youth

Aug. 14 (UPI) — About 200 young people representing 34 countries gathered in Seoul on Wednesday to launch an international network supporting peace and reunification on the Korean Peninsula, hours after North Korea fired a ballistic missile toward the East Sea.

At the 2026 One Korea Youth Forum, South Koreans, North Korean defectors, ethnic Koreans from the former Soviet Union and young people from overseas formally launched Youth Solidarity for One Korea.

Youth groups including the Korean Dream Crew, the youth group of the Korean Association of Koryo-saram, MuiPansapan and Studec International read the One Korea Youth Declaration, pledging to build an international youth network for peace and reunification based on the Korean ideal of Hongik Ingan, broadly meaning benefiting all humanity, and the values of liberal democracy.

Namsik Yoo, director of youth programs at Alliance for Korea United USA, said young people respond more strongly to hope than cynicism and will organize, create and act when given a vision they can understand, believe in and lead.

Yoo said Korean reunification should not be viewed as something distant or impossible but as “a future young people can imagine and create themselves.”

Young-soon Jung, president of the Korean Association of Koryo-saram, said the division of the Korean Peninsula was not merely a political issue but “a family history that continues today.” She said One Korea could begin when young people from different backgrounds listen to and understand one another’s histories.

During a Peace Innovation Challenge, 20 youth teams proposed projects tied to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. The top award went to a plan to turn the Demilitarized Zone into a national park after reunification and seek UNESCO World Heritage status.

The forum was hosted by Global Peace Foundation Korea, a nonprofit foundation registered with South Korea’s Unification Ministry. It was jointly organized by GPY Korea, Korean Dream Crew, MuiPansapan, the youth group of the Korean Association of Koryo-saram, Alliance for Korea United USA and Studec International, with Global Goals Youth and Loglo participating as partner organizations.

The forum concluded with participants carrying flags from their countries alongside the South Korean flag and declaring, “We Stand for One Korea.”

New Delhi, India — Authorities dispatched workers early to New Delhi on the morning of July 26 to paint over the graffitied walls near the Jantar Mantar observatory.

A day earlier, protests over an exam leak scandal, led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), had led to the ousting of India’s Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

The entry curve of the protest strip read: “#2026 Gen-Z REVOLUTION!!!”

A man in his early twenties climbed a tree carrying a powerful loudspeaker and blasted a song. “Azadi, give me freedom! Azadi, give me freedom! Azadi, give me freedom!” The crowd followed the words, with their hands raised in the air.

Azadi, translated as “freedom” in English, a popular hip-hop song from the Bollywood film Gully Boy, became the anthem of the student protests in one of the biggest challenges to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government in years.

Fast-paced video footage of police personnel beating students at New Delhi’s Parliament Street gave a new lease of life to the nearly decade-old track.

It was not just in Delhi – the chants reverberated in other cities such as Jaipur, Lucknow and Mumbai.

Just a decade ago, Azadi was among the most radioactive words — and criminalised protest slogans — in Delhi, for which student leaders were jailed for treason.

After thousands of protesters returned home following the minister’s resignation last month, the lights at Jantar Mantar had gone out. But rows of bright-yellow metal police barricades still lined the street. Many of them were painted over by protesters. One of them read, in red: “Umar, Sharjeel, Gulfisha were here before you”.

The journey of the Azadi chant — from Pakistan’s feminist movement, the Kashmiri resistance, to the mainstream in India — charts the evolution of both a political slogan and student politics and activism in India under Modi’s rule over the last decade.

‘Criminalising university spaces’

December 9, 2016, was supposed to be a casual evening at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), one of India’s premier public universities that for decades has also been a cauldron of political activism.

A group of students coming together to meet was just another banal event. This meeting was to discuss capital punishment in India, looking at the case of a Kashmiri, hanged for an armed attack on India’s parliament in 2001.

At least, that’s how Banojyotsna Lahiri, a close friend of Umar Khalid and one of the organisers of the event, who spoke to Al Jazeera, remembered that winter evening.

Indian TV media channels, seen as friendly to Modi’s government, made the event a national political flashpoint, repeatedly airing footage of students chanting Azadi slogans, led by then JNU student union president Kanhaiya Kumar.

Pro-Modi media labelled the students as “sympathisers of terrorists” and some channels even aired doctored clips about the event.

Students like Khalid and JNU became household names as the controversy “blew out of proportion,” Lahiri said.

“Intense media trial picked up. It was a targeted campaign: propagating that antinational students lived off taxpayers’ money,” Lahiri recalled. Within days, sedition charges and arrests followed, with Khalid and others released on bail a few weeks later.

The JNU has been a traditional bastion of left-liberal politics, which also puts it in the crosshairs with the country’s Hindu majoritarian right, especially under Modi. But it was not the only university with popular anti-establishment politics at the time.

After a Dalit student, Rohith Vemula, died by suicide in Hyderabad, in southern India, alleging caste discrimination, the Central University there erupted in protests, followed by a government crackdown.

These events in early 2016 kicked off a government campaign that gradually eroded space for dissent and expression in India’s public universities. Students said this has worsened over the years.

