Narendra Modi, the powerful and acutely image-conscious prime minister of India, is suddenly facing a political problem he had not anticipated on entering his 13th year in office.
Mr. Modi has had his eye trained on economic anxieties for much of the year, which were sharpened by the external effects of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. His government had to manage shortages of imported oil and gas, distributing the costs among businesses and ordinary citizens.
But it was another sort of economic pressure that has now caught up with him and helped drive thousands of students to protest in the capital: The crumbling and sometimes crooked machinery of India’s underfunded education system, along with a painful lack of jobs for the millions of graduates it produces.
After 25 days of protest, and nearly three days since police used batons and tear gas to disperse protesters, Mr. Modi was still struggling for a meaningful response. On Thursday, he posted on social media that “Nothing is more important than the welfare and future of our youth!” He has promised fast-track tribunals to punish the individuals who spoiled the exam but nothing else.
This sounded both late and lame to the protesters who were on the street, infuriating many of them further. The movement’s demands are widening rapidly from their initial complaints focused on over accountability for the scrapping of a college-entrance exam to, among other things, compensation for the protesters injured in clashes on Monday.
Many of the protesters are students, and many others have jobs, but they share a sense of desperation and rage about education and employment prospects. Smaller protests have emerged in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad and other cities, raising demands that Mr. Modi will find difficult if not impossible to answer in the short term.
Arsh Gupta, a 20-year-old college student, said “there are a lot of feelings” that brought him to the central protest site on Thursday. The original testing failure “is not a small thing at all,” he said, but he was driven more by other issues, most of all “the feeling that we’re living under a dictatorship.”
At the forefront of the protests is the Cockroach Janta Party, not an actual political party but a movement that takes its name from an insult made by the chief justice of India’s Supreme Court. It is taking aim at these much longer-term crises. The education system is in disarray, the C.J.P.’s spokesmen said, demanding that corrupt and bungling officials must face accountability.
India’s economy may be growing at a healthy rate, but it offers the protesters little hope. While the gross rate of unemployment looks low, recorded as between 4 and 7 percent, most workers fall outside the formal sector and never get counted. Young adults, especially those who have earned degrees and want to put them to use, are the most frustrated. Nearly 40 percent are unemployed, according to the State of Working India 2026 report published by Azim Premji University.
The protesters’ anger intensified after Monday’s show of force by the police, and appears to have turned against the whole of India’s government.
None of this was on Mr. Modi’s menu for 2026.
The Iran war presented a tough series of challenges but also an opportunity to make a fresh break. Economic difficulties had been piling up for months while Mr. Modi’s party was also fighting to win power in a series of state elections.
After winning control of state governments culminating with West Bengal in May, Mr. Modi turned to keeping down inflation and reining in the public’s expectations.
Mr. Modi started warning Indians that painful times were coming. Food prices were rising, and the rupee was nose-diving.
Around the same time, it emerged that the questions to a national medical college entrance exam had been leaked, so the results for millions of students were canceled. The C.J.P. took up the test-takers’ cause almost instantly.
The protest’s leadership is, however, dispersed and nonprofessional. That makes it unlike the farmers who staged a siege-like protest around Delhi for more than a year from 2020 to 2021, or even a current protest on behalf of Jammu and Kashmir, whose elected leader is trying to restore its statehood.
These mostly middle-class protesters cannot easily be made to look marginal.
Nor can the issues they raise be answered overnight. The causes of India’s jobs crisis have been brewing for a long time. A great deal of students’ time and their families’ money has been invested in courses that routinely fail to equip them for the workplace.
Amit Basole, an economist and lead author of the State of Working India report, noted that young graduates in India have always been disproportionately unemployed. But their number has grown terrifically in recent years, along with the debt their families owe for their educations.
“It’s a systematic failure. If the government’s not responsible, then who is?” asked Pranavi Tripathi, a 22-year-old business graduate protesting in Delhi on Thursday.
