India’s ruling BJP has concluded it has a problem reaching young voters, and is revamping its communications strategy in response. The trigger was a wave of youth-led protests last month over education policy and high unemployment — a movement whose organisers adopted the name “cockroach” after an official compared unemployed young people to them.

Reclaiming the insult

Adopting a term of contempt as a badge is an old political technique, and it works for identifiable reasons. It removes the word’s power as an attack, since it cannot be used against people who have already claimed it. It creates instant recognition without any organisation or budget. And it keeps the original insult in circulation, so that every mention of the movement re-airs what was said about them.

Protesters wearing cockroach masks in Bengaluru produce photographs that carry the story further than any statement would. That is not an accident of coverage; it is the strategy.

The grievance under the imagery

The imagery travels, but the substance is education policy and unemployment, and India’s version of that problem has a particular shape.

India has a very large cohort of young people entering the labour market each year, and the widely discussed issue is not simply the jobless rate but the mismatch between qualifications and available work — graduates competing for posts that do not require degrees, and government examinations attracting applicants in numbers vastly exceeding vacancies. Economists studying Indian labour markets have also pointed to the gap between headline growth and formal job creation, which is what allows a fast-growing economy to produce widespread frustration among the educated young.

Those are contested characterisations, and the government disputes elements of them. But they explain why a protest movement forms around education and employment together rather than either separately.

A communications answer to a material problem

The party’s response, as reported, is to revamp how it communicates rather than to announce a change of policy. Two readings of that are available, and both are held by serious observers.

The first is that this is a category error — that young people protesting about jobs are not persuadable by better messaging, and that a communications strategy addressed to a material grievance tends to confirm the complaint rather than answer it.

The second is that political communication is not merely packaging. A governing party that cannot make itself heard by a demographic cannot get credit for anything it does for them either, and reaching young voters where they actually are is a precondition for any policy response landing at all.

Which reading proves right will be visible in whether policy follows.

Why this is worth watching from outside India

Youth-led movements organised around unemployment and education have appeared in several countries over the past two years, sharing a recognisable pattern: leaderless or loosely led, organised through messaging apps rather than parties, and quick to adopt a symbol that the establishment supplied by accident.

The open question everywhere is the same. These movements are effective at forcing attention and poor at converting it into representation, because the structures that turn protest into policy — parties, unions, negotiated demands — are precisely what they have chosen to do without. Whether the Indian movement makes that transition is the thing to watch, rather than the masks.

Sources

• NPR — India’s BJP and the youth-led “cockroach” movement