Right-wing goons attacked student leaders. Khalid was shot at in New Delhi. Universities blocked permissions to hold discussions, film screenings or protests.

“It requires a lot of courage to be a student activist or leader in India, after coming from small towns,” Apoorvanand, a professor of Hindi at Delhi University, said.

“It is the first time in independent India where the government has undertaken a coordinated, well-thought-out attack on student activism.”

Lahiri said that the media campaign led to serious repercussions for those involved in the protests.

“The tag of antinational was accepted in wider Indian imagination, outside universities and these students [like Khalid] could never shed it,” Lahiri said.

In 2019, protests erupted against proposed amendments to India’s citizenship laws, which were seen as discriminatory against Muslims and rendering them second-class citizens.

Several Muslim student leaders in Delhi shot to national prominence for their fiery speeches and organising protests against the proposed Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

The government appeared to step back from a nationwide screening of who qualifies as an Indian citizen amid the protests.

Another crackdown followed, jailing dozens of prominent student activists and burying their cases under piles of charges, including terrorism.

After the citizenship protests in 2019, which ran into 2020, students say the spaces in universities for protest shrank even further.

Police presence and inquiries were beefed up; students allege that several politically biased appointments to university administrations were made, and funding for research and institutions was slashed.

Six years on, student leaders like Khalid, who was rearrested, and Sharjeel Imam continue to be imprisoned without trial.

The journey of ‘Azadi’

After the controversy in 2016, the visuals of JNU reverberating with Azadi slogans inspired a music producer, Dub Sharma, to layer electronic beats over the crowd chants, which flows as the central melody.

Those slogans called for freedom from caste-based hierarchy, capitalism, hunger, and to break free from the influence of the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological fountainhead of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

Three years later, the track was tapped by director Zoya Akhtar for her 2019 Bollywood flick, Gully Boy, inspired partly by the poverty of rappers in Mumbai’s slums. Sharma recreated the song for the movie — and recruited popular Mumbai artist Divine to rap to it.

But the revised version of the song only retained “freedom from hunger” from the crowd’s original chants, omitting other calls for social justice. The film’s team faced criticism for hollowing out the original track but they defended it, arguing that the track was altered to suit the film’s own arc.

Seven years ago, in the recreated version, Divine rapped about income inequality, politicians’ privileged children and called on people to take over a corrupt system — all of which have become the central theme of Gen Z protests across the world.

Under Modi, India has continued to slide in multiple democratic indices. This year, Sharma’s rehashed score became the anthem of the students’ resistance, calling for wider educational reforms.

The earliest modern political life of the Azadi chant can be traced to Pakistan’s feminist resistance to General Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship in the 1980s. The late Indian feminist activist Kamla Bhasin recalled being inspired by the chant’s fluidity and adopting it to the Indian subcontext, making the calls suitable to specific protests.

Kashmiri resistance to Indian occupation adopted the slogan in the late 1980s as well. The left liberal movement in New Delhi caught up, too. But their calls to freedom were specific to their unique contexts.

A year before Bhasin passed away in 2021, she referred to the Azadi chants in an interview as “a living, breathing slogan”.

“This slogan grows every day, it evolves every day. Its meaning is not set in stone.”

Beginners’ guide to protesting in Delhi

A month after India’s chief justice controversially equated India’s unemployed youth with cockroaches and parasites, the insult caught the national imagination last June.

A Boston University graduate, Abhijeet Dipke, casually wondered: “What if all cockroaches come together?” in a post on X. He then started a social media campaign, under the self-named Cockroach Janta Party, and went viral on the internet. It gained more than 22 million followers on Instagram, more than double Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been in power since 2014.

Dipke returned to India, pledging to launch an agitation, channelling support in calling for education reforms starting with the resignation of the former education minister, after a series of examination scandals that affected millions of Indian students.

On June 6, he landed in New Delhi and came straight to the Jantar Mantar protest site, where he stood with Neha Bora, the national president of All India Students Association (AISA), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).

Bora, a slight 29-year-old, had been with AISA for eight years, since her college days in Delhi’s JNU.

“[The Cockroach movement] did not have any idea about what might happen, or what to expect here,” she told Al Jazeera, sitting cross-legged in a loose T-shirt. “They didn’t know what to do. They were excited but also scared.”

Bora said student unions, like hers, “helped the protest stand” and take shape.

After the protest occupied the Jantar Mantar strip, defying frequent police orders to vacate, Bora’s AISA, alongside the Student Federation of India (SFI), another prominent left-wing student organisation, organised a protest camp. Six students joined educator-turned-activist Sonam Wangchuk, 59, on a hunger strike.

For a month, student volunteers from these organisations took shifts at the protest site, making sure it was occupied at all times. They gave the protest slogans, placards, and a voice that helped bring it international prominence.

“Sit-in means a lot of repetition for those people who you’re appealing to join,” Bora said, describing challenges. “As a student organisation, we knew the science behind keeping protest alive: bring in different sections of society to support the movement, like lawyers, professors and farmers.”

