Algorithmic warfare: the real 'cockroach' in the room

In a war-torn world, economic uncertainity and desperation is growing. Alongwith it, algorithmic warfare which can trigger mass civilian unrest. Is India prepared?

(A social media image from the timeline of the Cockroach Janata Party.)

Let us be honest about what we are watching.

The Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) has generated more column inches in the past week than most issues that will actually determine India's future. Twenty million Instagram followers in five days. Opposition politicians tripping over themselves to sign up. Breathless international coverage from CNN to Al Jazeera, performing their usual pantomime of discovering Indian discontent as though it were a new continent.

And in the middle of all this noise, almost nobody is asking the only question that matters.

The question is not whether the CJP is an organic expression of youth anger or a vehicle for the formal opposition's ambitions - the question is what this episode reveals about algorithmic warfare, and whether India has the faintest idea how to prepare for it. The answer most probably is, not yet.

Begin with the facts of the CJP itself, because they are extraordinary and deserve to be read without sentimentality. Abhijeet Dipke, a public relations student in Boston, built a social media-based 'political movement', in numbers larger than the BJP's entire Instagram following, larger than Congress's, in less than a week. He did not need money. He did not need a manifesto. He did not need a single rally in a single constituency. He needed a Supreme Court justice to say something stupid, a generation of educated, unemployed young Indians sitting at the end of their tethers, and a platform algorithm designed to make anger travel faster than thought.

Nearly 40 per cent of Indian graduates under 25 are unemployed, according to Azim Premji University's most recent data. The PLFS Annual Report 2025 shows that youth unemployment for ages 15 to 29 runs at 9.9 per cent nationally, with urban unemployment at 6.6 per cent. More damaging still: those with secondary education and above also face a similar unemployment rate. India has built a vast machinery for producing aspirations and not an adequate one for fulfilling them. Therefore, gap is the kindling, and the algorithm is the match.

History has given us the test cases, and they should be studied with the seriousness of military after-action reports. The Arab Spring is the original model. Social media in 2011 did not create the revolutions of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria; what it dis was that it compressed timelines and removed friction from the act of organising. What it could not do, and what nobody asked it to do, was govern. Egypt's brief democratic window closed with the military's return to power. Libya collapsed into a civil war that continues to this day. Syria became a catastrophe of civilisational proportions. Tunisia, the single apparent success, has since reversed its own democratic experiment. The scorecard of the Arab Spring's youth revolutions, 15 years later, is almost uniformly bleak.

More recently and more relevantly for India, Bangladesh in August 2024 showed the updated version of this machinery. Platform algorithms amplified polarising narratives, suppressed dissenting voices, and curated viral misinformation that drove collective action without any institutional guardrail. Digital artifacts - manipulated images, live-streamed violence - became cultural products in themselves, glorifying the energy of the moment without accounting for its aftermath. The Sheikh Hasina government fell, and it still remains to be seen whether what has followed will hold as a stable democracy, or it will soon face institutional vertigo.

Nepal in September 2025 was faster and more savage. Youth protests over a government social media ban and corruption led within five days to the resignation of Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli, the burning of parliament and the presidential residence, and the army occupying the international airport. Nepal's youth unemployment ran at around 20 per cent. The movement had no institutional successor capable of absorbing its energy. Morocco's Gen Z protests the same year were triggered by around 35 per cent youth unemployment. The government made concessions. The structural conditions did not change.

The pattern, across every geography and every decade, converges on one of two outcomes. Either the movement destabilises the state and leaves a power vacuum that someone else, rarely the youth who lit the fire, fills. Or it is absorbed by a traditional political party that captures the energy, repackages the grievances, wins an election, and delivers rather less than it promised. India's own AAP is a textbook example of the second pathway. And it is not a coincidence that Dipke himself once worked with the Aam Aadmi Party, the movement-turned-party born from the 2012 anti-corruption surge.

India's exposure to algorithmic warfare is not merely larger in scale than Bangladesh's or Nepal's. It is categorically different. Nine hundred and fifty million internet users. A population where over 65 per cent are under 35. A political economy riddled with fissures, unemployment, agrarian distress, caste, religious polarisation, where each of these issues is a potent trigger. A media ecosystem in which the algorithm is effectively the editor. And most potently: a political class that responds to digital movements with unease and anxiety, both of which tend to make things worse. All such disaffection are effective tools in algorithmic war.

The X account for the CJP was restricted within days of its growth surpassing the BJP's handle. Nepal banned social media before its protests erupted. The Bangladeshi government cracked down on digital dissent. In each case, suppression accelerated rather than arrested the momentum. India is large enough, and its democracy resilient enough, that it will not fall the way Nepal did. But resilience without preparation is just luck, and luck is not a national security strategy.

What genuine preparedness looks like is worth spelling out, because the conversation in India remains focused almost entirely on the spectacle rather than the structural challenge.

The first requirement is algorithmic literacy - not the kind taught in elite schools in Gurugram and Bengaluru, but at genuine population scale. India has spent a generation on Digital India and almost none of it on the cognitive tools necessary to navigate algorithmically curated political reality. A citizenry that cannot distinguish between organic political sentiment and manufactured viral momentum is a citizenry permanently vulnerable to whoever controls the amplification machinery.

The second is the harder and less fashionable point: responsive governance on the economic question. Every youth revolution in this data set was an economic failure before it became a digital one. The unemployment rate is not background noise. It is the primary variable. If 40 per cent of your graduates are unemployed, you have not produced an educated middle class. You have produced a radicalisation pipeline. The meme is not the problem. The unemployment rate that precedes and enables the meme is the problem. The trigger for this round was undoubtedly the leak of the NEET medical examination paper.

The third is institutional robustness, which is the capacity to absorb political disruption without reaching reflexively for suppression. India's democratic institutions are older and more battle-hardened than Bangladesh's or Nepal's. That is an asset. But institutions do not maintain themselves. They require constant political investment in norms, in due process, in the kind of boring structural accountability that generates no viral content whatsoever.

The Cockroach Janata Party will, in all probability, either dissolve back into the digital ether or be absorbed into the opposition's electoral calculations. Most of the politicians endorsing it today endorsed it because twenty million followers is a number that concentrates political minds wonderfully. That is how movements end in democracies that hold together.

But the conditions that produced it - the unemployment, the algorithmic infrastructure, the compressed timeline between grievance and mobilisation - will not dissolve with it. The next trigger will come, as it often does.

The question India needs to answer, with rather more urgency than it is currently applying, is whether it will be ready for it when it does.