When Shradha Singh created an Instagram reel alongside two Rapid Action Force personnel in Connaught Place, she had no idea the seven-second clip would be weaponised against her.The 23-year-old content creator and yoga instructor from Madhya Pradesh was part of the growing crowd of young people who converged on New Delhi's Jantar Mantar protest site in the third week of July to express anger against question paper leaks. Like many others, Singh had seen the Indian public examinations system up close and had grown disillusioned with it. This prompted her to turn up to support the protesting students.Today, she cannot step outside her home.Her ordeal is part of a chilling new reality unfolding for young protesters in the capital. Their open – and sometimes abusive – challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party has made them the targets of relentless harassment from both online mobs as well as the police. “There is no limit to the death threats and rape threats that I’ve been receiving,” Singh told Scroll. “They’ve even found the Instagram accounts of my mother and my friends, who are being abused and badgered to share my whereabouts.”In an Instagram reel posted on July 25, Singh drew from the soundtrack of a popular advertisement for a line of cleaning products. When the narrator announces “blue is for the toilet”, Singh gestures to blue-clad Rapid Action Force personnel. When the audio track said “red is for the bathroom”, she points to her own red t-shirt. “I uploaded it purely for entertainment and not to show disrespect to the armed forces,” Singh said.Within hours, anonymous meme pages reshared the video, claiming that Singh had abused the armed forces. The next day, major news channels such as News18 India and Doordarshan broadcast the reel and criticised her for her “objectionable” content.“The captions of several videos reproducing my reel are saying that I made abusive remarks, which I did not,” Singh said. The consequences were immediate and terrifying. BJP supporters spotted the number plate of her car in an older post on her Instagram account and used it to track down her mobile number and address.“Some called and said, ‘we will kill you the moment we meet you, we will rape you,’” Singh recounted.The 23-year-old noted a pattern among her attackers: most of the abusive accounts had zero posts and zero followers, hallmarks of coordinated troll farms. “The rest were genuine users who were swayed by these accounts,” she said. Singh even pleaded with one Instagram meme page administrator to remove a misleading video he had posted on her. He declined. "He said I won’t because I’m making money from it,” she said.Far from helping, even Instagram seems to be attacking her for her role in the protests. So far, the Meta-owned social media network has removed 33 of Singh’s posts documenting the protests. She said that it offered her no avenue for appeal. Late night on Friday, Prime Minister Modi himself addressed the abuse directed at him. “Some naughty children have used dirty swear words,” he said in a reel on Instagram, going on to say that the “children” who have abused him were his own and he would show them the “right way”.— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) July 31, 2026