The Jantar Mantar protest was particularly remarkable in ways that experienced protest organisers — whose politics for years has been criminalised or sidelined — quietly equipped a younger generation to organise what, from the outside, appeared to be a leaderless movement, political analysts say.

With this came the same playbook from opponents to delegitimise the students, said Bora. For weeks, they fought back against “baseless conspiracies and allegations of being antinationals or foreign-funded”. At one point, Education Minister Pradhan called the protesters the “B-team of terrorists”.

However, this time, criminalising the young protesters did not work, and the demonstration continued to grow in popularity. Rather, the movement, campaigning on education issues, gave the student organisation a shot at gaining a foothold in national politics, said Apoorvanand.

Rediscovering ‘Azadi’

This summer, the grammar of Indian politics appeared to flip in the Gen Z protest wave. A stroll through the protest strip, reverberating with Azadi chants, raised a question: what had changed in New Delhi since 2016?

Before peeling back the layers, Lahiri, Khalid’s friend, insists that one needs to settle on a baseline: “The earlier citizenship protests were for Muslims, led by Muslims. Their names were Muslims, therefore [they were] easier to criminalise.” Several political analysts agree.

By contrast, none of the most prominent names in this year’s student protests was Muslim — though the organisers repeatedly called out the “hate and divisive politics” of the ruling government, which has been criticised for alleged targeted attacks on minorities.

Mohammad Junaid, a volunteer at the site, became the most visible Muslim face at the Jantar Mantar strip. Even before everyone had returned home after the protest ended, Junaid and his family members were picked up and harassed by police, he said.

At one point, the Cockroach leaders asked the protesters to refrain from chanting “negative” Azadi slogans. That made no difference among the crowd, though.

N Sai Balaji, a student activist who served as AISA’s national president from 2019 to 2023, said there is a clear difference between the student leaders’ pre and post-citizenship protests, where they have moved on from being objects of representation to owning the narrative.

“It’s just not the same kind. They are tech-savvy 1786809159, know how to integrate their message, and they know the language of the internet so well because they grew up there,” he told Al Jazeera. He compared this with his own generation growing up watching TV.

“That is why the traditional media was useless for them. Rather, they became the media themselves,” Balaji said. “They owned their story. Something we could not do.”

Balaji stressed that social media influencers and alternative media spaces reported the protest and became the main medium of amplification. Many began boycotting traditional media outlets seen as friendly to the government. “And no one was calling them antinationals in this new space,” he said.

Instead, for instance, when videos of Bora on hunger strike were watched by millions, Balaji said, it made people question the status quo. “India’s aspirational class, who felt betrayed by the government’s broken promises, found hope in people who were sitting selflessly,” Balaji stressed.

“That’s where the whole propaganda vanishes. Suddenly, the so-called antinationals become humans too,” he added.

Lahiri said the current generation of student leaders broke through traditional moulds of activism. “With their language, imagery, and Instagram reels, people outside universities are now able to connect more,” she said.

And with spaces inside universities criminalised, the students’ politics are yet again spilling out onto the streets, added Lahiri. She went a step further to note that unlike her own generation, the new student protesters are “trying to do politics under even harsher circumstances”.

Call it shallow, Lahiri argued, breaking into a laugh, but just saying, “Fu** Modi,” is more of a slap in the face, instead of our sentiments coated in academic language.

Out of the flood of online memes and posters, one stayed with Lahiri. It read: “Umar Khalid walked, so Gen Z could run.” She is not sure if Khalid would agree with this, but she does.

For Bora’s part, she told Al Jazeera, the 2019 citizenship movement led by Muslims “inspired a revolution inside” her, which keeps her going even today.

Painting her predecessors as antinationals and traitors of India, Bora said, the Modi government criminalised the mere expression of the word Azadi by “creating so much noise around it.”

However, “when students faced police brutality — when the wounds of those batons were fresh on their bodies — one understands that the Azadi slogan is the most radical assertion of fundamental rights in India”, Bora said.

The recent uprising of the youth in India might seem to have subsided after forcing Dharmendra Pradhan, the education minister of India, to resign. Still, he was never the true target of this historic youth revolt. The slogans, the placards, the irreverent digital art and the collective anger of the young were directed at one man alone: Narendra Modi.

There exists a pervasive prejudice among the intelligentsia that young Indians today are politically indifferent, consumerist and unconcerned with politics or the erosion of democratic norms. The events at Jantar Mantar have laid bare the shallowness of this assumption. The young harboured no illusions about the nature of this regime. They understood with absolute clarity that in the present constitutional setup, no minister possesses independent agency.

The Indian state today has been reduced to a single face, a single voice and an unyielding hub of authority: Narendra Modi. To demand the resignation of a minister, therefore, was not an administrative plea; it was a deliberate act to compel the supreme leader himself to yield.

Walking through Jantar Mantar, the protest site in central Delhi, occupied by thousands of young people for weeks, one could not escape this truth. What these young people achieved was nothing short of the iconoclasm of our times: the systematic demolition of the carefully curated, mythic public persona that this regime has spent a decade building as the sole visage of the nation.

