Governments often survive crises of policy. They find it much harder to recover from crises of perception. India’s recent student protests over examination failures and paper leaks may ultimately be remembered less for the immediate political concessions they extracted than for the questions they raised about the relationship between the country’s largest electoral constituency and its most powerful government.

The resignation of the Union Education Minister, legislative tightening of anti-paper leak provisions and promises of institutional reform were significant responses. But governments do not move with such speed merely because protestors demand it. They do so when they sense that an issue has begun to resonate beyond predictable political fault lines. That does not mean a political earthquake is underway. India’s electoral arithmetic remains firmly in the BJP’s favour. Narendra Modi continues to be the country’s most dominant political figure, and there is little evidence that a single movement can fundamentally alter that reality.

Opinion polls conducted in the aftermath of the protests offer interesting snapshots of public sentiment, but they remain snapshots, not forecasts. Polling in India has an uneven record, and no single survey can establish........

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