Young guns

V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now observed a subcontinent fracturing into a myriad localised, raging particularities, each subcaste and interest group discovering its sectarian voice.

However, the mass student protest in Delhi on Monday suggests a structural inversion of Naipaul’s thesis. What we are witnessing is not a million separate mutinies but a singular, aggregated rebellion of the youth, a generational convergence that dissolves traditional vertical hierarchies into a horizontal politics of accumulated grievances against the systemic degradation of education and the lack of employment opportunities.

By occupying the streets, by demanding administrative accountability, and by forcing the government to look them in the eye, the youth are reclaiming the very definition of popular sovereignty

At one level, these student protests are a localised Indian response to shared social and economic precarities, compounded by the administrative arbitrariness of an arrogant ruling regime.

At another, they are symptomatic of a broader generational churn that is unfolding not just in India but across South Asia.

Gen Z cohorts, raised in the shadow of both democratic aspiration and institutional decay, are increasingly unwilling to accept the status quo.

What distinguishes the Indian case is not the presence of dissent but the political ecosystem within which it is being articulated.

NarendraModi’s decade-plus-long dominance over the national imagination, realised by a systematic weakening of democratic institutions, has reshaped India’s political grammar.

He has centralised authority, personalised leadership and reoriented public discourse around Hindutva. This has delivered electoral dividends, but it has also narrowed the space for conventional opposition politics.

When tens of thousands of young people marched toward Parliament, they ostensibly did so to expose the structural rot of India’s educational bureaucracy under the current regime.

But they achieved, perhaps inadvertently, a deep and irreversible fracturing of Modi’s hegemony over the country’s mind space.

For over a decade, the Modi government has skilfully sublimated class anxieties and economic desperation into the grand, emotive architecture of Hindu supremacy.

Now, that ideological glue is coming unstuck against the hard, unyielding reality of a system that can neither properly educate its youth nor employ them.

The collapse of the education system, where board examinations and entrance exams have been regularly compromised, is exemplified by the case of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test-Undergraduate.

In a country where public investment in higher education has been systematically cannibalised by the private coaching industry, the integrity of an entrance exam is a socio-economic lifeline out of rural stagnation or urban underemployment for a young Indian.

When the government can’t hold these exams and shields the Union education minister from being held accountable, it is a betrayal of the foundational meritocratic idea of modern India.

Many Indians were convinced that the BharatiyaJanata Party had found a formula to suppress these legitimate aspirations.

After all, the global playbook of right-wing politics has always relied on a Faustian bargain.

The people must surrender democratic norms and civil liberties in exchange for civilisational pride and the illusion of economic mobility.

For years, the BJP successfully sold this narrative to India’s youth, channelling their systemic anxieties outward against manufactured internal and external enemies.

But the bubble eventually burst because Hindutvacannot feed the stomach with flags.

It has bred a deep discontent because its economic model inherently favours cronyism while leaving a vast majority of the population to scramble over a few crumbs.

When nearly 40% of India’s university graduates under the age of 25 are unemployed, the limits of majoritarian distraction have been reached.

The Indian State’s response to the youth has been an exercise in performative cruelty.

Under the Modi government, there has been a growing tendency towards the securitisation of democratic protests. Dissent is framed in terms of law and order, or national security.

This was witnessed in JNU, with the ElgaarParishad-BhimaKoregaon case, in the anti-CAA protests and, again, during the farmers’ movement.

Even the recent labour protests in Noida were tarred with the same brush. Many were surprised that students in central Delhi met with a coercive response, but this is part of the ruling regime’s tactics.

When Delhi Police mercilessly thrashed teenage children with lathis and targeted them with tear gas shells, it reinforced the very alienation that brought them to the streets.

They rallied via social media networks which eclipsed the BJP’s massive IT-cell-run apparatus, proving that digital natives can organise and express themselves better than an establishment run by a 75-year-old prime minister.

If Naipaul’s million mutinies were converging into visible, collective action, the youth cannot be silenced, even though the regime pretends that they won’t be heard.

The subcontinent is currently being remade by what can only be described as a series of Gen Z revolutions.

From the dramatic toppling of entrenched regimes in Dhaka, Kathmandu and Colombo by massive youth-led street movements to protests that rattled the security establishment in Pakistan, the structural drivers are identical.

South Asia is home to the largest youth cohort in human history, a demographic dividend that was promised a bright future but was provided an economy of gig work, exam leaks, and State-sanctioned precarity.

India is not Sri Lanka, Nepal or Bangladesh; its institutional depth and electoral legitimacy remain significant. But it is not immune to the structural pressures that have produced unrest elsewhere in the region.

For years, political scientists writing on the global erosion of democratic norms have focused on a highly institutional, top-down framework.

We have been told that democracies die through the slow, insidious subversion of courts, the co-optation of the press and the gerrymandering of electoral maps.

This institutional rot is real, and India has experienced it in spades in the past decade. But the students’ protest forces us to reexamine the ultimate point of failure.

These protests are signals of unmet expectations, of shifting political identities, of a generation seeking voice and agency.

By occupying the streets, by demanding administrative accountability, and by forcing the Modi government to look them in the eye, the youth are reclaiming the very definition of popular sovereignty.

If the Indian democratic experiment survives this dark era of majoritarian overreach, it will not be because its compromised institutions suddenly rediscovered their spine.

It will be because the hopeful, optimistic youth of India decided to stand up and fight back.

How do democracies die? Not like this, for sure.

(The writer is a lecturer at Yale University. Courtesy: The Telegraph India).