What was most remarkable about this uprising was its radical decentralisation.

There were no high-budget, professionally printed banners. There was no vanguard organisation dictating the visual language of the protest or distributing uniform slogans for the benefit of television cameras. Scraps of cardboard, discarded paper and cheap marker pens sufficed. Each placard bore the unmistakable, authentic imprint of individual moral agency.

Yet, beneath this extraordinary heterogeneity, there remained an unwavering thematic unity.

Everything revolved around Modi.

The prime minister was mocked, caricatured and systematically stripped of the sacral aura that had been constructed around him for more than 10 years. In a matter of weeks, this generation transformed an imposing figure of state authority into a subject of collective laughter.

The young were outraged, above all, by the sheer, unbridled arrogance of power.

This uprising did not spring from material grievances alone; it arose from a profound sense of humiliation. The immediate symbolic spark was the deeply insensitive remark made by the chief justice of India, who publicly compared unemployed young people to “cockroaches”.

Coming after years in which the higher judiciary has increasingly appeared less like an independent guardian of the Constitution and more like an extension of executive power, the remark was understood as an articulation of the regime’s own contempt for its youth.

The formation of the “Cockroach Janta Party” (CJP) was an act of counter-humour born of deep injury. The already unfolding scandal over irregularities in the NEET examinations provided the movement with a concrete institutional focal point. The scandal became the occasion to demand accountability not just for a single test, but for an entire culture of governance.

The regime, meanwhile, suffered from its own hubris. It had persuaded itself that Indian society was thoroughly managed. Preoccupied with engineering electoral outcomes through the manipulation of rolls, managing parliamentary majorities through party defections, and consolidating its hold over state institutions, it failed to notice the quiet, gathering storm beneath the surface.

Those who possessed platforms, prestige and the power to shape public discourse were engrossed in celebrating the grand narrative of national glory. Television studios debated the nation’s civilisational destiny and its global standing. The mainstream press sang panegyrics to a “New India”. Scarcely anyone looked towards the young who found every avenue of mobility blocked. Their anxieties were rendered invisible because the state and its allied media did not consider them worthy of serious democratic attention.

Deprived of traditional spaces, they constructed their own. Their smartphones became their public square; social media platforms became their political assemblies; and satire became their primary democratic vocabulary.

The ruling ideology had convinced itself that the project of cultural hegemonisation was complete: once the majority was mobilised around a politics of religious identity and grievance against minorities, material realities would cease to matter. The aspirations, anxieties and dignity of an entire generation simply did not figure in this political imagination.

It was against this backdrop of institutional indifference that Sonam Wangchuk began his fast at Jantar Mantar. The government’s initial response was its standard weapon: calculated silence. As Wangchuk’s health deteriorated, the refusal to even acknowledge his presence generated profound moral outrage. Then came the fateful decision to forcibly remove him.

It proved to be a fatal miscalculation. The young perceived the treatment of Wangchuk as an insult to their own citizenship. What was done to him could be done to anyone who dared to stand up. His humiliation became their collective provocation. The response was immediate: Jantar Mantar was flooded by thousands of young bodies.

When the young marched towards parliament on July 20, the state relied on its familiar playbook: barricades, prohibitory orders and violent suppression. It had deployed these very methods against the anti-CAA protesters and the farmers’ movement. But this time, the internal mechanics of fear failed to operate. The blows they received did not shatter their spirit; they deepened their moral clarity.

Their struggle was not merely about securing a policy change or extracting a routine administrative concession. They set out to breach that institutional arrogance. When the Delhi police rained blows on the protesters on July 20, beating young citizens with a ferocity typically reserved for enemy combatants, the protesters did not view those batons as the instruments of an indifferent police force. They recognised them as the direct expression of Narendra Modi’s political will.

Yet, fear failed to perform its intended historic function. Many returned to Jantar Mantar carrying their wounds like badges of honour. Some returned barefoot. Their injuries became symbols of moral persistence rather than reasons for retreat. Their resolve was remarkably simple: they would force Modi to sacrifice one of his own.

Crucially, the protesters refused to yield to the temptation of violence. Their weapons remained language, images and satire. Armed with their phones, they launched an unrelenting assault on the prime minister’s public image, the very asset he has guarded most fiercely throughout his political life. For the first time, Modi was drawn onto a battleground where he could not dictate the rules.

When the prime minister attempted to intervene directly on social media, addressing the youth as “friends”, the rebuttal was instant and devastating:

“We are not your friends.”

It was more than a clever slogan; it marked the psychological collapse of a carefully cultivated paternalistic relationship. For years, Modi had sought to speak directly to the populace, bypassing mediating institutions and independent media. The young rejected that calculated intimacy in a single sentence. The authority of the patriarch dissolved into the irreverence that a free people reserve for their elected officials. The spell of fear was broken.

The assault on Modi’s public image appears to have shaken the regime far more deeply than any routine electoral setback ever could. For more than a decade, his authority has rested not merely on the coercive power of the state, but on the illusion of invulnerability: an image of a leader who never retreats, never admits error and never compromises.

