"This protest gives the people the sense of power that we can fight the government to change certain things." - Ahilya Majithia, reporter with the DeKoder based in Delhi.
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FEATURING AHILYA MAJITHIA - Young people in India have been making international headlines for mass protests sparked by leaks of medical entrance exams that help students qualify for highly coveted government jobs. When India’s Supreme Court Chief Justice in May referred to unemployed youth in India as parasites and cockroaches, students launched a satirical party called the Cockroach Janta Party and the movement took off.
Protesters spent weeks marching, demonstrating, and occupying public spaces to demand major educational reforms in a nation where young people are increasingly squeezed out of stable careers in spite of spending years and going into debt to qualify.
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Breaking ICE: Community Self Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism. The protests spread from India’s capital, New Delhi, to other states including Assam, West Bengal, and Bihar, even as police brutalized protesters as seen in widely-shared images and videos online. Just weeks after the protests began, India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, resigned.
Ahilya Majithia, Reporter with DeKoder, based in New Delhi. She has been documenting the Indian youth-led protests and spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the movement's wins.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: Can you explain what prompted the protests? It wasn't just, I understand, about leaked exams. This was a longstanding, simmering unrest. What specifically were the protesters angry about, and how has the government failed them?
Ahilya Majithia: Okay. So, the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, he passed a comment which was comparing the youth of India to cockroaches and parasites of society, and this sparked a lot of outrage online. This got the attention of the founder of the Cockroach Janta Party, Abhijeet Dipke's attention.
And it actually started as a meme online that he posted, a AI-generated meme, which was just a symbol of a cockroach and how the youth is being called a cockroach. And because of this, a lot of people in India, they were deeply frustrated by the ongoing failures of the education system, and I think they decided to join, and it became an online protest at first.
And Abhijeet Dipke, he was studying in Boston, and he decided to come to India to let this protest take place. And once that did happen, many people joined in. I think this does also signify, because there's been so many failures of the education system, not just the NEET paper leak.
But apart from that, there's been a lot of failures that we've seen recently. And I think it was everyone's frustration, anger that the system isn't changing on its own.
