SITAMARHI: Ashok Kumar knows that Narendra Modi changed his life for the better.
Ashok remembers, as a child, watching his farmer parents struggle to make ends meet – and how things changed after Modi became prime minister in 2014. His government expanded benefits like cheap cooking gas and direct farm subsidies, giving Ashok and his younger brother Abhishek hope for a better future. Their parents rewarded Modi with votes in three elections.
But last week, 25-year-old Ashok found himself demonstrating against Modi next to Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century astronomical observatory that anchors New Delhi’s main protest site. The protests were spearheaded by the Cockroach Janta Party, a satirical movement that has become the voice of India’s young and disaffected.
The unrest erupted after the government invalidated national medical exam test results for about 2 million students, including Abhishek, after discovering test questions had been leaked.
In India, such standardised tests offer a pathway to the middle class. The world’s most populous country rations access to thousands of public-sector jobs — diplomats and administrators, but also clerks and forest rangers — through gruelling exams for which students spend years and small fortunes preparing.
Success can be statistically harder than getting into Harvard, but the prize includes lifelong security, as well as pension and housing benefits unavailable in the private sector. Meanwhile, corporate job growth has slowed to 3% annually from 11% in the decade before 2020, according to Marcellus Investment Managers.
Since 2014, at least two dozen exams have had their results invalidated due to leaks, according to a Reuters review of public records and media reports. But this time, it sparked one of India’s largest uprisings in decades.
Tens of thousands took to the streets, in Delhi and elsewhere, to express their fury at the repeated mismanagement of an examination system that stands between the masses and an iron rice bowl, an Asian metaphor for job security.
Four years ago, Ashok packed a small bag and moved a thousand kilometres away from his home state of Bihar. In Delhi, he earned a master’s degree and enrolled in a test-cramming school, repeatedly trying but failing to crack elite civil service exams. His younger brother Abhishek later joined him to prepare for a similarly competitive medical-school exam.
Thousands of similarly disenchanted youth have joined demonstrations airing an array of grievances against Modi’s Hindu nationalist government that are often obscured by India’s world-beating growth figures.
The complaints include widening economic inequality, high youth unemployment and an erosion of free speech rights, according to Reuters interviews with dozens of people during six days of protests. Indians under the age of 30 are three times as likely as the average citizen to be unemployed, government data show.
Students held up posters mocking in abusive language the septuagenarian Modi and his ministers, who govern a populace including some 900 million under the age of 35. They punctured the aura of inviolability around a strongman who has electorally crushed India’s once powerful Congress party and, critics say, cowed its historically freewheeling media.
Modi’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment. It has previously pushed back against criticism of its economic stewardship, arguing that claims of an unemployment crisis are overblown and that macroeconomic fundamentals remain robust.
The people’s party
The Cockroach Janta Party (or “people’s party”) takes its name from a disparaging remark made by India’s chief justice earlier this year about unemployed youth.
He later said his comments had been misconstrued.
On July 20, more than 50,000 attempted to march on parliament, according to some estimates. They were met with a violent police response but won sympathy from the many more following the protests online. The crowds, which by then spanned age groups and socioeconomic classes, swelled. Bollywood stars voiced support on social media.
“People are usually divided by religion, caste and language,” said Ashok, showing off a bruise he said came from a police baton during a demonstration. “This was the first time they united around education.”
Delhi Police didn’t respond to questions about its management of the protests. It has previously said that the demonstrations were policed professionally and that 118 officers were injured during the July 20 confrontation.
By the end of the week, the cockroaches had their scalp: Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, a primary protest target, had resigned. In a rare concession, Modi had bowed to demonstrators’ demands.
Modi’s government has since moved to tighten a law against exam leaks with harsher penalties. He also announced the creation of a panel to review the examination system in a video speaking directly to India’s youth.
The government has additionally agreed to offer compensation to the families of students who died by suicide after exam papers were leaked, as well as to drop efforts to prosecute protesters.
Pradhan didn’t return a request for comment.
Getting by on rice, buffalo milk
One of the world’s great economic booms began in the 1990s, when India cast off decades of protectionism and welcomed global conglomerates.
The country later developed leading companies of its own, providing back-office services to Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
It has for some years been one of the world’s fastest-growing major economies and now claims roughly half a billion middle-class citizens.
That prosperity, however, can seem distant in Ashok and Abhishek’s home state of Bihar, India’s poorest on a per capita basis.