The movement had to be contained before the satire hardened into permanent collective memory and the laughter of the young became the common language of the republic.

Pradhan’s resignation must be read precisely in this light. It is not the sacrifice of a minister; it is a desperate attempt to construct a firewall around the prime minister himself. The government will undoubtedly frame this as evidence of its responsiveness and democratic sensitivity. But the young understand it differently. For them, the resignation is a political concession extracted from an authority that had run out of options.

Before arriving at this point, the state had exhausted its standard repertoire of delegitimisation. It ignored the movement, questioned its motives, accused the youth of being proxies for opposition parties and deployed its media networks to allege foreign plots. When these slurs failed to stick, it resorted to force. Having endured all of this, the young do not view the minister’s exit as an act of state benevolence; they see it as the reluctant admission of a defeat that could no longer be disguised.

Ordinarily, the vocabulary of victory and defeat should not dominate a constitutional democracy. A government is expected to listen to its citizens, not view them as adversaries to be crushed. Dissent is not treason. But when a state consistently treats criticism as hostility and peaceful protesters as enemies of the state, it transforms democratic dialogue into a confrontation. When that happens, it cannot complain if citizens celebrate its retreat as a democratic victory.

The ultimate significance of this movement lies in its moral and creative form. The young answered state coercion with speech, wit, art and an extraordinary mastery of contemporary cultural forms. Their elders have often lamented that a generation raised on short-form content lacks political depth and endurance. Jantar Mantar has demolished that patronising assumption.

The meme was elevated to a potent instrument of political resistance. Laughter accomplished what solemn political rhetoric often fails to do: it punctured fear, dismantled false authority and deprived power of the uncritical reverence upon which authoritarian politics depends.

Authoritarianism requires not just obedience, but awe. It survives as long as people believe the ruler is beyond challenge, beyond satire and beyond defeat. The young at Jantar Mantar refused to grant Narendra Modi that sacral status. They restored him to the position he must occupy in a constitutional republic: an ordinary, accountable political leader, subject to the scrutiny, criticism and satire of the citizenry.

The protest site at Jantar Mantar may now be empty. The barricades have been moved aside and the crowds have returned to their hostels, campuses and homes. But movements of this nature do not end when the physical space is vacated. The critique inaugurated on the streets will continue in countless quiet spaces: university libraries, rented rooms, bus rides and millions of illuminated screens. The language that has been discovered cannot easily be unlearned.

If this youth uprising leaves behind an enduring lesson for the republic, it is a simple, fundamental truth: democracy begins the moment a people recover confidence in their own voice.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

India’s young protesters are mocking their government. And the jokes are landing.

As thousands of demonstrators take to the streets in the Indian capital, they are waging a parallel campaign online, flooding social media with memes, parody videos and self-deprecating jokes.

In doing so, they are also beating Narendra Modi – the powerful but image-conscious prime minister – at his own game.

Modi built his political brand through social media. Now protesters are using that same platform to mock his administration, ridicule pro-government television news coverage, transform confrontation with police into viral content and seize control of the online narrative.

The campaign has taken the protests demanding accountability and education reforms beyond the streets, broadening its reach and intensifying pressure on a government wary of appearing to yield to a rapidly growing youth movement.

Strava streaks and Subway Surfers

The “Cockroach” movement’s digital campaign has been largely powered by humour.

Clashes with police have become viral content. Videos showed protesters joking about keeping their Strava streaks alive — a reference to the fitness tracking app used by runners — as they ran from police baton charges.

Others edited footage of themselves dodging police barricades to mimic the popular endless runner mobile game Subway Surfers.

Some women have borrowed influencer culture, posting “get ready with me” videos before marches and “fit check” posts featuring helmets, goggles and other homemade protest gear. Other protesters have created spoof videos mocking pro-government television anchors and their dramatic style of broadcasts that have labelled the protesters “anti-national” and “foreign-funded conspirators”.

Several protesters spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from authorities.

One 25-year-old protester said the memes are more than comic relief; they are a way of coping. She sees them as a generational trait.

Unlike older generations, who learned to endure hardship, hers has little patience for “simply putting up with it,” she said.

“If our phone data runs out, we can’t even bear that. So we’re definitely not going to tolerate this,” she said, referring to Monday’s police crackdown on protesters in the capital.

‘We find speeches boring’

The street protests erupted a month ago, fuelled by anger over a string of exam scandals, including the illegal sharing of entrance exams for the national medical programme.

Young people say the scandals have jeopardised their futures and eroded trust in the education system. They blame Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who resigned on Saturday.

But the demonstrations have expanded into wider anger over government accountability, spreading to other cities.

Much of that expansion has been driven by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a satirical group that started the movement two months ago. Through memes, humour and satire, it has given younger Indians a new way to express their frustration with the government and helped turn a single-issue campaign into a broader youth movement.

At the main protest site in New Delhi, that influence was hard to miss.

