India’s government will likely quell the student-led Cockroach protests, but it will have a harder time suppressing the underlying frustration fueling them, prominent Indian commentators argued.
The movement, which began as a satirical campaign after a judge derided India’s unemployed youth as “cockroaches,” has transcended grievances about the education system’s failings to become an outlet for a “generation of desperate and furious young people who have seen their future snuffed out,” Arundhati Roy wrote.
Nearly 83% of India’s unemployed are young people who sit through grueling exams and chase job security for a future of “prolonged uncertainty,” academics wrote in Frontline. The authorities have violently cracked down on protesters, Vir Sanghvi wrote, “but what the government can’t fight is an emotion.”