Reuters reporters visited their family home in a remote corner of the eastern state, which depends on farming. They found a buffalo tethered in a courtyard littered with dung. The animal provides the milk their mother sells to supplement her husband’s income from tending a rice plot.
The invalidation of the May medical school exam deflated 20-year-old Abhishek, who unsuccessfully attempted that test three times.
“I thought becoming a doctor would help me get my mother some jewellery, a TV for the home,” Abhishek said at the family home.
Instead, Abhishek found himself dreading asking his parents for money to replace the beaten-up flip-flops he was wearing.
“How much can I study?” he said. “I can’t prepare this much again.”
Ashok, the older brother, had decided as a teenager to pursue a civil service job. Working for the government is one of the few paths available for ambitious Biharis looking to flee the fields.
He started going to exam-cramming schools while living at home, sometimes studying by lantern light when the electricity went off. “I thought hard work alone would be enough,” he recalled.
A series of cheating scandals – many in Bihar – disabused him of the notion. The state briefly became a fixture of global headlines in 2015, when photos of the relatives and friends of exam candidates scaling a building to sneak answers through windows were widely broadcast around the world.
“Cheats Climb High,” one American news website wrote.
As recently as 2024, hundreds protested the alleged leak online of an exam for entry into the state’s civil service. The Bihar government, which Modi’s party helps lead, said there were only limited irregularities and certified the results.
That didn’t help Ashok. He had fallen short of the cut-off to advance to the next round by just 10 points. He had taken the test while preparing for more competitive national exams, and came away embittered at the near-miss result.
Over the last four years, he has taken seven such tests, missing out each time. He estimates that he has spent more than $10,000, nearly all from the savings his father has scraped together.
Back in Ashok’s claustrophobic Delhi rental room, the peeling plaster walls are adorned with posters, including one with an inspirational quote from the Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda: “Arise, awake, and stop not until your goal is achieved.”
The sentiment, however, seems lost on him.
“The public examination system has largely collapsed,” he said.
‘For the future of the children’
Divya Unny is one of India’s winners.
She was just a child when India set off on its journey of economic liberalisation. By the time she was an adult, India had its own Vogue magazine, which she worked for before successfully pivoting into acting and directing. Her feminist short films have been watched by millions on YouTube.
But in July, the 41-year-old joined thousands of disillusioned “cockroaches” at Jantar Mantar. The crowds chanted “Inquilab Zindabad” — an anti-colonial slogan that means “Long live the Revolution.” Michael Jackson’s 1990s protest anthem “They Don’t Care About Us” blared from loudspeakers.
Unny, who lives in the coastal city of Mumbai, had her gripes with the government. She complained that Indian film studios seemed to prioritise making Hindu-nationalist-themed movies. Wages hadn’t kept up with prices, she said.
But Unny wasn’t in Delhi primarily for herself. She had developed a sisterly rapport with Simran Singh, the 21-year-old daughter of her housekeeper Mamta Singh. Simran had fallen into a funk after taking the medical exam and seeing her results invalidated.
Wanting to help, but not sure how, the filmmaker took a 17-hour train ride with her husband and marched at Jantar Mantar, wearing her late mother’s sari and a flower garland in her hair.
“We were just going to support something for the future of the children of this country,” she said.
Unny’s housekeeper, Mamta, had come to Mumbai from Bihar, like the Kumar brothers. She had moved to the city to enable bigger dreams for herself and Simran.
Until May’s exam results were cancelled, that bet appeared to be paying off. Her hours were long, but the wages enabled her to spend over $3,000 annually on test coaching for Simran. Her daughter was determined to live up to the expectations, dedicating herself to months of study and largely isolating herself from friends, Mamta said.
After the test, Simran expected that she would score higher than 500 points – likely enough to attend medical school. But soon after, Indian media started reporting suspected irregularities with the exam. Simran shut herself away for two days without eating, Mamta said.
Modi’s government later announced the tests would be invalidated “in the interest of students.” It also referred the leak to federal investigators, as it did in 2024, when questions for that year’s exam were also prematurely released.
The government organised a retest in June, but this time Simran scored below expectations. Even before that, however, she had decided to abandon her medical dreams and opt for a less prestigious course of study.
“Today my daughter is 21,” Mamta said. “After one year she’ll be 22 and again the same thing will happen. Will we keep doing this our whole life? When will she live her life?”
