In July, tens of thousands of young Indians took to the streets over examination paper leaks, scarce jobs and narrowing educational opportunities. In August, members of Narendra Modi’s cabinet reportedly received assessments of their performance on social media. The symmetry was almost too neat. India’s students had asked the government to account for its examinations. The government answered, in part, by examining its ministers.The assessments covered the frequency of posts, the engagement each attracted, their reach and even the geography of ministers’ followers. They followed Modi’s instruction that his colleagues become more active on the platforms favoured by the young. Static announcements tailored to X and Facebook were giving way to Instagram reels, selfie-style clips and a newly informal prime minister. The desired videos, one member of a minister’s communications team said, should have “minimal editing” and “some rawness.” Spontaneity had become a cabinet directive.The audience responded in ways the assessments could count more easily than interpret. Modi opened one address with “Friends”; users replied, “We’re not friends.” They reviewed his camera angle, script and editing as if he were an unsuccessful influencer. Many asked for his skincare routine. One widely shared reply compressed the joke into an accusation: “Your skin is brighter than the country’s future.” A prime minister seeking informality had become content. The report card would call this engagement.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.There is nothing foolish about a government speaking where its citizens listen. Modi understood the political power of digital media long before most opponents. But the present turn raises a different question. If alienation begins in experience, what can a change of format repair?The young Indians who challenged the government did not merely organise on Instagram. They used it to produce evidence: shaky footage of police action, rapid edits, jokes and memes that made an imposing figure available to ridicule. Images that television channels softened into “clashes” returned online as records of batons, tear gas and injured protesters. The protesters had turned the tools of political communication against the establishment that once dominated them.Across South Asia, youth-led movements had already learnt to turn the phone into a political instrument. In Sri Lanka, protesters occupied the presidential palace; in Bangladesh, a lethal crackdown failed to save the government; in Nepal, parliament burned. India’s movement, however, found its defining weapon in ridicule. The distinction lay in political grammar. It did not need to seize the state’s buildings. It entered the state’s images and stripped them of authority.Modi was not alone in discovering this. Parliamentary affairs minister Kiren Rijiju posted a video of himself swimming in a fast-flowing Arunachal river, accompanied by a warning not to enter such waters without knowing how to swim. The advice was sensible. The comments concerned his stroke. A public-safety message had become a performance review. The river was dangerous. The platform preferred the swimmer.An older campaign offers an instructive comparison. After 9/11, the George W. Bush administration appointed Charlotte Beers, a celebrated Madison Avenue executive, as under-secretary of state for public diplomacy. Her Shared Values Initiative was a roughly $15 million campaign built around five polished mini-documentaries showing Muslim Americans at work, at prayer and at home. The intended message was that America respected Islam and that Muslims and Americans shared commitments to faith, family, education and community.The films were broadcast during Ramadan in Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Kuwait, and through pan-Arab media. Some national broadcasters refused them. The State Department nevertheless estimated that the campaign had exposed 288 million people to its message. Exposure was measurable; persuasion was less so. A later US Government Accountability Office review found that many foreign media outlets regarded the campaign as propaganda and unlikely to succeed while American foreign policy remained unchanged. Its principal television component lasted about five weeks and was discontinued.The advertisements were not necessarily false. Muslim Americans could and did live the lives shown. Their weakness was that they answered a question many viewers were not asking. Audiences angered by Washington’s conduct in the Middle East were offered agreeable portraits of life in Michigan and Ohio. The campaign described American society while its viewers were judging American power.India has supplied its own variation. “India Shining” began as a government-funded campaign promoting the country’s economic achievements and was then absorbed into the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) 2004 election campaign. The gains were real but uneven. The slogan did not by itself defeat the governing coalition; elections are not so obliging. It nevertheless became shorthand for the distance between prosperity advertised nationally and prosperity experienced selectively. Even a truthful picture can mislead when its frame is too narrow.Modi’s Gen Z campaign inherits this difficulty in a harsher form. Shared Values addressed foreign publics looking at America from afar. Modi is addressing citizens who encounter the education system, the employment market and the police directly. They do not need a government reel to tell them what the government feels like. They possess their own pictures.The change in medium makes attention an especially unreliable measure. Television advertising could count the households it reached. Instagram counts views, likes, comments and shares, but cannot make them mean what a minister wishes. A reel may travel because it convinces, because it amuses or because it has become the day’s comic material. Circulation can be mistaken for consent precisely when ridicule is doing the circulating.Nor can authenticity be manufactured merely by removing polish. A lightly edited performance remains a performance. Indeed, “rawness” produced after a cabinet instruction may reveal the machinery more clearly than the formal speech it replaces. Young people recognise the grammar because they created it; imitation by authority does not erase the distance between them. Listening is not a visual style. It begins when what is heard is allowed to alter what the state does.The Bush administration discovered that a government could not advertise its way around a foreign policy. “India Shining” showed that a slogan could not make prosperity evenly felt. Modi may discover that he cannot reel his way around a record. Young Indians did not turn to Instagram because the government had failed to find them there. They turned to it because the government had failed to hear them elsewhere.Shyam Tekwani is a professor and columnist specialising in security affairs. Views expressed in this article are those of the author’s alone.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.