DELHI, India — “We did it!” The chant rose over Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, an 18th century stone observatory that has served as India’s designated public square for protests since 1993. Thousands of students crowded beneath the monsoon sky, phones held above their heads with news of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation on July 25.
For 36 days, they had slept under tarpaulins, marched in Delhi’s heat and maintained a round-the-clock protest outside one of the capital’s most visible political spaces. Now, exhausted, students hugged each other, climbed barricades and waved movement flags.
Jyoti Mahajan, an aspirant of the National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET), India’s mandatory entrance exam for undergraduate medical, dental or nursing courses, says the moment represented something many students had been waiting for: recognition.
“We finally feel like someone has heard us,” Mahajan, who spent weeks at the protest site, tells Truthdig. “We’ve studied for years, and all we ever wanted was a fair chance.”
A protester at Jantar Mantar holds up a placard that reads, “Papa, Modi ji gave the order to beat us with sticks.” (Safina Nabi)
The young people at Jantar Mantar were protesting what they saw as a broken promise: Their efforts weren’t being rewarded with economic stability. Instead, years of studying and sacrifice left them dealing with exam paper leaks, canceled exams and unemployment. Their frustrations are felt elsewhere in Asia, with South Korean youth coining the term “Hell Joseon” for the hyper-competitive pressure cooker of grueling exams paired with a stagnant job market. Similarly, China’s “Tang Ping” (or “lying flat”) movement represents a rebellion against the exhausting culture of overwork, with youth choosing a minimalist lifestyle over more traditional metrics of societal success.
In Delhi, the catalyst for protests was a single insult. In an offhand remark during a Supreme Court hearing on May 15, Chief Justice Surya Kant compared India’s unemployed youth to “cockroaches” — a slur that the youth then subverted by forming the satirically named Cockroach Janta Party.
The broken bargain
Many Indians see competitive university and job exams as central to the country’s promise of upward mobility. Success in exams such as the NEET, the Union Public Service Commission, Staff Selection Commission and in railway recruitment is seen as the most reliable path to secure employment and a stable middle-class life.
But millions of students compete each year for government jobs, and applicants vastly outnumber the vacancies. Further, students are often stuck as they wait to be recruited, typically spending two to three years before receiving a job appointment letter. This crippling lag is driven by bureaucratic inertia, administrative mismanagement and frequent court-ordered hiring freezes following exam leaks.
General unemployment in the country has become increasingly concentrated among the youth, with young people making up 83% of India’s unemployed population in 2022. The proportion of educated youth (those with secondary education or higher) among the unemployed rose from 54.2% in 2000 to 65.7% in 2022.
Chief Justice Surya Kant compared unemployed youth to “cockroaches.”
“Unemployment in India has become increasingly concentrated among educated young people, particularly in urban areas, challenging the long-held assumption that higher education alone guarantees economic mobility,” noted a 2024 International Labour Organization report on India.
The grueling study hours, financial stress and uncertainty have had a psychological impact on young people. A report by the National Crime Records Bureau found that 123,918 students died by suicide between 2014 and 2024. More than one-fifth of those deaths were linked to examination failure.
Against this backdrop, Kant’s “cockroach” comment struck a nerve, coming just two days after over 2 million people who had taken the NEET exam found out they would have to retake it because text questions had been leaked.
For many protesters, the remark represented a wider dismissal of young people who had spent years preparing, qualifying and waiting for opportunities. Students experiencing canceled examinations, unclear recruitment timelines and compromised processes — including institutional cheating rackets and sudden arbitrary changes to so-called grace-mark formulas — saw the remark as emblematic of unaddressed issues.
A dedicated placard-making area during the protest at Jantar Mantar. (Safina Nabi)
Abhijeet Dipke , a political communication strategist studying in the United States when the controversy erupted, watched the online reaction grow. Seeing young Indians reclaim the insult through humor and satire, he created the Cockroach Janta Party platform the day after Kant’s comments. He described the party as a movement “by the youth, for the youth.”
The movement spread fast online, as evidenced by the viral reach of hashtags like #CockroachJantaParty (1.9 million Instagram posts to date) and # NEETScam . The satirical Instagram page reached the 3 million follower milestone within 78 hours of its launch, and within five days, it surged past 10 million — more than the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s account .
