Why online trolling of Gen Z women dissenters is yet another proof of growing digital misogyny

“The theatre of Ruchika Singh facing a disproportionate backlash for [allegedly] ‘using abusive language’ towards the Prime Minister is absurd. She wasn't the first or only one. She just happens to be a woman and a minor, so the government and the public decided to make an example of her. She is being made a lesson for all women, ‘Try protesting and you will be next’,” she says.

Paul’s tirade is directed towards the social media trolling of 15-year-old Ruchika Singh, reportedly a Noida resident, who is accused of abusing the Prime Minister and his mother in a purported video. Her fate is shared by Shraddha Singh, 23, after a video surfaced in which she purportedly referenced a toilet cleaner advertisement, pointing to the formation of Rapid Action Force personnel deployed at the Jantar Mantar protest.

Both Ruchika and Shraddha have since broken down under pressure, issuing public apologies for their purported videos. But the impact on their lives has reportedly been severe.

Shraddha, a yoga instructor, is claimed to have lost her clients; Ruchika’s widowed mother, who offered tuitions for a livelihood, is said to have been forced to give them up and the family “leave their house”, to escape both online and offline harassment. There have been death and rape threats issued and the girls have been relentlessly doxed — private information about them shared online.

After Prime Minister Modi put out a video on social media, referring to those who ‘abused’ him as “misguided children”, saying he forgave them and urging others to show restraint, a lawyer who had filed a case against Ruchika has reportedly withdrawn her complaint.

“Everyone has a right to abuse because we live in a democracy and in a country of free speech. Oral abuse is peaceful. It would be hypocritical to say we don’t want to abuse when systems fail,” says women’s rights activist Kavita Krishnan.

She adds: “Here the issue is not the abusive language. The issue should be how could gun pellets and AK-47s be [allegedly] used on peaceful youth demonstrators. Issues should be education and democracy. The issue is: should we as citizens forgive Modi for the [alleged] use of pellet guns? The issue is why is the electorate cursing you and why are they angry with you?”

Meanwhile, Mumbai-based advocate and solicitor who deals in civil law, family and others, Pallavi Divekar, points out even in the past, “courts have repeatedly quashed prosecutions built on nothing beyond the fact that the accused used filthy language while angry”. Which implies that there might not have been a criminal case against Ruchika to begin with.

“The offence housed in Section 296 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) penalises a person who to the annoyance of others, firstly commits an obscene act in a public place, or utters any obscene words, or sings, recites or utters any obscene song, ballad or words, in or near a public place. The Supreme Court has been consistent on one point above all others: obscenity and vulgarity are not interchangeable concepts. Coarse, abusive or offensive language does not automatically become “obscene” merely because it is unpleasant to hear. For an offence to be made out, the prosecution must show something more precise — that the specific words used meet the legal threshold of obscenity, and that they were spoken in or near a public place in circumstances that caused annoyance to others present,” explains Divekar.

Also read: Why for Modi govt, struggling to make sense of Gen Z protest playbook, abusive videos are least of worries

The thing about online trolling, however, is that it needs little legal standing, or even reason.

While Ruchika and Shradhha bore the brunt of social media backlash against the protestors, they were in no way the only ones to be targeted.

Nishu (identified by first name only), who allegedly distributed samosas at the protest site, calling it Modi’s “tehravi ka khana” (food distributed at rituals held on the 13th day of a deceased’s death) has been reportedly asked to vacate her house by the landlord. And a reel purportedly showing a girl identified as Urvashi Palundarkar dancing at a solidarity protest in Mumbai was reportedly derogatively captioned by the BJP’s Chhattisgarh unit as “Babur ki virasaat par thumke lagane wali Gen Z”. They then purportedly juxtaposed the reel with the image of 14-year-old judoka Yogita Mandavi receiving a prize from the president, before going on to ask followers, “which mindset would u choose [sic]”.

These two, however, responded with the irreverence which has come to define Gen Z’s protest language. While Urvashi went on to post another reel saying, “you can’t follow the ‘Divide and Rule policy’ for Gen Z”, who have even forced Parliamentarians to adapt their lingo” — the reel garnered 1.5 million, including appreciation from politicians like Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal — Nishu, too, reportedly remains unfazed by the backlash.

What many have since pointed out is that the online backlash seems to be targeted more towards the Gen Z women, triggering the question whether their irreverence is more worrying to a section of society than that of their male counterparts.

A Parliamentary Committee report on ‘Cyber Crimes and Cyber Safety of Women,’ submitted in March this year, which examined the rise in cybercrimes targeting women and children, including cyberstalking, sextortion, deepfakes and online harassment, alongside gaps in reporting, investigation capacity and platform accountability, noted that as per National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) data, between 2017 and 2022, there has been a 239 per cent increase in cybercrimes against women and a multi-fold rise in cases involving children.

India is not unfamiliar with misogynistic remarks being targeted at women who are in the public sphere.

Just this week, Tamil Nadu’s leader of Opposition, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) leader Udhayanidhi Stalin, was arrested for alleged use of a “double entendre remark” in a public rally, purportedly directed at actor Trisha Krishnan. Later released, the leader claimed he had been quoted out of context.

An Amnesty International study, “Troll Patrol India: Exposing Online Abuse faced by Women Politicians in India’ conducted in 2020, had found that 13.8% of the tweets that mentioned 95 women politicians in the study were either “problematic” or “abusive.” Reena Tete, their then manager of the ‘Gender and Identity-based Violence Program’, had said, “Online abuse has the power to belittle, demean, intimidate and eventually silence women”.

