After 25 years in the saddle, first as chief minister of Gujarat and then prime minister of India, Narendra Modi may find it difficult to believe that his days at the pinnacle of power are now numbered. But barring another Pulwama, or some other ‘miracle’, there is relatively little chance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) coming back to power in 2029.This is in spite of every stratagem that his propaganda machine will be able to think of – to curb the freedom of the press, break up opposition parties, terrorise officialdom and disenfranchise still more voters beyond the 10% that the Election Commission has already got rid of (in Bihar) – in the three years that remain before the next Lok Sabha election. The reason to believe this is that discontent with his government has been rising steadily. Modi’s unparalleled propaganda machine has consistently portrayed him as a father of the nation, interested only in the welfare of his people. But that image had begun to develop serious cracks even before the seven-week-long Jantar Mantar student protest against the leakage of yet another set of papers in this year’s NEET examination and the Delhi Police’s brutal crackdown on students demanding accountability on July 20 this year.The students’ ire was understandable. Close to two million students had sat for the NEET exam, pinning their hopes of securing one of the 137,000 places in India’s 823 medical colleges, and 80,000 places in veterinary and ayurvedic centres of learning on the basis of this all-important examination. Then, after they had finished sitting for it, they discovered that the question paper had been leaked and that they would have to sit for the examination all over again.The exam paper’s leak was discovered soon after it was over, and confirmed by a succession of complaints from other schools and coaching institutions in the days that followed. After extensive inquiries carried out over the next five days, the government set June 21 as the date for a fresh examination. As many as 12 students could not take the stress and committed suicide. This year’s NEET exam paper leak was not an isolated event. On the contrary, as the desperation of educated youth to find jobs has increased, the ‘price’ of such leaks has risen steadily higher, and the leaks more frequent, till selling examination papers in advance has become a highly lucrative business.The Tribune reported that there had been more than 90 exam paper leaks over a period of eight years. In a larger set of examination papers examined by the Congress, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra put the figure at 152 over 10 years. All this has been happening while the number of students desperately looking for entrance into institutions of higher education has kept rising.That desperation is being reflected in a steady rise in the number of students who commit suicide every year. These have risen by nearly 80%, from 8,068 in 2014 to 14,488 in 2024. While breakups and tensions in their families were the most frequently cited cause, the failure to qualify in these do-or-die exams came second. According to Careers360, “Failure in examination” was reported as the “main cause of suicides” for 1,071 suicides among those below 18 in 2024.Something had to give sooner or later. That is what happened in June this year when, thanks to the emergence of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), the students’ agitation took a political form and zeroed in on the demand for accountability – to be signalled by the resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, as a first step.Modi could easily have acquiesced and given Pradhan, one of his most capable and respected ministers, another portfolio a few months later. But when the CJP joined the students’ movement at Jantar Mantar, it became a political threat, and that threat multiplied manifold when Ladakh’s most revered leader, Sonam Wangchuk, joined the students. Modi reacted to these developments in the way that he has reacted to every other challenge to his authority over the past 13 years – by lofty disdain, followed by ruthless suppression.Video clips have circulated far and wide showing policemen in uniform, and some unidentified persons in civilian clothes, using force against women protesters. One widely viewed set of videos showed a senior officer slapping a woman protester; police personnel surrounding a girl and allegedly groping her while others laughed, and an officer jabbing at a girl from behind.They also showed the Rapid Action Force firing pellet guns upon a crowd, and hitting some of the demonstrators in the face and eyes. Sheikh Irshad Mansoori, who is only 25, sustained several injuries on his face. Far more tragically, Sahil Lochab, who is only 19, was hit in the pupil of his right eye and has probably lost his sight permanently in that eye.Such drastic action has been taken by the police in several parts of the country, most notably in Jammu and Kashmir, but this time it was taking place in the very heart of the nation’s capital. So it was covered for hours by every TV channel in the country, beamed to million television sets and seen by millions of people. Millions also saw parts of the fracas on their mobile phones.The sheer magnitude of the BJP’s recent, post-Jantar Mantar defeat in by-election for a Bihar constituency that BJP’s president, Nitin Nabin, had won last year, and which the party has held with large margins for 35 years, shows that even the most staunch supporters of the saffron party have begun having second thoughts about supporting it. The government immediately went into damage control mode, but it took seven full days to frame a counter-strategy. The essence of that strategy was to project the now familiar paternalistic, all forgiving father figure image of Modi that the country has been fed the past 13 years, at full blast.On July 29, Smriti Singh Chandel, a junior local lawyer, “recognised” a 15-year-old girl who was one of the exuberant young persons who had allegedly criticised Modi in intemperate language during the Jantar Mantar protest, and claimed that she had used vile language and abused Modi’s mother. Chandel later withdrew the complaint.Whatever she is alleged to have said was sufficient for the prime minister’s image builders to work upon. The police had filed a zero FIR against the girl, insisting, with no proof whatever, that she was 25-years-old. When her will was sufficiently broken, she was told that the great father of the nation, Modi, would like to forgive her if she asked for his forgiveness. The girl agreed and released a video apologising: “I’m just 15 years old. What I did is unforgivable. I said something very vulgar. But this is my first and last mistake. I will never do something like that again. I never posted that video. I want to say sorry to the entire nation. I can’t even look up. Please forgive me. Please.” Modi said he “forgave” her but the zero FIR against her remained under investigation for several days. Chandel eventually withdrew her complaint but not before the young girl underwent the trauma of being a ‘wanted’ person in the eyes of the law.Since then, Modi has gone back to presenting his avuncular face on Instagram and ‘X’ (formerly Twitter). The Jantar Mantar demonstration, he said, was just an expression of fear and anxiety by educated youth, and reflected their anxiety about finding work that would secure their futures and reward their parents for the sacrifices they have made. They needed to be forgiven, not punished, he said. But the stunning bypoll defeat of the BJP by newcomer Prashant Kishore in Bihar’s Bankipur, and a less sensational by-election defeat for the party at Datia in Madhya Pradesh, shows that while it may be too soon to draw conclusions about the future from a single prolonged demonstration, there is good reason to believe the youth have lost faith in Modi’s promises of better days, and in particular, in his party’s 2013-14 campaign promise that it would create 20 million jobs, presumably in the next five years, if brought to power. That promise had made the share of youth in the BJP’s vote jump from 20% in 2009 to 34% in 2014, and 41% in 2019. Despite the Modi government’s failure to live up to this promise, it stayed nearly there at 38%. Those are the voters whom the BJP is in danger of losing now.CJP’s rise is not a flash in the pan, but a warning of where the BJP is heading in the aftermath of the Jantar Mantar assault on the youth. Forgiveness from Modi is the last thing the youth want. On the contrary, his sudden presentation of a benign face has almost certainly enraged them further. What the youth need are jobs – secure jobs that allow them to plan a secure future. The Modi government has presented no credible evidence in the past 12 years that it knows how to create these. If the India Alliance wants to push it out of power, it needs to create a credible employment plan that will end the gnawing anxiety that is driving more and more young, highly educated students to despair and, even suicide. What is more, it must start implementing these plans in the states that it controls now. It has almost three years to do this in. But three years is not a long time. Prem Shankar Jha is an economist, author and Visiting Professor at Harvard University; formerly, Editor of Hindustan Times and The Financial Express, Information Adviser to Prime Minister V.P. Singh. His books include Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger: Can China and India Dominate the West?, and The Dismantling of India’s Democracy 1947 to 2025.