News this week included: CDC lai liao!; Lawrence Wong on boosting fertility, AI-enabled disinformation, and a potential Cabinet reshuffle; Justice for Myanmar says 13 Singaporean arms-trading firms still active; Bombardier’s expansion; Shopee’s retrenchment; local interest in SpaceX’s IPO; the (limited) ways unions here have been helping retrenched white-collar workers; the ongoing debate about food, rental and other cost pressures for hawkers; CapitaLand helps delivery riders with parking; conditions suitable here for underground storage of nuclear waste; a new AI supercomputer for climate and health research; century-old “King of Bedok” bungalow up for conservation; CNA commentary on the risks with Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs; ST multimedia story on “unseen” abused husbands; “Don’t just stare, give us a smile,” says mother of son with autism; commentary by NUS’s Simon Chesterman on the need for better privacy rules to deal with AI companions; NParks employee among those investigated for alleged illegal handling of snake in the wild; a dead dugong at Bedok Jetty, a rare dead whale (discovered last year) in our waters, and “Into The Ocean: Journey Beneath”, the new exhibition at ArtScience Museum; and ST’s suggestions on eating and sleeping well, and avoiding excessive screen time, during the month-long World Cup that starts next week. (Better still, as Jom has argued, just boycott most of it.)
Below are the issues we explore in depth:
International: India’s turn
Surya Kant, India’s chief justice, seems to harbour a peculiar aversion to his nation’s youth. In the past, he has called them “oversmart”—a uniquely Indian term for someone who speaks out of turn, especially in the presence of those older—while boasting that he knows “how to deal with them.” Last month, hearing a case that prima facie was about something else entirely, India’s chief unc labelled youngsters “cockroaches, who don’t get any employment…Some of them become media, some of them become social media…”
It came at a time when Indian youth have been brutalised by an unforgiving education system. In May, it was announced that the 2.27 million aspirants who had just taken the NEET exam—a funnel to roughly 130,000 undergrad medical school places (and upward mobility)—would have to sit for it again because the paper had been “leaked”. A spate of suicides followed news of the cancellation. On the heels of this controversy came another: nearly 1.8 million Class 12 students affected by a flawed, new online evaluation method, implemented by a software firm that won an allegedly corrupt tender process.
Amidst all this, Surya Kant’s remarks fell like a spark on dry kindling. (His clarifications the next day were too late.) Riffing off the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), an Indian student at Boston University launched the satirical Cockroach Janata Party (CJP)—the “Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed”. Being “chronically online” and capable of ranting professionally were the other membership prerequisites. Tens of thousands signed up through a Google form; and within days, CJP’s Instagram account amassed 23 million followers, 10 million more than the BJP (which has harvested bushels of political fruit from seeding disharmony and misinformation on social media).
CJP has demanded the resignation of the education minister. Failing that, its founder, currently in India, has threatened to launch nationwide physical protests in addition to the one held last week in New Delhi, the capital. “It is high time,” said an attendee. “We are grappling with numerous problems and challenges, yet the youth are being channelled towards the IPL [a hugely popular cricket tournament], films, and religious issues. This protest seeks to foreground discussions on education and freedom of speech.”
The movement has drawn inevitable comparisons with recent Gen Z-led movements in neighbouring Nepal and Bangladesh. But there are fundamental differences. Despite its name, the CJP is not a registered political party yet, nor is the BJP nearly as unpopular as the governments those movements toppled. Indeed, it’s currently on a high, having just come to power in West Bengal, a state long considered immune to its virulent Hindu nationalism. What may give the party pause though is an astonishing result in Tamil Nadu where twin Gen Z waves of excitement and resentment washed away interests, including BJP allies, that had ruled for decades.
Its reaction to the “cockroaches” reflects this uncertainty. As the movement spread with astonishing speed, the party instinctively reached for its authoritarian toolkit—blocking the CJP website and X accounts on “security” grounds, hacking other social platforms and rolling out ministers to incant the familiar litany of libel and lies: anti-national conspiracies funded by foreign actors seeking to destroy India. Lately though, it has softened its tone: “It’s part of democracy. Such things happen in democracies,” one senior leader said of the New Delhi protest.
They do. But as Jo Teo argued in their recent essay for Jom, the experience and practice of democracy itself is being transformed in Gen Z’s device-wielding hands. Geriatric elites ignore this at their own peril.
Society: It’s the cockroaches Indians again
Disinformation divides. From Russia’s attempts to drive a wedge between blacks and whites before the US presidential election in 2016—“intentionally pouring gasoline on racial division”, said one analyst—to China’s efforts to demonise Ukrainians as Nazis, sophisticated psyops globally destabilise societies by exploiting ethnic caricatures or divisions. Amidst the recently concluded Shangri-La Dialogue, perceived by many in China as a pro-West jamboree, it’s now Singapore’s turn.