“It is a country which has a culture where men abuse each other with unprintable epithets involving their mothers and sisters,” Tara Krishnaswamy, co-founder of Political Shakti, an organisation which works to increase political representation in Parliament and Assemblies, told The Federal. “Threats of revenge between men involve feudal, barbaric rape threats against their sisters and girlfriends. Meanwhile, family standing is deeply linked to the body parts of girls and women. In line with this misogynistic mentality, the ultimate satisfaction for insecure grown men against good governance is to behave like pack animals to hunt down minor girls. It is a bigger statement of their inadequacy than anything else.”

India’s reality fits into emerging global patterns.

The 2024 report of the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General on violence against women and girls identified three emerging challenges: “growing backlash against women’s rights, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI), and the expansion of the manosphere — an ecosystem of misogynistic content that is seeping into mainstream culture, shaping public attitudes towards women, and fuelling violence.” The 2025 report found that the popularity of extreme language in the manosphere — a varied collection of websites, blogs and online platforms that promotes masculinity, misogyny and opposition to feminism — not only normalises violence against women and girls but has growing links to radicalisation and extreme ideology. And as such, these social media platforms amplify vicious threats, use vulgar language and coordinate consistent trolling.

In 2021, British scholar Nitasha Kaul’s article titled “The Misogyny of Authoritarians in Contemporary Democracies”, discussed politicians who are most likely to use misogynistic rhetoric to uphold a “masculinist strongman ideal”. She explains how public figures like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi have all used misogyny to assert their power.

About the Indian Prime Minister, Kaul wrote, “Modi has a history of ridiculing women in political and public life who challenge his power or his policies; they are acceptable only within a normative patriarchal role and image. The wife of an opposition politician is a ‘₹50 crore girlfriend’ and the head of opposition Congress Sonia Gandhi is a ‘jersey cow’ and her son Rahul Gandhi a ‘hybrid calf’. In the 2021 elections in West Bengal, he referred to the [then] CM Mamata Banerjee, in lewd and insulting tones.”

Many have taken offence at the PM’s ‘patronising’ tone in his post forgiving those among the Gen Z who allegedly abused him. Phrases and sentences like “naughty children” and “It comes as a cultural shock to see our daughters using such language” have prompted many to criticise his choice of words. Among them is Trinamool Congress leader Mahua Moitra, who questioned why the PM’s advice on civility was specifically targeted toward young women. "Men abused you too. Please don't reserve your advice for only ‘daughters’,” she stated.

Also read: From andolankaris to 'andolanjeevis', what’s common to protestors across agitations in India

Hong Kong-based writer-editor Debasish Roy Chowdhary, co-author of ‘To Kill a Democracy, India’s Passage to Despotism’, insists “Both online hate campaigns against women and use of bullets on peaceful protesters are manifestations of state coercion aimed at silencing dissent”.

He adds: “Physical violence is merely a cruder form of this coercion, but in fact less worrisome than the more sophisticated and insidious campaign of online hate because the latter has a far greater chilling effect than physical violence. In that sense, online hate campaigns are a far more effective tool of coercion. After all, there are limits to physical violence by the state because the violence is identifiably linked to the state. When a student is hit by a pellet gun or killed by an AK-47, the state is automatically implicated and carries the attendant risk of inflaming public opinion. No government in a democracy would like to take that kind of risk if it can help it. That is not the case for online campaigns, where the state can maintain plausible deniability”.

As Roy Chowdhary explains, “Government-aligned trolls are not the same as the government, so their activities cannot be blamed on the ruler. There’s thus no limit to this form of coercion and it has near-zero consequences in terms of public opinion.”

So despite police not pursuing cases filed against protestors, digital harassment of the young, Gen Z dissenters continues. Interestingly, the trolling of their women counterparts has pushed many among the Gen Z men to speak up.

One such is Jaipur-based, 26-year-old Milind Chakraborty, who had participated in the protests in Jaipur. Terming the targeting of Ruchika as “nothing short of state-sponsored misogyny”, Chakraborty says, “This is the death of democracy. The girl is a scapegoat in the bigger narrative establishing the misogyny and ego-satisfaction of the autocratic dictator”.

Meanwhile, in an Instagram post, journalist Faye D’Souza questions the root of Gen Z’s allegedly “coarse” language.

“Could it be,” she asks, “that this Gen Z has been raised for the last several years in an environment that is increasingly coarse. If we look around, there are politicians who are constantly trading insults, TV debates that have turned into shouting matches, social media trolls that use the worst possible language, especially for women in public life — abusive hashtags, personal attacks, repeatedly using euphemisms for prostitutes, euphemisms that one should be raped; this is the sort of environment we have raised one entire generation.”

D’Souza adds: “Shouldn’t we have been more responsible? Young people didn’t invent the culture they inherited; they observed the culture they inherited. We have built a universe around them that is coarse and abusive; it is the language that they hear people use all the time. Adults have normalised this language.”

In the days following the withdrawal of the protest on July 25, legal helplines such Chhatro ki Goonj, have been launched online for those being targeted by organised trolls.

Gurmehar Kaur, student activist and youth Congress leader, in an Instagram post, provides courage to young girls, especially Ruchika Singh, saying, “These online attacks are co-ordinated; many of these accounts that are targeting you have existed and have been cultivated for the purpose of silencing dissenting voices. They are not real, their words are not real, do not believe them, they do not define you.”

Paul echoes her, as she sums up the intense trolling that the women have been subjected to as a “smokescreen”.

“The sudden moral panic over her vocabulary is merely a smokescreen: the true offence was her anger,” she says. “The language is merely an excuse to vilify an entire generation, especially young women, so they are intimidated out of joining the next protest. Misogynistic and abusive language is the forte of our male politicians. This glaring hypocrisy makes one thing clear: the sudden outrage over ‘morality’ is merely a tool to maintain a strict, patriarchal perimeter around women’s voices.”