NEW DELHI: Every Independence Day, India turns its gaze to 1947, to the long march to freedom, the sacrifices that made it possible, and the making of the Republic. But every generation eventually asks what freedom means in its own time.
For India’s Gen Z, the question feels more immediate. Their answer, perhaps, lies in the freedom to believe that effort still matters. It is the freedom to sit for an examination without wondering whether the question paper was compromised.
To seek jobs without getting the rude shock that the economy has no place for qualifications. In short, the freedom to ask those in power one vital question—who is responsible when the system fails? For decades, the Indian middle class lived by a compact that was almost sacred.
Parents worked and saved, often taking education loans of various kinds, while children studied, cleared examinations, earned degrees and hoped for a better life. It was never an easy bargain. But it offered something invaluable, a formula. You worked hard, earned your qualifications and moved ahead in life. That formula now seems to be fraying at the seams.
The great examination machine has become a lottery in which the stakes are impossibly high and the odds increasingly cruel. One leaked paper, one cancelled test, one administrative error can erase years of hard work. And for families that have invested their everything in education, this amounts to a betrayal.
The anger that was visible on streets certainly ran deeper than a single examination. It is the accumulated fatigue of a generation discovering that merit alone may not be enough. This is why the protests mattered. They have shifted the conversation.
Young Indians are forcing a different set of questions into the centre of the national conversation: Where are the jobs? Why are examinations vulnerable? Why does accountability travel downward but rarely upward? Why must students pay the price for institutional failure?
There is something quietly radical about this. The young were not demanding the collapse of the system. They are demanding that it function. And they were demanding that those who run it answer for it. This might prove to be the most consequential political instinct of this generation.
A protest can begin as a whisper on social media and become a crowd on the streets. Smartphones have changed the architecture of dissent, while a hashtag can turn scattered frustration into a collective demand. This does not make every online movement wise or every protest justified. But it certainly makes ignoring the young citizens at the great peril of those who are in power.