For more than a decade, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has presented himself to India as a figure of strength and control. His speeches are scripted, his broadcasts are formal, and his public appearances are choreographed down to the camera angle. It is striking, then, that the 75-year-old prime minister has recently begun posting selfie-style videos on Instagram, addressing young people as "friends" and even borrowing the Gen Z meme about being "first in my bloodline" during a graduation speech in Delhi. With more than 106 million followers on the platform, Modi hardly lacks an audience. What he appears to lack, and what he is now urgently seeking, is the trust of India's youngest voters.
To understand why this shift matters, one must first appreciate how deliberately his earlier image was constructed. During the 2014 election campaign, Modi used 3D holograms to address dozens of rallies at once and staged informal "Chai Pe Charcha" events at tea stalls, while the BJP ran one of the most disciplined digital operations India had ever seen. Once in office, he continued to favour channels he could control. His monthly radio programme, Mann Ki Baat, has aired since October 2014, the NaMo app offered a direct line to supporters, and he has largely avoided open press conferences. Even his 2025 appearances on podcasts hosted by Nikhil Kamath and Lex Fridman were polished, long-form conversations rather than spontaneous exchanges. A slightly awkward, home-made reel therefore marks a genuine departure.
That departure did not come out of nowhere; it followed a political shock. Earlier this year, a wave of youth protests led by the satirical Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) spread across India through memes, livestreams and reels. What began as an online joke soon brought demonstrators onto the streets of cities such as Mumbai and Kolkata, and by late July the pressure had forced Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign. Pradhan had already faced criticism over the 2024 NEET exam paper leak, a scandal that affected millions of students. For a party accustomed to dominating public conversation, the speed with which a mock party turned online attention into real-world pressure was deeply unsettling.
Demographics explain why the BJP cannot afford to ignore this warning. More than 60 per cent of Indians are under 35, and Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, is expected to form one of the largest voting blocs by the 2029 general election. Moreover, the party's position is less secure than it once was: after winning 303 seats in 2019, it fell to 240 in 2024 and now relies on coalition partners to govern. Winning over young voters is therefore not merely a question of image but of long-term political survival.
Yet the early response suggests that young Indians will not be won over easily. Modi's first selfie reel, released while the protests were still under way, drew more than 400 million views, but much of that attention was mocking. A long pause after he said "friends" became a meme in its own right, and users ridiculed the lighting and camera angles. The BJP's own pages fared even worse. One reel set in a gym, in which an older trainer urged young people to stay away from the protests, was widely dismissed as "cringe", while another used the theme song from Friends, a sitcom far more beloved by millennials than by Gen Z. As 22-year-old Ginni Malia told the BBC, the sudden timing of this outreach invites suspicion, particularly when the videos imitate Gen Z language without addressing the grievances that fuelled the protests. Recognising the problem, the party has reportedly issued ministers social media "report cards" and replaced Amit Malviya, who had led its IT cell since 2015.
These missteps point to a deeper problem: Instagram rewards a very different kind of politics from the one the BJP perfected. India is Instagram's largest market, and Reels flourished there after the government banned TikTok in 2020, inheriting an audience fluent in short, ironic video. The BJP's traditional strength, by contrast, lay in networks of coordinated supporters on X and WhatsApp who could push a single message across the country within hours. Instagram's algorithm, however, promotes whatever generates watch time, replays and shares, regardless of who posted it. As Joyojeet Pal of the University of Michigan observes, a reel from an account with only a few hundred followers can easily outperform one from a political giant. In his view, the BJP designed its strategy for a network-driven internet, whereas today's platforms are driven by emotion.
Equally troubling for the party is the loss of control once a video is posted. On Instagram, content belongs as much to those who remix it as to those who create it, and commentator Anurag Minus Verma argues that the platform is fundamentally built around irony. In such an environment, even a serious political message can be turned into a punchline overnight, which is precisely what happened to Modi's first reel. For a party that has long set the terms of national debate, accepting this loss of control may prove harder than mastering any new format.
The party's anxiety also reflects events beyond India's borders. In recent years, young, digitally organised movements have toppled governments across South Asia. Sri Lanka's 2022 Aragalaya protests drove President Gotabaya Rajapaksa from power; student protests in Bangladesh ended Sheikh Hasina's 15-year rule in 2024; and in September 2025, Gen Z demonstrators in Nepal, angered by a social media ban, brought down Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli within days. India is far larger, and its institutions far sturdier, than those of its neighbours. Even so, the CJP has shown that the country is not immune to the same forces.
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to overstate what Instagram means for the BJP's electoral fortunes. The party's real power rests on its grassroots organisation, its close ties to the RSS volunteer network and a deeply loyal voter base. Indeed, Pal himself suggests that the BJP could still sweep elections even if every Gen Z user mocked it online. Its rivals, meanwhile, face the same pressures. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who reshaped his public image through the Bharat Jodo Yatra and casual social media content, also held an Instagram "Ask Me Anything" after the protests, a sign that every party is now competing for the same restless audience.
Ultimately, Modi's experiment with Gen Z reels reveals both the BJP's adaptability and its vulnerability. The party has reinvented its communication before, from pioneering social media campaigns to embracing podcasts and influencer interviews, and it may well master this format too. However, the young Indians it hopes to reach have made one point unmistakably clear. They care far less about whether their leaders can make a convincing reel than about whether those leaders are genuinely willing to listen.
