When placards mocking the establishment surfaced at Jantar Mantar under the banner of the “Cockroach Janata Party,” the visual was dismissed by many as satire, a bit of internet-born theatre finding its way onto the street. But look closer and a familiar pattern emerges — one that has repeated itself with uncanny regularity over the last decade: a hashtag is born, an algorithm decides it deserves amplification, a crowd of the aggrieved gathers and within days a domestic grievance has been reframed as a referendum on the Indian state itself. This is not organic democratic ferment. This is a toolkit and it is time Bharat named it as such.
The snowden warning we chose to ignore
In 2013, Edward Snowden did India — and the world — an enormous favour. His leaks on the NSA’s PRISM programme confirmed what strategists had long suspected: American technology companies were not neutral platforms but were, in effect, wired directly into the surveillance apparatus of the United States government. Metadata, private messages, location trails, social graphs — all of it sat within reach of an intelligence establishment that answers to Washington, not to Delhi, and certainly not to the citizens whose data it harvested.
This was not a one-time scandal to be filed away. It was a structural revelation about who owns the pipes through which the Global South now conducts its politics, its commerce, and its private lives. Yuval Noah Harari’s warning in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century — that those who control data will control the future, and that the coming century’s most dangerous battles would be fought not with tanks but with algorithms — reads today less like a warning and more like a prophecy already fulfilling itself.
China understood, Did we?
While the West lectured the world on the virtues of an “open internet,” China quietly declined the offer. It kept Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and X outside its digital borders, building sovereign alternatives it could regulate, audit, and if necessary, shut down. Whatever one’s views on China’s own surveillance practices, its leadership grasped an elementary truth: a nation that does not control its information architecture does not fully control its own politics.
India, in its enthusiasm to be seen as open, liberal, and globally integrated, took the opposite path. Not only did we allow American platforms unfettered entry, we handed them Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 — the “safe harbour” intermediary clause that shields platforms from legal liability for the content they host and, crucially, for the algorithms they run to decide what gets seen, by whom, and how often. We gave foreign corporations the keys to the public square and then told them they need not be accountable for what happens inside it.
The anatomy of manufactured unrest
Look at the pattern honestly. The farmer protests. The agitation against CAA-NRC. Now the “Cockroach” mobilisation. In each instance, the sequence is near-identical: a genuine underlying grievance exists — as it does in any large democracy — but the online amplification of that grievance follows a curve too clean, too rapid, and too internationally coordinated to be coincidental. Curated algorithms do not merely show people what they like; they build empathy maps of entire demographic segments — the anxieties of the young, the economic insecurities of the urban poor, the frustrations of women navigating a changing society — and then they test which emotional lever produces the most engagement. Anger, it turns out, is the most engaging emotion of all. And anger, once identified and amplified at scale, is trivially easy to point in a direction.
This is not conspiracy theory; it is documented advertising science being repurposed for statecraft. The same targeting engines that sell shoes and diet pills are more than capable of selling outrage against a sitting government — and unlike shoes, outrage against a rising power like Bharat serves a very specific geopolitical interest for those who would prefer India remain divided, distracted, and diplomatically pliable rather than confident and assertive on the world stage.
Privacy was always the myth
Meta’s family of apps — WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook — along with X and Snapchat, are not simply communication tools. Post-Snowden, we know they are potential instruments of a foreign intelligence apparatus that can, when it chooses, access the very data streams Indian citizens assume are private. The end-to-end encryption marketed to reassure users means little when metadata — who spoke to whom, when, how often, from where — is arguably more revealing than content itself. Every “assembly” organised on these platforms is, by definition, an assembly that a foreign power can see coming before the Indian state does.
Technology must bow to the rule of law
Here is the uncomfortable truth Bharat must confront: at present, technology is winning against law and order, every single time. A platform headquartered in California can, through its algorithm alone, shape what an Indian citizen believes about their own government, their own neighbours, their own nation — with no accountability to any Indian court, regulator, or law. That is not free speech. That is an abdication of sovereignty dressed up as digital liberalism.
The Prime Minister and India’s senior leadership must treat this with the seriousness of a national security matter, not merely a law-and-order irritant. Section 79 needs urgent re-examination — accountability cannot remain optional for platforms that function as the nervous system of Indian public discourse. Algorithmic transparency must be mandated, not requested. Data localisation must move from policy paper to enforced reality. And India must accelerate the building of sovereign digital infrastructure — indigenous platforms, indigenous cloud, indigenous AI — so that the country is never again dependent on tools built, owned, and ultimately controllable by interests outside its borders.
A rising power cannot afford a borrowed nervous system
Every civilisation that has risen to genuine power in history has first secured control over its own instruments of communication and information. Bharat stands at that exact threshold today — an economy ascending, a civilisational voice re-emerging on the world stage and a young population hungry for a future of its own making. It cannot afford to conduct its democracy on infrastructure it does not own, cannot audit and cannot ultimately trust. The toolkit is visible. The pattern is documented. What remains is the will to act — before the next manufactured outrage and the one after that, chips further away at the sovereignty a billion-plus Indians have every right to expect their state to defend.
