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The recent Financial Times piece on India’s Gen Z unrest—sparked by exam leaks, soaring graduate unemployment, stagnant real wages, and the Chief Justice’s unfortunate “cockroaches” remark—has once again exposed a familiar divide. On the streets, young people are mocking official rhetoric and demanding accountability. Offline and overseas, a different conversation often unfolds.
A detailed response from an old classmate living overseas, illustrates the pattern. It acknowledges some failures—such as the Education Minister’s repeated exam scandals—yet quickly pivots to historical equivalence. Congress-era religious mobilisation, Bofors, the 1984 riots, and the commercial explosion of engineering colleges in the 1980s and 1990s are cited as root causes. Global trends in IT layoffs and wage stagnation are invoked to dilute specificity. The piece is also framed as potentially foreign-funded, with the familiar suggestion that criticism of the present government is indistinguishable from support for the opposition.
This reflex is common among many Non-Resident Indians. After twelve years in power, measurable delivery on the headline promises—twenty million jobs a year, a broad neo-middle class, transformed employment outcomes for the educated young—remains elusive. Over four in five of India’s unemployed are under thirty. Graduate joblessness is multiples higher than among the illiterate. Skill programmes have placed only a fraction of those trained. Yet the dominant NRI narrative frequently treats any focus on these gaps as partisan disloyalty rather than a straightforward assessment of results.
A long-standing skepticism of the Indian system and its governance—formed in the late 1970s and early 1980s and sustained across successive governments—makes the current moment less surprising. Patterns of over-promise, institutional evasion, and the steady normalisation of unaccountability predate any single political tenure. That longer view does not, however, grant immunity to the present administration. Twelve years is sufficient time for structural claims to be tested against outcomes. When the same administration continues to deflect toward earlier eras or external conspiracies, the deflection itself becomes part of the record.
Appeals to patriotism fare poorly in such discussions. They function less as analysis and more as a conversational dead-end—the last refuge that shuts down scrutiny at the dining table or among friends and relatives. Evaluating whether stated targets were met, whether institutions performed, and whether young people gained durable economic ground requires no loyalty oath. It requires evidence.
Distance amplifies the bias. From abroad, national image, continuity, and selective success stories often loom larger than the daily friction of job scarcity, compromised examinations, and precarious gig work. Those living inside the system experience the gap between rhetoric and reality more directly. Both perspectives can be informative, but only if the conversation refuses the false choice between uncritical admiration and reflexive opposition.
The Gen Z protests are not an isolated spasm. They reflect cumulative pressure on a generation that was promised transformation and has received, for the most part, continuity of the same structural shortfalls. Holding power to account after more than a decade is not anti-national. It is the minimum requirement of democratic scrutiny.
Karthik
Bangalore, 26/7/26 11am.
