The mother of a young student accused of cursing at prime minister Narendra Modi during the recent Gen Z protests in India has appealed to authorities and the public to stop harassing the family.

The widowed woman said she and her teenaged daughter were facing relentless harassment, forcing them to leave their home.

The protests, triggered by the leak of the national medical entrance exam’s question paper and led by the Cockroach Janta Party, a sarcastically named youth-led movement, yielded a flood of memes and reels mocking the prime minister.

After the protesters forced the resignation of the education minister, achieving their key demand, Mr Modi issued a video message in which claimed that “misguided” demonstrators had made derogatory remarks against him, but that he had forgiven them.

On Sunday, the teenager, a resident of Noida near the Indian capital Delhi, issued an apology to Mr Modi and said she was relieved he had forgiven her for her remarks during the protest.

By then, the student had already been named in a police case. She was accused of using “abusive and objectionable” language against the prime minister with the intention of provoking public peace and disturbing communal harmony.

While the police complaint claimed she was 25, the girl said in her apology video that she was “just 15 years old".

While Mr Modi has said that the students who attended the protests should be guided and government officials have given assurances that the participants would not face legal action, police in several states have filed cases against a number of them.

"I want to forgive those who abused me. I request society to accept my decision," the prime minister said in his video address.

Yet, the girl’s mother said, they had been forced to flee their home due to harassment from neighbours and strangers.

“I’m raising my daughter alone. My husband died in an accident in 2019 and my younger son lives with my in-laws. How can we continue living there when people and police keep coming to our house?” she told the Indian Express.

“I got married in 2010. She was born in 2011, and my son was born in 2014. She is just a child. Please forgive her and let us live like everyone else.”

She urged authorities and members of the public to stop hounding her family. “The Police are also still visiting our house. My daughter and I’ve shifted to another location. She studies in Class 10 and I used to teach students. I don’t know what our future holds now,” the mother said.

In spite of the fact that her daughter had apologised for her “blunder”, the woman said, she was still facing legal trouble.

“The prime minister has also forgiven her. Then why has the case been transferred from Noida to Delhi? What if the Delhi police also start coming and harassing us in the future?” she said.

Saurav Das, a spokesperson for the Cockroach Janta Party, said the weeks-long demonstration in Delhi was called off on 25 July after the Modi government "assured us that no punitive action would be taken against any protester, either now or in the future".

But more than 100 people had since been arrested across the country, many named under non-bailable charges, the party alleged.

The Delhi police, meanwhile, have reportedly launched a crackdown on allegedly abusive online posts targeting Mr Modi and asked three platforms to remove posts laced with "objectionable language and offensive remarks".

"An exercise to identify such content across different social media platforms is already underway," an unnamed official told the PTI news agency.