What did the world see when student and youth groups were exploding in protest in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar? Would they ever understand the importance of an examination whose failure had pushed millions of careers in disarray? What does this say about India’s higher education system, its student culture, the place of youth politics, and crucially, the future of the Modi-government? How did this represent India to the world?Based overseas this summer, I had the strange experience of facing these questions, and trying my best to explain the fire in Delhi and nationwide on various international forums. An urgent feeling of loss for being far away from Delhi mingled with the need to make things clear, for myself and various media and academic institutions whom I faced, many of whom were taken aback by the force of the student protests, the existential humour in the movement’s self-appellation, and most crucial question: how did young students manage to take the triumphal sheen of a party and a man who seemed invincible in India?An unprecedented dent made on national politicsThe news of the education minister’s resignation as at least a symbolic victory to the student protestors arrived with poignant weight as I prepared to speak on a plenary panel of the Triennial Conference of University Professors of English in Munich on global trends in higher education.My brief the next day was to present a picture of higher education in India to a community of senior global academics and administrators. The Times Higher Education, which carefully follows global trends in higher ed, wanted to make sense of the force and energy of the protests against the Union education minister, and I spent an hour speaking to one of their journalists who was trying to understand the explosive nexus of education, politics, corruption, and youth lives that had fuelled the protests. It was clear that the sheer weight and force of its student and youth demography had made India a significant presence for the international community of higher education, and several had questions about what was coming across in Europe as an unprecedented dent made on national politics by student demonstrations.Religion. The economy. Agriculture. Democracy and the electoral process. The reality of caste. Corruption. Storm and lightning through everything have left the Modi government unfazed, and in some cases, mightier. How did this government, run by a party that swept state elections as recently as this May, was shaken by its youth?When national examination systems fail studentsDoes this mean that higher education is more important to this youthful nation than all the other realities? It is hard for the world to believe this. Religion still drives communities and shapes sentiments nationwide. Caste still excludes people in irreversible ways beyond the imagination of western societies used to the inequalities of class. Democracy is more vital than ever in the world’s largest democracy, more as it comes under the onslaught of exclusionary citizenship drives.2020-21 saw what peasant unity could do in this nation, particularly north India, the long cold winters it could brave through, their protests jamming infrastructure and traffic movement in the National Capital Region. And finally, the hollowness of the economy under the brittle façade of its size and rank in the world has started to disenchant the working and the middle class as they struggle to find jobs and hold on to what they have as the AI wave as already started to sweep the country.Higher education is not more important than any of these. But the truth is that almost all of them come together with electric vitality in India today in the crucible of higher education.Economy, jobs, corruption, democracy, institutions, hope for a better life and survival itself, mobility beyond the poverty of agriculture. Each and every of these realities, for India’s youth, must move through the chute of higher education. Almost everything that is a defining issue in India today reaches crisis, transformation, or rejuvenation, through education, particularly at this urgent juncture of high school and professional training. Higher education is linked to mobility everywhere, but in India this is a lifeline for so many precarious lives that is hard to imagine in affluent Western nations.How do these concerns collapse in a single heap when national examination systems fail students? It is impossible not to remember the 2017 suicide of S. Anitha, a poor student from Tamil Nadu, the daughter of Dalit wage labourers, after failing to qualify in the NEET in spite of high board scores and facing a stumbling block in the judiciary. Her tragedy bared everything that is dark, disturbing, and destructive in India today: the relentless attempt of the juggernaut of the central government to override state authority and dismantle federalism, the oppressive myth of “One Nation, One Exam”, the structural violence and exclusion fated for the poor, the caste-oppressed, and women, their destroyed dream of upward social mobility and financial security, the hope for a doctor’s job and contribution to the nation’s economy. It took just one death to reveal them all. But the suicides didn’t stop.India’s massive youth populationIndia’s youth population, a significant percentage of its 1.4 billion total, is massive by world standards. Forget about the size, even this demographic percentage of youth has been a reality unknown in post-industrial Western nations for a long time now. It is also well-known that India has been wasting this demographic dividend ever since it became a reality, and now this dividend is finally on a downward curve. Key to the wastage of the demographic divide is the failure of the economy to produce jobs on any sustainable scale.Even the much touted liberalisation of the economy in the early 1990’s, many economists point out today, made the upper classes wealthier while failing to produce enough jobs for even the educated middle class, much less the millions in dire poverty. The illusion of employment produced by the short-lived wave of call centres and software coding was quickly cut short by technological change and now stands to be wiped out altogether by the AI wave. But these were still the good times. During the declared good times – “achhe din” – promised by the Modi government – top down development and crony capitalism, as in the infamous Gujarat model, have finished off any remaining prospect of significant employment generation.The corporate economy produces a handful of jobs for the elite in places in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai and the National Capital Region (NCR) around Delhi. But for the hundreds of millions of poor or lower middle-class youth in India’s rural or provincial backwaters, the only shot out of poverty or a precariously low middle class is through the insane roulette wheel of examinations that pit a wildly vast population against a microscopic minority of seats, be it for places in good medical or engineering colleges, or for jobs in the government.The Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) that recruits government servants across the ranks continues to dominate national career prospects in a way that suggests the liberalisation and globalisation of the economy never happened in this country, and that we are still a failed socialist state.It goes without saying that Indians have unquestioningly accepted the urgency of examinations and have elevated it to an entirely different altitude of significance. Mass examinations to recruit government clerks were put in place by the British government for whom the entire enterprise of higher education in India had to be positioned to serve the staffing needs of the massive empire. The one shot at success required copious rote learning and attempts to game the system that now has a long history of questionable distinction in India for close to a couple of centuries.The political scientist Sanjay Seth has argued that rote learning