Earlier this year, a stranger who walked through the background of an influencer’s video in Dubai became the year’s most durable meme: “Zero civic sense,” she said. The phrase has circulated ever since – a shorthand for the idea that Indians do not care enough about shared public space. In the following months, a Supreme Court remark about “cockroaches” produced the Cockroach Janta Party: a satirical movement that became a real one, with real protests at Jantar Mantar, and then Sonam Wangchuk was forcibly hospitalised by Delhi Police on July 18 after 20 days without food, still refusing to end his fast, and a Parliament march took place on July 20 which saw incredible police repression and force. They are similar stories at different scales. Both are asking the same question: what does it take for an Indian citizen to feel that a fellow citizen’s problem is their concern too? And both are arriving at the same uncomfortable answer. What do people care about?The ‘zero civic sense’ diagnosis blames individuals. But when properly understood in a democracy, ‘civic sense’ is not only about litter or queue-jumping. It is about the capacity to see someone else’s suffering as a claim on your conscience — even when that someone is outside your immediate circle of consequence. The person who litters, pees or spits on the street, the office that looks away from the site of injustice and the people who watch students die by suicide over a paper-leaked examination and move on to the next news cycle are committing the same offence at different stakes. This is not simply a character flaw. It is the product of a social architecture that has spent centuries teaching people that the problems of those below them in the hierarchy are natural, deserved, or invisible. These differences not only create a sense of entitlement but also an indifference towards the collective good. Dipankar Gupta traced this to caste consciousness two decades ago. Suraj Yengde makes it blunt: civic sense, in India, is a caste issue. These old divisions evolve into new class-community divisions, othering fellow citizens.Corruption functions on the same logic at an institutional scale. The people running our system are the people who do not experience the consequences of their decisions as real costs. And in most of the cases, those consequences land on people outside their circle. Over ninety students died by suicide in five years, directly linked to examination-related stress and scandal; fourteen more in 2026 alone. NEET has evolved from the AIPMT system because this exam suffered one major, catastrophic leak that redefined national exam operations. After which, the National Testing Agency was formed. Over the years, these medical exams have suffered six major paper leaks, causing nationwide cancellations. The engineering-focused JEE Main is a computer-based test, yet the JEE Main entrance has faced two highly sophisticated cybersecurity compromises. Despite technological upgrades, other NTA-administered tests like UGC-NET have also continued to face structural leaks and subsequent mass cancellations. This is what the Narendra Modi government’s anti-corruption mandate and the promise of acche din has run into. A shortage of policy and a shortage of the empathy that makes institutional failure feel personally unacceptable to the people running institutions. These scams are evidence that you cannot fix a structural problem with a change of government.The nature of India’s welfare stateAmbedkar saw the deeper architecture in 1936: “The caste system is not merely a division of labour but a division of labourers”. The hierarchy that severs horizontal bonds and makes solidarity across those ranks feel unnatural rather than obvious. A collective demand for better institutions, policies, and their implementation requires a felt sense of shared public fate. Rigid caste-class-religion-specific solidarities prevent that feeling from forming organically. All political parties always promise an anti-caste rhetoric, but it is only absorbed into party organisation and coalition arithmetic, or vote distribution, rather than into a coherent programme for social transformation.There is no major tendency in Indian politics that currently owns the project of building horizontal empathy across caste-class-religion lines as its primary work. The opposition has fragmented into “moods of dissent” because there is no coherent effort that puts the social revolution before the political one, as Ambedkar insisted it must. The current Indian government’s welfare delivery is also (like previous governments) distributive: it moves resources downward, without disturbing the system that produced the deprivation. It is possible to receive a subsidised ration and still be made to enter through the back door. This hierarchy and the welfare state coexist without contradiction because the programme’s purpose is political consolidation, not social transformation.The reactions and the silenceThat is why this movement is important – and what makes the political class’s response to it so revealing. CJP’s demands are, by any reasonable measure, among the cleanest and most broadly legible of any protest movement in recent Indian memory: institutional accountability, reform in the education system, and justice for the families of students who died. There is no minority-specific grievance here that can be weaponised. There is no caste demand that can be used to fracture any coalition. The leak did not discriminate. In other words, the kind of protest that should be easiest to support can’t be slipped into an “anti-national” agenda narrative. And yet, the opposition has made statements from a distance. The Congress has not launched an organised initiative to actively stand with the protesters; they are working on their own, separately, through the ‘Chharon ki Goonj’ initiative, on the same issue. Most opposition parties have offered verbal support while maintaining careful organisational distance, calibrating their vote arithmetic before deciding how close to stand.The ruling party’s silence on this matter is deafening. Such indifference to its own electorate is not becoming of a democratically elected party. That silence turned into something more active on July 18, when Delhi Police forcibly hospitalised Wangchuk. This was not a response to the movement’s demands, but to the inconvenience of a man visibly starving in the capital. Indian state registered a person as a “cost” only once the optics became unmanageable, not because the demand is just.But what about others? The people? The media? They did show up. Thousands of protesters claimed Jantar Mantar and the road to Parliament on the July 20. A movement built almost entirely online, dismissed for months, got so many people on the streets. This is something which most organisations fail to achieve. The state’s reaction did not match the scale of what it was responding to. The government’s engagement has remained tokenistic at best. On the ground, the police met the protesters with brute force of batons and tear gas. This sparked major outrage on social media platforms. And yet on the same digital platforms, a large section of people still seemed unsure about their stand on the issue. Even this protest, with its single, shared, undeniable injustice, cannot get citizens and political parties to say “this is my problem too” without qualification and calculation; then the division runs deeper than any individual political failure. It runs through the social architecture itself. The system regenerates the fragmentation even when the moment seems, by design, perfectly made to transcend it. Democratic empathy is not a soft aspiration. It is a structural need. And its absence is not a meme. It is a crisis.The social reform India needs cannot be delivered by a government, and it will not arrive with the next election. It is something citizens must demand of institutions, of their political representatives, and most uncomfortably of themselves and each other. Across their communities, across the community. For strangers. Consistently. With spine.Richa Sagarika is an independent researcher and writer based in Delhi. She is currently pursuing theoretical research in political geography. She is a postgraduate in Geography from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.