The resignation of education minister Dharmendra Pradhan marks a monumental rupture in the long-standing immunity from accountability that the Narendra Modi government has enjoyed since it first came to power in 2014. This immunity from accountability has hitherto rested on three pillars: fear, the fettering of civil society and the free press, and the ability of the state to slot episodes of dissent into silos, keeping them from gaining mass empathy.The extreme brutality deployed in the suppression of past protests, the long incarceration without trial of prominent activists under draconian laws, the use of bulldozers to punish activists, and the free hand given to right wing brutality by non-state actors have all contributed to a climate in which expressing dissent, especially for the marginalised, is an endeavour that is unlikely to be undertaken lightly. Further, the choking of civil society through restrictions on funding and the co-option by the government of the mainstream media has meant that the layer of society traditionally most likely to inform the public and organise collective action to demand accountability has been fettered. Finally, the ability of the government to slot episodes of dissent into silos in the public discourse preventing them from being framed in terms that would spark mass solidarity or general empathy is rooted in a deeper fault line in the Indian polity. Despite decades of nation building, organic empathy in India still tends to be reserved for the members of one’s own family, caste and community. In the absence of a larger sense of fraternity, a great deal of power to determine what is “national” and “anti-national” vests in the mainstream media, from which people take their cues on whom to sympathize with and whom to demonize. This has given the mainstream media a great deal of power to reroute the anger from policy failures into identity linked conflict. For example, anger about the education system or unemployment has hitherto been channeled into anti-reservation or linguistic assertions, where the fault is not of a state that has failed to provide opportunity but of someone else “stealing” that opportunity from you. Protests, even when successful, become so siloed that they do not shake the government itself. The Gen Z protests have managed to smash their way through this otherwise ironclad lid on dissent. In addition to their sheer chutzpah, which undoubtedly played its role in dismantling some of the fear with which this government is viewed by its citizens, their ability to break through is also rooted in changes in the way people communicate and the unique role the entrance exam plays in the Indian polity. While social media algorithms are not free from bias, they break the monopoly held by the mainstream media over defining the national and the “anti-national”. In this the Gen Z protests have benefited from the major anti-government agitations that came before them and the systems that those movements created and left behind. Both the Citizenship Amendment Act-National Register of Citizens protests and the farmer protests recognised the importance of controlling their own narrative and the dangers of relying on the mainstream media to define the movement. While both these movements were demonised in the mainstream media, their demonisation also hit at the credibility of the media itself. The declining credibility of the mainstream media and the ecosystem of YouTubers who have emerged in India in response to this decline meant that the Gen Z protestors were never dependent on the mainstream media to draw attention to their cause. Instead, the protestors could heckle, mock and even drive the media away from their protest site without losing out on their ability to reach people. The entrance examFurther, the entrance exam is an experience that cuts across language, caste, religion, the urban-rural divide, and even class. This experience of shared suffering can, at least in the short term, generate its own solidarities that override traditional caste and clan affiliations, and a politics rooted in this diversity is harder to silo. Entrance exams for professional courses in India occupy a space in the public imagination that transcends their actual role. India’s post liberalisation growth, characterised by high inequality, and a poorly managed transition out of agriculture has generated few concrete plans to absorb either the labour being made redundant from agriculture or the young people aging into the workforce every year. Stagnation in real wages has meant that the urban working class has also had little opportunity for upward mobility. Entrance exams in this system forge an uneasy compromise between citizens left behind by India’s growth story and the state, where the failure of the state to offer a path to material upward mobility is compensated for by the hope of a better future. The entrance exam shifts the burden of thriving in this broken system on to the individual. The idea sold is that individualised effort can override the structural barriers of the economy. Hence, loans are taken, land is sold and family assets are liquidated to pay for private coaching from the burgeoning private coaching industry. Children as young as 14 are sent away from their homes to study in distant coaching centres (despite high suicide rates), all in the hope that a bright child might be able to pry open a path for the family to upward mobility that the structures of the Indian economy otherwise deny them. But when the sanctity of the entrance exam itself collapses, with paper leaks, the entire house of cards comes tumbling down, and the resentment spills on to the streets. The terms of the compromise between the state and the people, based on which many reconciled themselves to the unfairness of the economy, have been violated. A slogan heard at many of the protests was “Modi chor hai (Modi is a thief)” despite this not being a financial scam. The theft at the centre of this protest is that of the kids’ futures. Resentment towards the state and not at other studentsWhile on the face of it, the spontaneous student protestors have little in common with the highly organised and union-backed farm law protests, at the heart of both are people who believe they are being robbed of something existential. What land was to the farmers, the hope of a better future is to the students, and much of the strength of the movement came from children fighting for something existential to them. Beyond their success, the protests have stamped the Indian polity with their own unique political vocabulary. Two aspects of this stand out – first, in contrast to the Mandal agitations, the students are channeling resentment towards the state and not at other students. There is a budding recognition that the problem for India’s youth is a state that has simply failed to provide enough opportunities, and not how those opportunities are apportioned. A protest on the fairness of the Indian examination system which has traditionally been a dog whistle for upper caste anti-reservation assertions, rallying behind Ambedkerite slogans perhaps best demonstrates this shift. While it remains to be seen whether and for how long this politics can override the pull of inherited identity, the success of a protest on these terms can ingrain some of this thinking into the political consciousness of the generation. Second, and perhaps more interestingly, the protests reject framings of victimhood in favour of framings of power. In an era where the dominance of Hindutva perpetually hides behind a cloak of “Hindu khatre mein hai (Hindus are in danger)” victimhood, and Hindus are expected to be grateful for the protection of the BJP from imaginary demons and put up with their many misgovernances in return, the students are a breath of fresh air. They have all suffered to varying degrees, but the defining images of the protest are not pleas for sympathy or justifications of hatred. The defining images of the protest – a woman standing in front of a police bus, young people escaping from a lathi charge thanking the police for the “cardio”, a youngster casually opening a locked police van to let his comrades escape, students dancing under water cannons and boy wishing Modi a “happy Diwali” as teargas shells explode behind him – mark a generation that defines its agency as a matter of right, not retribution. As the “Cockroach Janata Party” officially ends its protests having accomplished much of what it set out to do, its lasting contribution, beyond the resignation of Pradhan, will be in what it brought to the surface – the raw energy of a generation finally staking its claim on the polity, on its own terms and with its own political vocabulary. Will they forge their own fresh politics, and shape their own civil society or will they also be coopted into the existing mesh of inherited identities? Only time will tell. But in the interim, the past week is perhaps best summed up by a line from Subhadra Kumari Chauhan’s ode to the Rani of Jhansi: “Budhe bharat mein bhi aayi phir se nayi javani thi (even old India is filled with youth),”, and for that we can be grateful. Sarayu Pani is a lawyer by training and posts on X @sarayupani.Missing Link is her column on the social aspects of the events that move India.