Some protesters marched in Spider-Man masks and Batman costumes, carrying tongue-in-cheek placards. Other protest signs echoed the irreverent tone of social media, with memes and pop culture references woven into the demonstrations.

One poster featuring the education minister asked: “When will AI take his job?” Another captured the movement’s spirit with the slogan: “Every joke is a [tiny] revolution.”

Some slogans and posters took on an overtly profane and risque tone. A 23-year-old student said the protesters were simply speaking the language of their generation.

“We find speeches boring, we are the summary generation. We have a habit of consuming things in a short span of time, so we are using the same ways to put our message across,” she said.

Jokes now target Modi

For Modi, who is entering his 13th year in office, the protests present an unusual challenge.

His image is built on strength and decisiveness, but he risks alienating young people if he responds too forcefully. Nearly half of India’s population is under 25, making young voters one of the country’s most influential electoral groups.

But the protests have broken a longstanding taboo: mocking Modi himself.

Jokes about Modi were rare during earlier protests, when his government was criticised for suppressing dissent. But now, even he has become a target of taunts.

Modi’s gestures, pauses and mannerisms have been turned into viral edits that turn his own words into political jokes.

When Modi released a late-night, selfie-style video on Thursday addressing the protesters, he promised swift legal action against those responsible for leaking academic or job exams.

But many internet users edited the clip with parody voiceovers and references to his past promises they said had gone unfulfilled.

One video went particularly viral.

Modi’s original address began with him referring to the protesters as “friends”. A parody video kept that opening, and abruptly cut to three young girls staring into the camera and responding: “No, we are not.”

A 21-year-old student said there is no better way to challenge Modi than by using social media that helped build his political brand.

“We are just answering him in his language,” he said.

Leaders of India’s youth-led “Cockroach” movement are set to hold talks with government representatives on Friday in an effort to resolve a growing political crisis triggered by national examination paper leaks. Despite the dialogue, protest leaders have made clear that nationwide demonstrations will continue until their key demands, including the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, are met.

The negotiations come after activist Sonam Wangchuk ended a 26-day hunger strike overnight, raising hopes of a possible breakthrough in the weeks-long standoff that has brought tens of thousands of young protesters to the streets of New Delhi.

The movement has become the biggest youth-led challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi since he first took office in 2014. Opposition parties have backed the protesters’ demands and disrupted the ongoing monsoon session of parliament, turning the issue into one of the most significant political crises of Modi’s third term.

Government and Protest Leaders Prepare for Talks

Representatives of the self-styled Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), which emerged from an online satirical movement into a nationwide protest campaign, will meet government ministers at a neutral venue.

CJP spokesperson Saurav Das said the movement hoped the government would engage seriously with protesters’ concerns.

“We hope that the government comes with an open mind and listens to the people of this country who have been on the streets for so long,” Das told reporters. “We will explain our demands in greater detail, and we hope the government will respond positively.”

However, he stressed that negotiations would not halt the movement.

“We are not backing out,” Das said. “Real change begins at the grassroots, and that is exactly what we intend to continue.”

Education Minister’s Resignation Remains Central Demand

While the government has indicated its willingness to continue discussions, protesters insist accountability must begin with the removal of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

Thousands gathered again at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar protest site on Thursday, where demonstrators vowed to remain until Pradhan resigns.

“We will continue protesting until Dharmendra Pradhan is removed,” protester Sudesh Singh said. “If we stop now, we compromise the future of millions of students.”

The demonstrations were sparked after authorities cancelled the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), India’s highly competitive medical entrance examination, following the discovery that question papers had been leaked. Nearly two million students were affected by the cancellation, triggering widespread anger over repeated failures in India’s examination system.

From Online Satire to National Movement

The Cockroach Janta Party began as an online satirical campaign involving only a few hundred young supporters. It rapidly evolved into a nationwide movement after the examination scandal, attracting millions of followers on social media and drawing large crowds to protests across the country.

Monday’s march toward parliament saw tens of thousands of protesters defy restrictions before clashes broke out with police, who used tear gas and batons to disperse demonstrators.

Further confrontations occurred on Wednesday night when more than 10,000 people gathered in central Delhi.

Analysts say the movement reflects broader frustrations among India’s youth over limited employment opportunities, repeated examination scandals and declining confidence in public institutions.

Security Tightened Across the Capital

Authorities have significantly increased security measures around the protests.

The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation announced that 17 metro stations in central Delhi would remain closed again on Friday, marking the third major shutdown of the capital’s transport network this week.

Mobile internet services around the protest area were also disrupted, with Reuters journalists reporting patchy connectivity throughout Friday morning.

Officials say the restrictions are necessary to maintain public order, though protesters argue they are intended to suppress demonstrations.

Government Plans Legal Reforms

Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on Thursday that his cabinet would consider legislation aimed at strengthening punishment for those responsible for examination paper leaks.

The proposed amendments would seek faster prosecutions and tougher penalties for individuals involved in leaking examination papers.

Protest leaders, however, argue that stricter punishments alone will not solve the problem.

They say systemic reforms are needed to restore confidence in India’s examination process and prevent future leaks before they occur.