For Uday Chandra, professor of politics and international relations at Ashoka University in the state of Haryana, the significance of the movement lies in the way protesters organized themselves and transformed individual grievances into a common identity.
A movement “by the youth, for the youth.”
Individual venting online quickly morphed into collective demands. Beyond calling for the education minister’s resignation, students and young people also wanted a complete restructuring or abolition of the National Testing Agency , the immediate enforcement of strict anti-paper leak laws featuring nonbailable criminal penalties for administrators and legally mandated timelines for government exam results and job appointments.
Later, protesters would also demand compensation for families of students who died by suicide following exam paper leaks and guarantees that no legal action would be taken against protest participants.
Chandra describes the movement as a “politics of appearing apolitical,” where young people reject traditional party politics while still engaging in a political struggle over institutions, fairness and accountability.
“The absence of a traditional political identity does not mean the absence of politics; it represents a different way of entering public life,” he tells Truthdig.
The Asian credential crisis
Across much of Asia, education is viewed by many as the safest route to upward mobility and stability, with families spending heavily on degrees and qualifications. As a result, private education is booming in the region, as students and their families try to boost their chances when they sit for highly competitive exams. Seven out of 10 new schools in India from 2014 to 2022 were private.
However, for a growing number of young people, the connection between academic achievement and economic security has weakened. In South Korea, suicide and self-harm rates are also on the rise, with a total of 9,838 cases of self-harm and suicide attempts by elementary, middle and high school students reported last year.
The country represents one of the clearest examples of the credential race -– the competition to have as many degrees, certificates and qualifications as possible in order to have an edge in acquiring work — reaching its limits. South Korea has one of the world’s most educated young populations, with the share of 25-to-34-year-olds holding a tertiary degree rising from 37% in 2000 to 69% in 2021.
“This generation of student protesters is not tied to nationalist legacies.”
Yet higher education has not eliminated anxiety over jobs, housing or social mobility. A majority of South Koreans agree with the idea of Hell Joseon, popularized during the 2010s and alluding to Joseon, Korea’s last feudal dynasty. Many people want to leave the country or avoid marriage, children, dating and home ownership, as the economy and job prospects don’t correspond to their hard work.
In China, rapid expansion of higher education produced millions of graduates who then entered an increasingly competitive labor market. Now, China is confronting one of its toughest youth employment crises in decades. To enter the public sector, students take a civil service exam which in 2024, had a 1.5% pass rate.
For some Chinese young people, the pressure of constant competition and uncertain rewards has contributed to the now popular social and online idea of Tang Ping, a rejection of relentless striving that reflects wider exhaustion with the promise that sacrifice will inevitably lead to success.
Amherst College political scientist Amrita Basu , who focuses on Asian studies, sees this phenomenon as rooted in a feeling of institutional betrayal.
“There is a long tradition of student protest in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka. But I think there is a generational shift taking place now,” Basu tells Truthdig.
Unlike earlier student movements that were often tied to political parties or ideological struggles, many recent youth protests have emerged from everyday discontent over unemployment, fairness and opportunity, Basu says.
“This generation of student protesters is not tied to nationalist legacies,” she says.
“We might see these protests as pragmatic rather than ideological,” she adds, with young people around Asia demanding fair opportunities, decent jobs and systems that reward merit rather than political connections.
“Young people want a fair chance to build a life.”
Cynicism is reshaping youth movements across Asia, argues Ashok Swain, an Indian-born professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University in Sweden.
“In India, young people question whether education and hard work still bring opportunity. In Bangladesh, a dispute over government job reservation widened into a revolt against an unaccountable political order,” Swain tells Truthdig.
“In South Korea, economic insecurity and intense competition have weakened faith in social mobility, while in China many young people increasingly doubt that sacrifice and obedience will produce the prosperity earlier generations were promised.”
While the immediate triggers differ, Swain argues that the economic gap between expectations and reality often evolves into broader questions about fairness, accountability and political voice.
“Young people want a fair chance to build a life, but they also want to be heard and treated as political actors capable of shaping the future, rather than as a population expected simply to obey and wait.”
