Last week’s Cockroach Janta Party protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi was a media spectacle. Reporters captured the crowd, asked founder Abhijeet Dipke some tough questions, and heard from the angry students, parents, and concerned citizens gathered. Some, however, found a shortcut to cheap views: shoving the camera in the faces of queer folks and calling them transphobic slurs.
“Are meetha (fruity) people like you going to bring change in the country?” Anjani Vats from 99 Khabar asked 19-year-old Ujjwal Singh in a horrific video Vats shared on Instagram.
One could see the hurt and indignation on their face even as they raised a finger in defiance—their long nail painted a delectable maroon—and refused the slur. In a telephonic conversation with ThePrint, Ujjwal, who has just passed class 12, called Vats “a pathetic excuse for a journalist.” They also said they’ve noticed a trend among the comments.
“I’ve received support from around the world—the US, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan. But the hate comments are only from India, though. And most of the trolls are from accounts with zero followers, or from people with ‘RSS, BJP, Brahman, Jai Shree Ram, and Jay Mahakal’ in their bio,” Ujjwal said.
The video isn’t the first of its kind. After every other pride march or protest, incel influencers post clips of queer people with slurs, malicious commentary, and overused sound effects—the “FAAA” phenomenon is a recent example. But over the past three months, the hate seems to have galvanised.
A similar incident happened at Delhi Pride this year. Then came the protest against the infamous Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, where Shabnam, a trans designer and educator, was recorded without her consent through Ray-Ban Meta Glasses. The video mocked her appearance (Shabnam is bald and was wearing a sari at the protest), and the trolling that followed was even worse. Organisers often send out advisories about such jeering attempts at protests. But no one could have anticipated that the Meta creep tech would get to its base business in India this soon.
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India’s wounded “pride” problem
It’s not a coincidence that one of the first reported act of violation using the Meta glasses was enacted upon a trans person. If the Supreme Court striking down Section 377 allowed the queer community to breathe easy, then the Narendra Modi government’s 2026 Act has put the metaphorical muzzle over all Indian trans persons once again. Modiji has removed whatever flimsy protections the community had and created a vocabulary of “real trans” vs “fake trans”.
Who said the government’s renaming zeal is limited to cities, welfare schemes, and monuments? Its primary project has been christening the citizens with new nicknames: Leftist student protesters are the “Tukde tukde gang”, Sikhs and farmers are “Khalistanis”, and Muslims are “ghuspaithiye”, aka, intruders.
The exercise was bound to reach the queers sooner or later. Enter the latest narrative: real trans people deserve the Hindu patriarch’s protection, but the fake ones are cockroaches to be stamped out.
And so attacks such as the recent one have become commonplace. They’re launched with twin purposes: strike the fear of endless memefication in the hearts of trans people and dismiss the political movement they’re a part of. Reduce a trans person to a slur, and then hurl it at the public anger that threatens to dethrone you.
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Into the affray
Artist Harshit Singh, who accompanied Ujjwal at the CJP protest, met deception at its worst in the form of Ranu Singh of The Pamphlet, who approached them in the shape of an ally. She hugged them, wished them “Happy Pride Month”, and went home to post heinous videos against the three trans persons present during the protest on 6 June. Her video with the third trans person—besides Ujjwal and Harshit—mocks their accent. And none of Harshit’s long conversation with Ranu made it to the video—not the student suicides, nor the broken system. What did make the cut was the artist’s lack of knowledge about jailed activist Umar Khalid.
“Inhe jaan ki nahi, gyan ki padi hai (They care only about ‘knowledge’, not human life),” Harshit said.
Indeed, life—a pre-med student’s or a trans person’s—is worthless to the engagement-starved influencers. Since Ranu and Vats’ videos went viral, Ujjwal has been kicked out of their home. Harshit, who has struggled with suicidal thoughts in the past, broke down in tears after they saw Ranu’s betrayal. In a recent video, Shabnam shared that they were forced to appear on social media, which they had never done, just to push back against the wave of hatred.
“What does it mean to ask someone to live as a meme?” wrote professor and activist Vqueeram Aditya Sahai in an Instagram story after the video featuring Shabbo went viral.
The platforms, of course, have no love lost for those poised at precarity. According to Harshit, YouTube deigned to take down a video in February, following Delhi Pride, after being tagged 2,000 times. Meta doesn’t even pretend and bangs the door shut in your face.
On average, Vats gets a few thousand views on his reels. But the video where he mocks Ujjwal and calls himself a “mard (man)” had over 78 lakh views. Ranu’s video on The Pamphlet’s Instagram page—where editing and sound effects are used to mock Ujjwal—has 46 lakh views. She has removed her collab from the video, though, and now has a rainbow flag in her bio. I can’t decide which is worse: Ranu’s duplicity or her lack of conviction in the hatred she spreads.
In 2021, the queer digital advocacy platform Yes, We Exist India made five recommendations to make Instagram safer for LGBTQ+ individuals. The app seems to have marched in the opposite direction since.
Many have dismissed the CJP protest as a damp squib. But for Ujjwal, it has been their “most revolutionary” Pride Month so far. They went to protest for fellow students, faced vile attacks on their gender identity, and refused to back down.
“It’s always a transfemme person who problematises a space,” a dear friend loves to say.
But it’s a terrible burden. While the community did rally around Ujjwal, Harshit, and Shabbo, the hate lingers. Safe spaces are hard to create and impossible to retain. The memes are here. How far is violence?
Views are personal.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)