Political Stakes Continue to Rise

The protests have quickly evolved from a dispute over examination integrity into a broader political challenge.

Opposition parties, led by the Congress Party, have embraced the movement’s demands, seeing an opportunity to pressure Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ahead of several important state elections scheduled for next year, including contests in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Punjab.

Political analysts warn that the growing movement could reshape India’s political landscape if the government fails to address the concerns of young voters, who form a crucial part of the BJP’s electoral base.

The protests have also been accompanied by an unprecedented surge in online criticism, memes and satire targeting Modi, reflecting what observers describe as diminishing public hesitation to openly challenge one of India’s most influential political leaders.

Friday’s talks may provide the first opportunity for both sides to de-escalate the crisis, but with demonstrations set to continue regardless of the outcome, pressure on the government is unlikely to ease in the near term.

With information from Reuters.

Police say several people also injured while the suspected shooter has been arrested.

Five people have been killed and others wounded in a shooting at a youth welfare centre in the northern German city of Stade, according to police.

Two suspects were detained following the shooting on Monday, one of whom is believed to be the alleged attacker. The motive is not clear.

“Homicides involving multiple victims occurred at a youth welfare facility,” police said. “Five people were fatally injured and additional individuals sustained injuries.”

Police in Stade said a major operation was being conducted on Dankersstrasse, a street south of the city centre. People were urged to avoid the area and follow the instructions of the emergency services.

Stade is about 40km (25 miles) from Hamburg with a population of half a million.

Civic pride, sure. But what is it really worth to the city of Anaheim to have its name on the hometown baseball team?

Hundreds of millions of dollars, the city has said. As the Angels’ stadium lease approaches its end, and as Anaheim prepares for negotiations either with Arte Moreno or a potential new owner, it’s worth keeping in mind.

So too is a concept floating around City Hall in Anaheim: What if we could put a new stadium and a youth sports complex next to one another?

Nothing is imminent, and even a bill winding its way through the state legislature would not necessarily require the Angels to return Anaheim to the team name.

It’s leverage: If the Angels’ owner wants to build atop the stadium parking lots, the city can pursue an exemption to a state law that currently restricts what can be built there, which could mean more money for the team and its development partners. In exchange for the exemption, the team name would revert to the Anaheim Angels.

If that’s the carrot, this is the stick: The city would have to approve the zoning changes that could make the land “two to three times more valuable than it is as a parking lot,” Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken said.

Said Aitken: “There are no gifts. For an ownership to truly be a partner to the city in what that property could be, there is going to have to be some realization that Anaheim is not Los Angeles.”

The Angels’ stadium lease expires in 2032, and the team can extend it through 2038. A new owner could move the Angels — or at least leverage the threat of a move — but Anaheim offers a 150-acre site with what every owner in pro sports covets: land around the venue to turn the property into a year-round money-making operation.

The standard ballpark villages include restaurants, shops, hotels, homes, offices and entertainment venues. The Ducks are launching one, called OC Vibe, around Honda Center, and within walking distance of Angel Stadium.

What intrigues the city, for at least part of the parking lots around Angel Stadium: a youth sports park for all those travel ball teams. Ontario is building a 199-acre one around a minor league ballpark; Irvine has a 194-acre one up and running at its Great Park.

Katie Wright, who books sports events for Anaheim’s tourism bureau, said there would be a market if her city built a sports park.

“The demand for, specifically, soccer, baseball and softball is tremendous,” Wright told the Anaheim City Council in April. “They would be filled every single weekend, I think.”

What Anaheim has that Ontario and Irvine do not: Disneyland down the street for visiting families, a variety of restaurants within walking distance, and hotel rooms aplenty. In Anaheim, 40% of the city’s general fund comes from taxes on hotel rooms.

“With Angels baseball right next to a youth sports facility, to have the synergy of hotels and restaurants, and players interacting with the Little League kids and soccer fields,” Aitken said, “I just think it’s a unique opportunity.”

Everything old is new again: In 1996, Anaheim pitched a youth sports center called the “Little A” in part of the stadium parking lots as part of a ballpark village that never materialized.

What might be in the best interest of the city now might not be in that of the developer, whether that turns out to be the Angels or a real estate partner. While a sports park might drive tax revenues to the city, a developer might pay the most for land used for hotel and retail properties, said Louis Tomaselli, the Irvine-based executive managing director at JLL, a nationally prominent commercial real estate brokerage.

“A youth sports complex would likely be at or near the bottom from a land value perspective,” Tomaselli said.

That’s all part of the negotiation, and for now the city of Anaheim has no party with which to negotiate. That leaves room for all sorts of brainstorming, including Aitken’s curiosity about flanking the development with high-rise residential buildings, similar to the condominiums that have risen next to Petco Park in San Diego. In some of them, you can watch the game from your balcony.

But let’s get back to the value of the Anaheim name on the baseball team.

“A lot of times, we get the question, ‘Exactly where is Anaheim?’” Wright, the Anaheim tourism official, told the City Council. “We’re always fighting to say, ‘We’re not L.A.’”

