The workers of Indian Youth Congress (IYC) were detained outside the Global AI Summit in New Delhi. Their crime? Asking the government of India a simple question: Where are the jobs?They carried no weapons. They broke no laws. They held placards with unemployment statistics, numbers the government would rather not discuss, while showcasing Artificial Intelligence as the centrepiece of its development narrative. For this, they were detained, dragged into police vans, and dismissed in predictable fashion: anti-national, anti-development, anti-technology.Every young Indian who is anxious about their economic future has a stake in what happened outside that summit.The numbers they don’t want you to see83% of India’s unemployed are aged 15-29. That is five out of six. In a country that sells its “demographic dividend” to global investors, the dividend is jobless. (International Labour Organisation (ILO) India Employment Report, 2024)Graduate unemployment stands at 29%. Nine times the rate for illiterate Indians. The more educated you are in this country, the less likely you are to find work. Let that sink in.India adds 12-15 million young people to the labour force each year. The economy creates five to eight million formal jobs. Do the math. Every single year, millions of young Indians walk into a labour market that has no room for them. They become delivery riders, gig workers without insurance, or they stop looking entirely, at which point the government stops counting them.On the Right to ProtestI want to address directly the charge that the Youth Congress protest was somehow inappropriate, embarrassing, or “anti-national”.Protests outside global summits are a hallmark of functioning democracies. Full stop.WTO Seattle, 1999: 40,000 people marched over labour rights and inequality. Now recognised as a defining moment for global civil society. G8 Genoa. G20 London and Hamburg. COP climate summits from Copenhagen to Glasgow. The World Economic Forum at Davos, every single year. Citizens showing up at moments of high-profile policy articulation to demand accountability is what democracies do.Youth-led movements, from Fridays for Future to Occupy, have reshaped global discourse on climate, inequality, and the future of work. German students protest at G20, and no one calls them anti-national. British trade unionists march outside WEF, and no one calls them anti-development. This label, it seems, is reserved exclusively for Indian citizens who dare to question their own government.The Indian Youth Congress is a recognised democratic political organisation with a decades-long institutional history. Its workers exercised their right to peaceful protest, as enshrined in Article 19 of the constitution of India.Calling democratic protest “anti-national” weakens the very democratic values that define this republic.A government confident in its record would welcome questions about jobs. It would not need police vans to silence them.AI: Who benefits?While Youth Congress workers were being dragged into police vans outside, here is what was being celebrated inside the Summit.AI could affect 40% of all jobs on the planet. That is the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) own estimate. Their managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, said it plainly at Davos: “In most scenarios, AI will likely worsen overall inequality.”92 million jobs will be displaced globally by 2030. (World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025)300 million full-time jobs automated by generative AI alone. (Goldman Sachs)12 million Indian workers may need to change occupations by 2030. (McKinsey)20% of Indian IT jobs could be automated in the next three to five years, with entry-level roles first. (EY-NASSCOM, 2024). These are the jobs that gave an entire generation of Indian graduates their first salary, their first sense of economic dignity.Daron Acemoglu, MIT economist and Nobel laureate, has put it bluntly: the productivity gains from AI are being overstated, while the displacement effects are being understated.Joseph Stiglitz has said it differently but arrived at the same place: unregulated AI will worsen inequality. The Indian Youth Congress was asking the government to confront this. They were detained for it.The cognitive architecture we are failing to buildHere is something that goes beyond the job numbers and deserves serious attention.We are watching cognitive displacement happen in real time.A new study from Microsoft researchers in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University mentions: “In scenarios that demand critical thinking, individuals who had grown comfortably reliant on AI found themselves less adept at problem-solving compared to their peers who engaged more actively with the task at hand.”Look around. We are already producing graduates who can prompt ChatGPT and yet cannot construct an argument. Who can generate code and yet cannot interrogate a problem. Who can access information and yet cannot synthesise knowledge.The question Indian education policy must answer is urgent: how do we ensure AI does not make our youth intellectually dependent on the very systems that may soon render their labour redundant?Finland and Singapore have restructured education around critical thinking, creativity, and adaptability, the skills that remain resistant to automation. India’s National Education Policy 2020 acknowledges this in principle. Its implementation has been slow, under-resourced, and largely confined to institutions that serve the privileged few.We need a new cognitive architecture for Indian education. One that builds what AI cannot replicate: moral reasoning, interdisciplinary thinking, emotional intelligence, the capacity to navigate ambiguity. Without this, we are preparing our youth for obsolescence.These are the questions being seriously interrogated within the Indian National Congress. These are the policy debates happening inside the Indian Youth Congress, because they are existential. The party that gave India its constitutional framework, its public institutions, its commitment to social justice, is today the only political formation willing to ask plainly: what do we owe our young?A final word to Young IndiaIf you are a young Indian reading this, regardless of your political affiliation, I ask you to consider one thing.Who is talking about your future in the hard, unglamorous, data-driven language of policy?Who is asking what happens to the 15 million young Indians entering the labour market this year when the jobs are not there?Who is asking what your education is preparing you for?Who is asking whether the AI revolution will include you or replace you?The Indian Youth Congress asked those questions outside the AI Summit. They were detained for it. I stand with them.The question is: do you?Karan Chourasia is national joint secretary, Indian Youth Congress.A version of this article was originally published on Indian Youth Congress.