Why young Indians are protesting against Modi's government - critical summary review

India is the world's largest democracy, and for the past twelve years it has been governed by Narendra Modi, now in his third term as prime minister. Two systems shape a young Indian's prospects more than almost anything else: the national entrance exams that decide who gets a university place, and the electoral roll that decides who gets to vote. In 2026 both became the target of the biggest street mobilisations the country has seen in years, led by a movement that started as an online joke and calls itself the Cockroach Janta Party, or Cockroach People's Party. It is not a registered party. It is a youth movement organised on social media, and it has twice this year put the government on the defensive.

That is the backdrop for news that has been arriving in bursts since June.

How an insult turned into a movement

The name comes from an insult. During a hearing, the chief justice of India's Supreme Court, Surya Kant, compared some unemployed young people to "cockroaches" and "parasites". In response, Abhijeet Dipke, a political communication strategist in his thirties who studied at Boston University, posted on X: "What if all the cockroaches united?"

The post went viral and turned into a satirical party whose manifesto presents it as "the party of the people the system forgot to count". Within two weeks its Instagram page passed 22 million followers, more than the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP. The government tried to block the movement's accounts on national-security grounds, and the attempt did not prosper.

The first wave: a leaked exam and two million students

In May the questions of the national medical-school entrance exam, the test that sorts candidates into India's medical courses, leaked. The results were cancelled and some two million candidates were ordered to sit the exam again. According to the Indian press, some of them took their own lives after the cancellation.

The movement adopted the candidates' cause almost immediately. Its first street protest came in early June in New Delhi, and within days thousands were gathering in the capital, including a hunger strike inspired by Gandhi's methods. The activist Sonam Wangchuk fasted for weeks; after a court ordered daily medical monitoring, Delhi police removed him by force from the protest camp and took him to a public hospital, which his family called an illegal detention.

From hospital, Wangchuk called supporters to march on Parliament on 20 July. Tens of thousands joined. Police sealed streets, restricted internet access in the area and used tear gas and batons when part of the crowd tried to break through the barriers, injuring dozens of students.

Fast-track courts, talks and a minister's resignation

Modi's first public response came on 23 July: fast-track courts to punish those responsible for the leak, and a promise of legislation against exam fraud. Opposition parties echoed the protesters' demands and halted parliamentary business for days. The movement's spokesman, Ashutosh Ranka, dismissed the offer and asked why leaks were happening in the first place.

On 25 July the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, announced his resignation on X. "Considering the situation that has arisen at Jantar Mantar and across the country, so that anti-national forces do not take advantage of it, I have sent my resignation letter to the prime minister," he wrote, adding that he deeply respected the legitimate aspirations of the country's youth. He became the second minister to leave office over a scandal since Modi took power in 2014.

The health minister, J. P. Nadda, said the government had accepted all the demands presented: reform of the exam system, withdrawal of police cases against protesters, and compensation for the families of students who had taken their own lives. The movement announced the end of the mobilisation, and mobile internet near the protest site was restored.

The second wave: names struck off the electoral roll

Since last year, a nationwide revision of the electoral roll has asked close to a billion people to produce documents proving they are still entitled to vote. More than 130 million names have been struck off, more than the population of Mexico. The next national election is due in 2029.

The Election Commission, long one of India's most trusted institutions, says the revision exists to remove duplicate registrations, people who have died and people who do not meet the requirements to vote. Inaccurate rolls have long been part of life in a country where tens of millions move around in search of work, which opens room for abuse, and critics accept that part of the cuts is legitimate. On 2 October the Commission ordered newly eligible voters to be registered and people wrongly left off the lists to be reinstated. The BJP spokesman Pratyush Kanth said that if parties themselves had repeatedly demanded the removal of duplicate, false and ineligible records, the Commission's effort to clean up the rolls should not now be portrayed as inherently suspect. The government and the Commission deny the accusations against the process.

Former election officials dispute the method. Ashok Lavasa, who served on the Commission, said earlier revisions relied on door-to-door verification to make sure everyone was included, while the current process transfers the burden of proof entirely to the citizen. Rohinton Nariman, a former Supreme Court justice, said in a lecture that "the heart of our democracy, which is the right to vote, is in grave danger".

The contested case is West Bengal, where Modi's party won a state election in May after a revision that removed around nine million names. Opposition leaders argued in petitions to the Supreme Court that the number of excluded voters exceeded the margin of victory in dozens of the seats the BJP took. Of the appeals judged so far, most were found legitimate and reinstatement was ordered. Court-appointed officials cleared a further batch of voters to return to the roll, and the Commission appealed against that decision, according to its own petition.

October: detentions, internet blocks and the institutional answer

Protests resumed in the capital at the start of October, now demanding the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, head of the Election Commission, the suspension of the revision, and the repeal of the law that the opposition says allowed Modi to influence the choice of the Commission's leadership. On 3 October police forcibly detained demonstrators who pulled away security barriers chanting "vote thief, quit". Among them were the independent MP Kapil Sibal and the student association president Neha Bora. "First they removed people from the voters' list and now they are not letting us protest against it. That is unacceptable," Bora told Reuters.

On 10 October New Delhi saw one of the largest containment operations against peaceful demonstrations in recent years, with drones overhead, thousands of officers on the streets, internet blocks and movement restrictions. Around five thousand people were detained that day, most released by nightfall. Dipke and two close allies were held after landing at the airport. Two of them were later sentenced to five days in prison for trespass. On 12 October the opposition alliance led by Rahul Gandhi's Congress party brought tens of thousands onto the streets.

The government rejects comparisons with the Emergency, the period when then prime minister Indira Gandhi suspended democratic freedoms. The minister Kiren Rijiju says this is a normal matter of public order. Kumar has not commented on the calls for him to go; he holds constitutional protections that make removal difficult and, so far, retains the prime minister's backing.

Unemployment, the thread running through both crises

Behind the exams and the roll sits the same complaint. India's headline unemployment rate looks low, but most workers are outside the formal sector and are never counted. The frustration concentrates among young adults with degrees: close to 40% of graduates aged 25 or under are unemployed, according to the State of Working India 2026 report from Azim Premji University. Amit Basole, the report's lead author, noted that young graduates always had disproportionate unemployment, but that the figure has grown enormously in recent years, along with the debt families take on to pay for that education.

What to do with this information

From here, what tells you whether anything changed is institutional, not electoral. Watch the voters' appeals still pending at the Supreme Court and at the Election Commission, which has already ordered names reinstated in West Bengal and has contested other reinstatements. Watch whether Gyanesh Kumar stays at the head of the Commission. Watch whether the exam reform and the compensation promised to families in July actually materialise. And watch what happens to the detained leaders, including the two sentenced for trespass, and whether their cases end in release or in new proceedings.

Both times this year the government made a concession and the mobilisation stopped. The open question is whether those promises get delivered before the next national vote. When a story like this leaves your feed, what do you usually check to find out whether the promise was kept?