FROM HERE
I only know the Indian protest through what my Meta™ Dalal chose to hand me. It is possible I only saw the memes.
But I know what the week after feels like. We got our scapegoat in three days. We burned down Parliament, cremated our dead, and we elected a prime minister who is better at Facebook than anyone else in South Asia. Ten months on, the grievance that put us on the street is intact.
A resignation is a receipt, not a reform. My message to GenZ Indians: Ride the wave. Then, watch the next exam cycle instead of the next trend.