Indian police baton-charged protesters heading to parliament and forcibly hospitalized a hunger striker, as frustration over the country’s education infrastructure intensified.
India is home to globally competitive universities and has produced world-class entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers, but the vast majority of its students languish in a bureaucratic, rigid, resource-starved system: Thousands of members of the Cockroach Janata Party — initially formed satirically but now garnering considerable momentum — descended on Delhi in frustration over failures in the national exam system, while an activist held a three-week hunger strike to call for the education minister’s resignation.
“Young people are not demanding guaranteed success,” one writer argued in The Indian Express. “They are demanding something far more fundamental: a fair chance.”
