The Reel Panic
Dharmendra Pradhan resigned in July, days after Delhi police put pellet guns on the street for student protesters for the first time, cracked batons across women's backs, and tripped kids running from the crowd. The government beat teenagers in the street, lost anyway, and handed over the minister everyone had been chanting for.
A few days later, at midnight, a 75-year-old man opened Instagram and filmed himself a reel.
Modi's account has been posting raw, unedited, just-me-and-my-phone videos ever since: four of them by the end of July. The last one called 2026 “the first Instagram election,” pitched to the exact generation that had just spent a month getting hit with pellet guns on his government's orders. It worked, numerically. The first reel hit 300 million views in a day, over 400 million within the week. Numbers like that come easy when state media is pushing your account into every phone in the country before breakfast.
What it didn't do is convince anyone watching that Modi likes them, understands them, or was ever on their side. The comments turned into open mockery, over a million on one video alone, and the ratio wasn't close. Creators duetted him. One posted a response that opened with “your caption game is very weak” and got more engagement off that single line than the PM's entire broadcast apparatus managed with the state behind it. Reporters caught him reading a teleprompter in videos styled to look off-the-cuff, which might be the funniest detail in the whole saga: his team spent a week faking the one thing that could have made the strategy work — looking like a guy who forgot to write down what to say.
A government confident in its own support doesn't spend four nights running narrating itself into a teenager's algorithm at midnight. It panics into it. Modi's reels are a hostage tape with better lighting — a party that watched its numbers collapse among under-25s, after sending police after those same twenty-somethings with batons and pellet guns, now grinning into a ring light and playing a victim card by gaslighting the situation.