In 2005, when Anaheim sued the Angels after Moreno slapped the Los Angeles label on the team, the city commissioned experts that testified the name change would cost Anaheim nearly $200 million over the following decade and close to $400 million through 2029. The Angels dismissed both numbers as wildly high, but that is what the city presented in court.

I asked Sean Moran of Los Angeles-based Innovative Partnerships Group for an update. Moran estimated the worth of the Anaheim name at $26.5 million per year — or more than $500 million over the life of a 20-year deal — based on the value of references to the city on game broadcasts, digital and social media, highlight clips, betting sites, in fantasy leagues, and more.

“I don’t think you can put a monetary value on civic pride and respecting your fan base,” Aitken said. “So, if a new owner wants to come in and start fresh and really respect the fan base in Orange County, the name should not even be a negotiating point.

“It should be the first thing you do, out of respect for where this team is located, and the fan base that is so loyal in good times and bad.”

Perhaps. But, if I’m the new owner of the Angels and the city is on record saying its name on the team is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the first thing I say to the city in negotiations is: You can get your name on the team for that $500 million, which would help me build a new ballpark that could cost $1.5 billion.

Who else could benefit from that? Moreno, as the need for a new owner to pay for a ballpark could lower the sale price.

Even without that exemption from state law, a new owner could pursue a fair amount of development on land Anaheim has failed to develop for 60 years, on a site the city’s own land use plan envisions as “an exciting mix of high energy uses while providing additional housing.” Or a new owner could simply inherit the existing lease and deal with potential development later.

You can start to get the shape of what the bargaining might look like. Avelino Valencia (D-Anaheim), the assembly member who introduced the bill in Sacramento intended to spur the return of the Anaheim Angels name, included a provision that says resolution would take precedence over legislation.

“If there is another outcome that takes place, in negotiations or deal-wise, there would be no need for this, right?” Valencia said.

All of that could be years down the road, so no sense arguing all the finer points now. Aitken promises a series of community meetings first, so that Anaheim residents can share how they envision the future of the Angel Stadium property, with or without a baseball stadium.

This should come up for discussion too: The Anaheim Angels name might be ideal for the city, but what, if anything, should the city give up to get it? The last time the city asked, Moreno just said no. If a new owner would be willing, should the taxpayers of Anaheim consider subsidizing the name?

At New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, India’s most famous protest strip, hundreds of mostly young people in cockroach masks and with dog-eared exam guides in hand tried to turn an online joke into a real-world force.

They call themselves the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) – a satirical “people’s party” born barely three weeks ago after India’s chief justice reportedly likened government critics and unemployed youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites”.

What began as a parody account and meme factory has since exploded into a channel for anger over exams, jobs and a fraying sense of economic promise.

On Saturday, that digital discontent stepped off the screen. Waving India’s national flag and clutching schoolbooks, the protesters demanded the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan after a string of exam paper leaks, technical glitches and cancelled tests.

For many, the fiasco over the NEET medical entrance exam – and reports of student suicides – symbolises a system young Indians say has no credibility left.

The CJP’s founder, 30-year-old political strategist and Boston University graduate Abhijeet Dipke, flew in from the United States to lead the rally, telling supporters that “cockroaches don’t ever fear.”

Police in riot gear and steel barricades underscored the risks of dissent in an era when large protests have often been met with crackdowns and criminal cases.

With more than 20 million followers on Instagram, CJP has already outgrown many mainstream parties online.

Its first street protest now tests whether self-deprecating memes and satire can be converted into a lasting organisation – and whether India’s anxious, hyper-connected youth can find a new political language for their frustration.

June 1 (UPI) — Research shows that a rise in remote work since the COVID-19 pandemic is connected to a rise in unemployment among younger employees, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported Monday.

In a blog post, the research authors said they estimate about 64% of the rise in unemployment among recent college graduates has to do with the connection to remote work, which “makes it more difficult for manager sto train and mentor new employees,” they wrote.

“Accordingly, companies may be reluctant to hire less-experienced workers in distributed work arrangements,” the post continued.

The authors said that unemployment among those younger than 29 was an average of 3.1% in 2017-19, compared to an average of 3.7% in 2022-25. Conversely, they wrote, the unemployment rate for more experienced college graduates fell from 1.9% in 2017-19 to 1.8% in 2022-25.

The researchers said they used data on both “remotable” and “non-remotable” jobs, comparing how easily common tasks for a given job can be done remotely. They also used proprietary data from an unnamed Fortune 500 company.

“We show that when people work next to their colleagues, they receive more feedback on their output and more mentorship,” the authors wrote. “When they are separated by even a short distance, that feedback tapers off dramatically. The loss in feedback is more pronounced for younger workers, who miss out on constructive comments that spur their development.”

However, Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University who studies remote work, said that even companies that have remote work often have opportunities for time on site, CNBC reported.

“I don’t think there is any evidence this is slowing employment,” Bloom said. “Indeed, quite the reverse, as it’s easier for people to work and so labor supply looks to be rising.”