From screens to streets
Over the past few months, the test for the movement in India has been whether outspokenness online could translate into something meaningful in the streets.
On June 6, Dipke arrived in India from the United States, and having called a protest at Jantar Mantar, he went straight there from the airport. In that moment, he brought the Cockroach Janta Party’s digital momentum into the physical world.
At Jantar Mantar, private anxieties became a public grievance. Those preparing for exams — typically studying 14 hours a day in tiny rented rooms in coaching hubs like Delhi’s Old Rajinder Nagar or Mukherjee Nagar, and venting in Reddit forums and private Telegram groups — left that isolated existence and turned their exasperation into a physical reality.
Among them was Sneha Das, a 23-year-old law student from East Delhi. She tells Truthdig she joined the protest because she felt the concerns of young Indians were being ignored.
Police used tear gas and beat and detained protesters.
“I am a student, and the way Delhi Police and the government are handling us, especially women, has created a rage inside me,” she says referring to the use of force by the police. At a march on Parliament on July 20, police used tear gas, and beat and detained protesters, leaving 200 people severely injured, including with broken bones.
For Das, showing up once was not enough. She returned repeatedly, determined to stand alongside other students demanding accountability. She says she and others were not mobilized through traditional political organizations, instead joining the protest based on networks built online through Instagram posts and WhatsApp groups.
Among those who stayed at Jantar Mantar throughout the sit-in was 21-year-old Ayush Kumar, who says the underlying question was whether young Indians could still trust the institutions they had spent years preparing to enter.
Ayush Kumar, left, holds a pair of signs while participating in the protests in Jantar Mantar. (Safina Nabi)
“They can’t even give us clean air to breathe. How can they give us a stable future?” Kumar says, referring to politicians not doing anything to address Delhi’s suffocating pollution.
“Twenty-one students are already dead. If this is what we have to face after preparing for years, what do we do? We come to the streets and protest,” he says, referring to the 21 students who died by suicide after finding out in May that they would have to retake the NEET exam.
For Kumar, the protest was ultimately about accountability, “They are accountable to us, they owe us answers.”
Beyond exams and jobs
Responding to online appeals, figures from outside the student movement joined the protest. The arrival of environmentalist and education reformer Sonam Wangchuk from Ladakh on June 6 brought wider national attention to the movement.
His decision to begin a hunger strike on June 28 alongside student activists turned Jantar Mantar from a largely youth-led mobilization into a public campaign focused on questions of accountability and the government’s response to dissent.
On July 18, the protest entered a more confrontational phase when Wangchuk was taken by police from the Jantar Mantar protest site while he and other protesters were on the 21st day of their hunger strike.
Narendra Modi said he forgives the protesters, calling them “misled children.”
The move sparked anger among supporters, with hunger strike participant Neha Bora describing it in a social media post as a detention, alleging that “Delhi police forcefully” took away Wangchuk and attempted to remove other protesters.
Delhi Police, however, said Wangchuk was moved to a hospital due to his deteriorating health and that the action followed a Delhi High Court order and medical advice.
For many protesters, the incident reinforced their belief that their concerns were not being adequately heard, and they argued that it strengthened rather than weakened their resolve to continue demanding accountability.
Two days later, protesters announced the “ Sansad Chalo ” march to Parliament to bring their concerns directly to lawmakers. The repression of that march left many further convinced that public institutions wouldn’t listen to them.
Then, days after students successfully forced the education minister to resign, on July 31, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he forgives the protesters, calling them “misled children.”
Amid the repression and condescension, more protests can be expected in the future. The sense of abandonment and the economic frustration is unlikely to simply disappear — something that holds true across Asia, where an entire generation that dutifully followed the road map of education and credential-gathering is confronting similar structural roadblocks. From the quiet withdrawal of China’s Tang Ping to the despair of South Korea’s Hell Joseon, young people are asking what happens when hard work and academic merit no longer guarantee dignity.
The post High Effort, No Reward: From Delhi to Seoul, Youth Have Had Enough appeared first on Truthdig .
High Effort, No Reward: From Delhi to Seoul, Youth Have Had Enough
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