Through a meme and a movement, Indian students have once again mobilized, this time in response to Chief Justice Surya Kant’s comparison of unemployed youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites” attacking the system. This remark led to the creation of the Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP, a mass-scale satirical movement with a mission to amplify the “voice of the lazy & unemployed.”

The political movement was fueled by compounding grievances. The precipitating factor was the leak of a medical entrance exam paper and irregularities in the government’s on-screen marking system forced millions of students to retake exams. But discontent has been building up for some time because of surging unemployment rates and a deepening disillusionment with the government. Student suicides associated with increasing academic pressure have reached as many as 13,000 a year.

Matters escalated further when hunger-striking activist Sonam Wangchuk was forcibly removed from a student protest site in Delhi and hospitalized by authorities. Tear gas and baton charges on student protesters catalyzed a countrywide youth uprising that would culminate in the resignation last week of the Modi government’s education minister.

Apart from material grievance, the student movement was ignited by what philosopher Axel Honneth argues is a form of moral indignation. Widespread feelings of injustice have changed the nature of emancipatory struggles from rational economic interests to ones that are personal and emotional. Framing students as parasites through dehumanizing language, rather than as citizens facing systemic and institutional barriers, strips them of political dignity and represents them as inferior and shameful in addition to diverting attention from the state’s own policy failures.

Region-Wide Discontent

Across South Asia, contemporaneous youth-led, digitally organized uprisings have taken place in quick succession. Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya protest in 2022 forced the resignation of both the president and the prime minister. Bangladesh’s student-led movement in 2024 against a quota system in government jobs, compounded by rising authoritarianism, led to the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina after 15 years in power. And in Nepal, a country where nearly 56% of the population is under 30, a generation disproportionately affected by economic precarity and a housing crisis, a Gen Z protest in 2025 toppled Prime Minister K.P Sharma Oli within days of a government ban on social media.

These cases mark different points on the spectrum of outcomes. Protesters in Sri Lanka and Nepal converted disruption into institutional turnover, resulting in the installation of new elected governments following the uprisings. Young people in Bangladesh toppled a government but have struggled to translate that disruption into a stable institutional order. In India, CJP called off its protest after the government met its three immediate demands—the education minister’s resignation, withdrawal of criminal investigations against protesters, and compensation for the families of students who died by suicide following the leak. However, the settlement remains contentious, as CJP raised concerns that the government was not honoring its commitments, with a spokesperson warning that the protest would resume if punitive action against student protesters continued.

Youth uprisings matter, then, not simply as sudden, spectacular action but as a means of amplifying the voice of a demographic majority and reshaping the terms of legitimacy and accountability between citizens and the state.

The movement’s broader charter—a new Public Examinations Act, reform of national examination bodies, a students’ rights charter, a national aspirant welfare fund, and permanent parliamentary oversight of examination authorities—is due to be taken up in a further round of talks with the government. The protests have yet to produce lasting institutional change, yet they have already demonstrated the capacity of young people to organize and exercise self-determination over their own political future.

The United Nations estimates that the world is home to 1.3 billion young people, more than half of them living in low- and lower-middle-income countries. Almost half of South Asia’s 1.8 billion people are........

© Common Dreams