The protest at Jantar Mantar ended on July 25 with the resignation of former education minister Dharmendra Pradhan. The crackdown did not end with it. Its second phase is not being run by the police. It has been outsourced to a distributed swarm of social media accounts and targets girls and women who went to protest.Out of anger and frustration, protesters of all genders shouted expletive-laden slogans at Jantar Mantar. A few days after the protest was withdrawn, hardline accounts targeted girl students or women, using cropped and AI-fabricated images with captions such as ‘Find her. She abused Prime Minister Narendra Modi.’Many handles and individuals from the organisation backed by the current government, such as The Jaipur Dialogues and others, posted a series of close-up, cropped photographs identifying individual women protesters. One account asked followers to publish two young women’s home addresses, colleges and workplaces so that “neighbours, colleagues and classmates” could be informed.Maharashtra’s cyber authority alone flagged 429 handles or posts allegedly spreading false or derogatory material around the protests, at least 140 of them produced with AI tools.The state, meanwhile, supplied the other half of the machinery. Delhi Police registered an FIR over “derogatory, malicious and defamatory” content and asked X to delete the posts and hand over the account holders’ full names, addresses, contact details, email IDs and login/logout records with date and time stamps. Next, a 15-year-old girl was booked under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for a viral clip from the protest.These developments indicate two systems and one output: The state provides the means to identify protesters and legal jeopardy, while the informal networks supply the shame, the doorstep visit and the phone call to the family. Alone, neither of these might work. Together, they produce a punishment the law never authorised and no court can review, because no single actor did anything a judge can name.Women exclusively targetedWhy target women? Because in the name of decency, girls can be easily targeted in Indian society. Nothing happens if a man swears or abuses during a public speech or instigates them through videos or posts. But a girl or a woman who, out of frustration and anger, did the same is indecent, and indecency is a charge her family, her neighbours and her college can prosecute without any state involvement at all.That is why the abuse migrated to women – it is the vector where social enforcement is cheapest, and where the target’s own household can turn against her. There are many other examples like this, and they are also receiving “unlimited death threats and rape threats”, and even their family members are being shamed on social media platforms.Also read: The Hindutva Project of Tracking Women Protesters Down and ‘Teaching Them a Lesson’The most troubling case involves a schoolgirl, and its sequence deserves attention. The Zero FIR registered at Noida under Sections 352, 353(1) and 356(1) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) was filed by a Supreme Court advocate, who traced the original footage through the person who filmed it at Jantar Mantar and obtained the girl’s personal details through a network of social media handles. The complaint was transferred to Delhi Police, and by the complainant’s own account, it has now been withdrawn.So, an individual treated the doxxing network as an investigative resource and converted its output into criminal process – with the state supplying the process. A video subsequently appeared of the girl apologising with folded hands and saying, “I am only 15 years old… I apologise to the entire country. I am so ashamed. I can’t even look at myself.”The private complaint and mob pressure together produced a nationally circulated act of contrition by a young woman for words shouted by a mixed crowd. Maybe the FIR was later withdrawn; that changes little. The apology is permanent; the FIR was not.The prime minister then announced that he had forgiven the students, describing the sight of “daughters” using abusive language as a “culture shock”. The noun deserves attention. Importantly, sons also swore. No one has asked a son to apologise to the nation, and no one’s son has been offered forgiveness for the condition of his culture.These kinds of doxxing campaigns have become increasingly common over the last decade. Those publishing personal information and issuing rape and death threats are committing offences under existing law, yet visible police energy has been directed at a schoolgirl. And organisations or individuals associate with them that publish personal information or give death and rape threats face nothing.Even if they face some cases, they will emerge like many others have: like those convicted in the Bilkis Bano or the Unnao rape case. Thereafter, they will be garlanded and celebrated.The objective of this kind of activity is very clear – to shame and punish girls and women so severely that every woman thinks twice before expressing her heart and mind or even going to a protest. Singling out is the message. The case is individual; the audience is everyone. In the world’s largest democracy, that is what a general deterrent against asking questions looks like.Auditing official slogansThe ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao’ scheme was launched in 2015 as the government’s flagship commitment to the girl child. In 2021, the Parliamentary Committee on Empowerment of Women found that of the Rs 446.72 crore released under the scheme between 2016 and 2019, 78.91% had been spent on media advocacy rather than on interventions in girls’ education and health.A scheme that is four-fifths advertisement is functionally just a slogan, and slogans are easy to betray. Yet, to the surprise of the current Union government, the betiyan (daughters) that the advertisements celebrated have arrived at the protest site. Women made up roughly 58% of NEET-UG 2026 registrations and about 59% of qualified candidates, qualifying at a higher rate than men.When some of them stepped out on the roads to demand a clean examination system – the very padhai the slogan urges – the response was not an engagement with the demand but a referendum on their decency, a public reassertion of what a sanskari girl may say, wear and want.Gendered digital discrimination raises the price of selectively doxxing women and girls, while using synthetic imagery and threats that reach the family operates as a tax on female visibility that boys or men at the same protest were not asked to pay.Also read: Why the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao Scheme Has Failed on Several CountsEach publicised case reflects thousands of household decisions, such as whether a ‘daughter’ will be able to attend classes at a distant coaching centre, whether she will be allowed to have a social media account or whether she will be permitted to join a march.The individual attack may look like just one incident, but it creates a chilling effect on society for girls. A country whose growth strategy depends on drawing more women into education and the workforce is subsidising the opposite.Crude speech can be criticised, answered and socially discouraged in the ordinary way societies negotiate manners. The question is whether the state should be the arbiter of tone. Should it deploy provisions written for public mischief and defamation against teenagers for rudeness, while explicit threats to kill and to rape – offences floating in the public domain – go largely unexamined?Discourtesy towards a minister is not an offence in Indian law and never has been. What is being punished is a register of speech, and it is being punished on the basis of gender.The meaning of educationThe deepest irony is pedagogical. The foundation of education is the licence to ask questions; a student who asks how her examination paper leaked is performing exactly the function her education is meant to produce. An establishment that celebrates padhao [to teach] in its advertising but treats the educated daughter’s question as indiscipline has confused the slogan with the policy. Or it deployed the slogan for electoral purposes, never intending to back the policy at all.What is being tested instead is whether the beti in the hoardings is permitted the full citizenship of an adult – the right to be angry, to be wrong, to be crude and to be answered rather than socially hunted.The gendered aftermath of the Cockroach Janta Party protests has exposed an arithmetic problem at the centre of India’s most advertised welfare slogan. What the hoardings promised was education; what the aftermath has delivered is instruction of a different kind, given to an audience of one and read by millions.A slogan that cannot survive its own beneficiaries asking a question was never a policy.Tuhinsubhra Giri is an International Research Fellow at the Academy of International Affairs NRW, Germany and an assistant professor of economics at at Christ University, Bangalore.