Rahul Verma on the student protests:

Governments find such protests much harder to confront because there is no obvious ideological counter-narrative. One can’t simply invoke nationalism or accuse every dissatisfied student of serving foreign interests when the grievance concerns administrative failure. The usual political vocabulary becomes ineffective. More importantly, governments are generally better equipped to deal with identifiable opponents than of diffused public discontent that acquires a life of its own.

This partly explains why the sociology of the CJP protest deserves closer attention. Unlike many previous mobilisations against the BJP, this movement draws hugely from groups that have constituted an important part of the party’s electoral coalition. A large number of these young, aspirational Indians and their parents on the protest site may even have voted for the BJP in the recent past. They are protesting because the systems through which they hoped to advance appear increasingly unreliable.

Nilanjana Sen and Avishek Jha on the problem of educated unemployment:

What began as a colloquial expression among young people preparing for government jobs has, through this fieldwork, become a way of understanding educated unemployment itself. Sitting is not simply another way of describing exam preparation; it has become a way of living through prolonged uncertainty.

Sitting now defines the everyday lives of educated unemployed youth across India. It grows out of a crisis of employment and opportunity, and it demands a form of continuous self-work, maintaining discipline, caring for families, working out what adulthood means, and continuing to invest in an uncertain future. At the same time, sitting signifies stasis: it carries the emotional and temporal weight of prolonged preparation.

The shift from waiting to sitting is not merely a change in vocabulary. It reflects a changing relationship between education, aspiration, and employment in post-liberalisation India, one in which prolonged uncertainty is increasingly lived through disciplined preparation and sustained by an expanding economy built on aspiration itself.

Vivek Kaul on the student protests:

To be counted as part of the labour force, a person must either be employed or be unemployed but available for work and actively looking for a job.

This helps explain why falling unemployment does not necessarily mean that the labour market is healthy. The real issue is not whether people are working, but whether they are working in productive jobs.

The State of Working India 2026 report notes that much of the recent increase in employment has come from self-employment and agriculture, while earnings from self-employment have largely stagnated.

Roshan Kishore, as usual, provides a brilliant statistical angle on why the yutes are protesting.

If you are wondering why I said yutes:

I had worked on a detailed brief on what we know about how India works for This Indian Life.