The movement is not letting up. On Monday, August 10th, 2026, in the state of Jharkhand, thousands of young people marched toward the regional Parliament to protest alleged irregularities in public service recruitment exams. Police responded with tear gas, water cannons and batons, a now familiar pattern of crackdown in a country where youth led protest has kept gaining ground for weeks.
The movement traces back to June 2026, when thousands of young Indians took to the streets demanding accountability over the mismanagement of medical school entrance exams, tainted by fraud allegations. What began as a targeted protest quickly widened into broader demands, centered on mass youth unemployment and government corruption.
The movement found a name, and a symbol, in a controversial remark made by India’s Chief Justice, who compared the country’s unemployed youth to cockroaches. In response, a Generation Z collective formed the Cockroach Janta Party, literally the Cockroach People’s Party, turning the insult into a banner for the protest. On July 20th, the movement called for a peaceful march toward Parliament in New Delhi.
That July 20th march marked a turning point in the crisis. According to Human Rights Watch, Indian security forces used tear gas and batons to crack down on largely peaceful protests by students and other young people. The organization called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to promptly launch an impartial investigation into any unnecessary and excessive use of force, to allow peaceful gatherings, and to end the practice of shutting down mobile internet access during protests, which it considers dangerous for the public and inconsistent with India’s international human rights commitments.
An investigation by the New York Times, based on an analysis of videos and testimony from protesters, backed up these accusations. The paper documented the use of batons, tear gas and pellets by Delhi police, the Rapid Action Force and other paramilitary units, concluding that these forces had exceeded numerous guidelines set by the United Nations, as well as those of India’s own Ministry of Home Affairs, which state that force should only be used when absolutely necessary, kept to a minimum and proportional to the situation. According to protest organizers, at least 150 participants required hospitalization, with many more injured. Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition in the lower house of Parliament, also publicly condemned the use of force.
Faced with the scale of the unrest, the Indian government has had to concede a first major political setback, with the education minister resigning under street pressure two weeks ago, a rare development that reflects the movement’s capacity to directly influence the executive. Since then, Narendra Modi’s government has been working to manage the fallout from one of the worst protest crises it has faced in recent years, even as young members of Generation Z report becoming targets of threats on social media.
Beyond the initial spark of rigged exams, this mobilization exposes a deeper fault line between India’s stated economic ambitions and the reality faced by its youth. With 370 million young people between the ages of 15 and 29, the country was counting on this demographic dividend to turn its population into a decisive advantage over an aging China. But behind still spectacular economic growth lies a structural problem, the country is failing to create enough skilled jobs to absorb this mass of young workers, with unemployment reaching 36 percent among 20 to 24 year olds.
That situation is feeding a growing sense of a broken social ladder within a generation that was, on paper, supposed to carry India’s economic miracle forward. Repeated scandals surrounding public service exams, historically a symbol of meritocracy and social mobility in India, are crystallizing this frustration, turning a generation meant to embody the country’s future into an increasingly organized force of resistance against the Modi system.