as an Indian habit long predates the British, rooted as it is cultures of memorialisation both religious and secular, from the learning of grammar and arithmetic tables to religious verses and hymns. Either way, selection-through-examinations, be it for higher education or jobs, was doomed to reach a level of crisis as the proportion between examinees and available places approximated the absurd. And this is exactly what has happened. There has been a near-complete failure to create jobs as well as spots in institutions of higher education, particularly in professional such as medicine and engineering which remain time-tested pathways to upward mobility, financial security, and social prestige in post-independence India. Low-quality private engineering colleges tried to exploit the market for a while but they ran out of steam after their degrees proved worthless in the job market.Higher education institutions in the West stare at rapidly dropping college-age populations and shrinking admission numbers, particularly as anti-immigrant moves block international student recruitment. India has a problem that goes so far in the opposite extreme that it may be difficult for people outside the country to grasp it. For a postcolonial nation with memories of war, partition, famines and other disasters that persist through generations, where hundreds of millions still live in precarious conditions, the poverty trap is real even for new (and still unstable) members of the middle-class.With securing a seat through the great roulette wheel of examinations the only hope to stay out of poverty, the private coaching industry has done a devilish job of preying on the fear of the teeming millions for whom success at the examinations is the holy grail of life. The lessons the coaching centres offer have nothing to do with any mastery of any subject; they are all single-mindedly devoted to gaming the system.But the even greater flaw with the examination system is that this is essentially the only system now for hundreds of millions of Indian youth who cannot afford an expensive private education or manage to escape overseas. And the current government, which believes in centralising everything to the point of reducing India’s federal identity to a mockery, has centralised examinations relentlessly, even introducing a common admission test for getting into public universities after high school.Centralised control amounts to centralised corruptionTheir motto, “One Nation, One Exam” is an ominous echo of their other slogan, “One Nation, One Election” – an attempt to undermine federalism and crush regional political parties by holding state and central elections at the same time. Centralised control, under this government, amounts to centralised corruption. At least in the past, in this great big diffuse, scattered country, when corruption had multiple nodes and venues, resistance to it was also scatted and pluralised, perhaps chaotic and ineffectual, but still real. With power and controls in one place, this government has targeted to eradicate the plurality of resistance. As it has tried to do with almost all institutions of public life, the legislature and the judiciary included.It is hard for outsiders to understand how massive the backfire has been this time. Something that has not happened yet with the government’s takeover of the judiciary, the electoral system, the public and private sectors of industry, airports, every national monument, even the right to citizenship. What was it?It was the demographic group that was betrayed by the exam disaster – the youth. Given the national educational pathway, for most students, the most crucial turning point comes at the end of high school where success or failure, entrance or rejection promises hope or despair to students and families across all social strata, religion, and ideological divide. This very turning point has crashed for the aspirants whose aspiration range from sheer survival to high prestige. The destruction of no other domain has triggered such a catastrophic outrage.Exclusionary citizenship tests targeted minorities, the poor, and the vulnerable, leaving the more privileged, and articulate segments of the population largely unaffected and indifferent. Determined and powerful as the farmers’ protests were, the life and predicament of the peasant couldn’t enter the non-peasant imagination of a nation that desperately seeks urban modernity. Till it affects you personally, a corrupted judiciary only remains scandalous on alternative media followed by vilified left liberals. Even the famine of jobs has a faceless villain given the workings of the economy are mysterious and inexplicable even to an educated population, to say nothing of the uneducated masses.But failure and dysfunction in the examinations handled by the central government? That has a clear face. And who does it affect? Everyone who hopes for a decent life in this country, those who have betted everything in their life till now on their chance of getting a coveted seat through the examination. Crucially, this is a population old enough and articulate enough to know how they have been cheated, and they possess the language (both civil and vulgar) to stage and express their discontent. Neither religion nor caste, deployed by the BJP strategically to divide and unify as necessary, to engineer riots or consolidate vote banks, could divide this population who feel their years and lives are now slipping away.This time, the government saw its police violence land on the children of the very families who had voted them to power, including the fervent Hindu, the believer in the greatness of Bharat, the upper caste follower of every Brahminical ritual, as well as students like S. Anitha. Aspiration to higher education and its promised social mobility/security, in this country, unites the Hindu and the Muslim, the right, middle, and the centre, the rich and the poor. It also includes the caste-privileged and the caste-oppressed till the lightning rod issue of reservation and quotas come up and divides them again. But the failure of the whole system destroys them all together – the seeker of the “general” as well as of the “reserved” seat.These are students fuelled by generations faith in the examination system – and the ranks and “merit” lists it unequivocally produced through decades, even centuries. For those who come from families who have inherited the legacy of success in examinations, it offers the alluring promise of continuity – the prestige of a place and/or a rank, the mark of merit beyond doubt, and a secure life after, with proper social status and recognition.Their parents and grandparents were clerks, officers, military personnel, civil servants, engineers, doctors, teachers, professors – all of them qualifying through examinations that had earned the trust of generations and now, their fetishising obsession. And for the millions whose parents and grandparents had been none of these and were bonded to the labours of the land and the human body, examinations are the only portals to all that and more.The Achilles heel of this governmentAuthoritarian governments across the world, from the US to China, have been relentless at restricting faculty, student, and curricular freedom to curb words and thoughts that challenge its ideology. But the student protests in India were not about ideology, or even freedom of thought.It was simply this: how can a government mess up the only system that offers any glimmer of hope to the teeming millions from all directions, across all ideology, and identity? How can they hope to get away with this mess? The destruction of the Great Roulette Wheel augurs the destruction of the powers that manipulate it. Higher Education, or the examination system that stands for it in India, may very well be the Achilles heel of this government that has miraculously managed to add every firestorm into its arsenal of firepower.Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is Open Intelligence: Education Between Art and Artificial.