THE post began with an apology. The writer Amitava Kumar explained that Facebook had blocl(ed his Substack link in India, so he was sharing his essay as plain text instead. I read that line twice. Then I laughed, because I recognised it.

In Pal(istan, we know this routine well.

The linl( that won`t open. The site that loads everywhere except here. The workaround that everyone shares and no onein authority admits is needed.

Kumar was writing about the young Indians who call themselves cocl(roaches.

Their movement began as satire, a joke party mocking the government over a leal(ed medical entrance exam. Then it became the Cockroach Janta Party. For over a month, young people camped at Jantar Mantar Delhi`s iconic protest site.

Now their anger has turned on a revision of the voter rolls that has, reportedly, stripped millions of their right to vote.

Last weel(, the state responded with brute force: thousands of protesters and journalists were detained; CJP leaders were picl(ed up on arrival in Delhi, and mobile and internet services were jammed in most parts of the capital. India`s mainstream television channels lool(ed the other way.

Seen from here, none of this lool(s new.

We have lived through nationwide internet suspensions. We spent more than a year with X blocl(ed. We have watched names vanish from television screens, speeches go unaired, and protests barricaded before they began. We have seen leaders detained on their way to rallies and journalists told, politely or otherwise, what not to cover. If the government across the border has a playbool(, some of its chapters were written here.

But the cockroaches have a playbook too, and it is one we also know. They named themselves after the creature everyone wants to crush but can never eradicate. It is a brilliant choice. An insult became a badge. A threat became a punchline. Their posters are irreverent, often profane and frequently very funny, in a culture where young people are raised to be respectful towards their elders. Reporters at the protests have described crowds fanning each other in the heat, laughing into the police`s eyeglasses with facial recognition.

Humour is what people use when the usualchannels close.Itis harder to arrest and cheaper than a lawyer. Pakistanis understand this instinctively. Under Ziaul Haq, satire went underground and survived. In recent years, when television fell silent on certain subjects, the jol(es simply moved online. A meme can say what a news anchor cannot, and a whole generation has learned to read between thepunchlines.

When the media looks away, someone else fills the gap. In India, young reporters and small digital outlets have covered the protests that big channels ignored. One protest site even had a wall honouring the journalists who showed up. That, too, is familiar. In Pal(istan, some of the most important reporting of the past few years has come from people working with a phone, a YouTube channel and very little protection.

Kumar wrote in the same post about another writer urging his fellow guests to `celebrate the cockroach`. Young Indians, he said, had given the country its most hopeful moment in a long time.

The sentiment is understandable. There is something moving about young people who refuse to be solemn, who meet barricades with jol(es and detentions with more jokes. But hope is not the same as change, and the state has a long memory and a large budget. Laughter can sustain a movement. It cannot, on its own, win one.It is tempting, from this side of the border, to watch India`s troubles with a certain satisfaction. I would resist that. The tools being used against India`s young protesters are not foreign to us. Neither is the courage of those using humourto fight back. What is happening in Delhi is less a story about India than a story about the region, about governments that have learned to switch off the internet faster than they can create jobs, and young people who have learned to make jokes faster than governments can ban them.

There is one difference, and it is worth naming. India has long called itself the world`s largest democracy. That claim is what makes the barricades at Jantar Mantar so jarring to watch.

We have never made such grand claims about ourselves. Perhaps that is honesty.

Perhaps it is simply lowered expectations.

Either way, when I 1001( at Delhi and see a reflection of the state of affairs at home, I am not sure who should be more embarrassed.

The cockroaches are laughing. The state is cutting the internet. And from across the border, it all looks very familiar.

The jol(e is on us. • The writer is a journalist and conducts writing workshops in Karachi.

X:@ Ledeing Lady