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A satirical online response to Chief Justice of India Justice Surya Kant’s description of unemployed youth as “cockroaches” was quickly reclaimed by an entire generation of Indian youth. They turned the insult into a collective identity and soon “swarmed” the city and the country. Yet this was not the only recent protest in India rooted in a crisis of livelihood. In 2021, farmers from neighbouring states marched to Delhi and set up camp outside the capital in opposition to the farm laws, which sought to transform Indian agriculture to serve big capital, threatening agricultural livelihoods.

In March this year, industrial workers around Delhi and other parts of northern India staged sporadic protests against wages that had remained low and stagnant for years. Now it is the youth – including sections of the middle class – who are mobilising against examination paper leaks and the unemployment crisis.

Unlike the earlier protests or movements, the significance of this youth or Gen Z movement lies in the social breadth of those it has drawn together. Protesters include people from different income groups, caste and religious backgrounds, many from sections that have long borne the brunt of unemployment, discrimination and insecure livelihoods. Their participation has been central to the movement’s scale, political force and ability to articulate unemployment as a shared crisis rather than the grievance of any single social group.

What has been striking, however, has been the involvement of sections of the urban middle class for whom street protest, engagement with public causes and sustained interaction with people from different social locations have been relatively unfamiliar. This distance has only deepened with the privatisation of education and the increasing social segregation it produces, by allowing people from different classes to move through parallel institutions and social worlds.

These different protests raise related questions: what connects them, where do their differences lie and why has the latest movement drawn the urban upper-income classes? What do they collectively reveal about India’s economic model and its capacity to provide secure and sustainable livelihoods?

The post-1990s liberalisation period was one of high economic growth for India. It was a growth process led by corporate capital. The economic interests of the urban upper-income tiers were tethered to it, with their aspirations and prospects of social mobility being increasingly dependent on it. This was starkly reflected in the income gains: between 1980 and 2015, the real per-adult income of India’s top 10% increased by 435% – equivalent to an average annual growth rate of 5.1% – far outpacing the 94% increase experienced by the middle 40%,........

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