Nearly five weeks after the leaders of India's youth Cockroach Janta Party began their protest demanding the resignation of the education minister over exam paper leaks, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, 75, posted a rare selfie video: he said he was pained by their suffering and promised remedial steps.

The video, posted late on Thursday on Instagram, where CJP amassed 22 million mainly Gen Z followers in a matter of days in May, was not enough to satisfy the thousands of protesters who had gathered in central Delhi, braved a massive police crackdown days earlier, and then inspired protests across the country. On Saturday, the education minister stepped down, meeting the protesters' main demand, in a rare such setback for Modi.

The resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan hands a clear win to the CJP, whose young supporters have openly mocked Modi through raps, placards and graffiti, an almost unthinkable development only weeks earlier in a country whose politics has been almost fully dominated by Modi since he came to power in 2014.

"A large number of people who were at the protest may actually be his supporters — and that's quite different from other kinds of protests in the past," said Sanjay Srivastava, anthropology professor at SOAS University of London.