What began as an ill-considered courtroom comment by the Chief Justice of India has blown up into a full-scale nationwide protest movement by the student community against the rot in India's education system. Although Chief Justice Surya Kant has clarified that his cockroach comment was only meant for lawyers with fake degrees, his original remark on May 15 that unemployed individuals become social media activists and attack the system like "cockroaches" and "parasites" touched a raw nerve and snowballed from a creative social media satire into a youth protest movement that the country had not seen in five decades. 

That there is a generational chasm in thinking between Gen Z and the establishment generation was obvious from the way the government, the legal system, the law and order machinery, the media and even the education system responded to the students' anguish. 

The fire of anger had already spread among a highly networked generation when Abhijeet Dipke, who had initiated the internet satire on cockroaches and come up with the moniker Cockroach Janata Party, left his studies at Boston University to channel the brewing internet resentment into physical protests. Small protests in Delhi, Pune and elsewhere were met with indifference, amusement and disdain by authorities, who had underestimated from the outset the viral power of social media and its instrumentality for the Gen Z. 

By the time the protests shifted to the Jantar Mantar protest site in New Delhi on July 6, it had gathered a life of its own with government intelligence hopelessly underestimating today's social media-connected and aware youth's moblisation power. By the time Ladakh-based educationist and innovator Sonam Wangchuk, highly regarded among the young, joined the movement and started an "indefinite fast" demanding education reforms and government accountability, the protesters ranks had swelled to 50,000, with youth, fed up with examination paper leaks and a broken education system that led to growing joblessness (reports say about 40% of India's graduates are unemployed), joining the protesters' ranks from all over the country. 
 
Ill-Conceived Police Action and Fallout

A government, smug in its brute parliamentary majority and consistently high popularity ratings for its supreme leader, badly miscalculated this time, hoping to wear out the students' patience by simply turning a deaf ear. Perceiving the burgeoning restless ranks of students cutting across religious and social divides, bolstered by supportive parents, empathetic elders and thousands who shared the students' anguish as a potential law and order problem in the heart of the capital's business district, the government sacked Delhi's police chief without notice, brought in someone with anti-terror experience, and set a poorly guided and sadistic police force on the students, hoping to disperse them through lethal force. 

The result was catastrophic. Advocate N Hariharan told judges of the Delhi High Court, hearing a bunch of  petitions alleging that "brute force" by the police against Cockroach Janta Party-led protesters marching to Parliament: "Something that followed was unimaginable. Brutality to the largest measure possible has been used. I am not for once saying that the state did not have the ability to regulate the movement, channelise the movement... Policemen can be seen beating ladies on their private parts. Women at the protest were molested. More than 90 protesters were injured, and the numbers keep growing. I am not saying police were not injured, but it needs to be inquired what happened on the ground."

He said unjustified police action against unarmed students had "shaken the conscience of the nation" when the protesters were merely exercising rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution of India, including the right to peaceful protest and assembly. 

Instagram, Facebook and X carried real-time the State brutality against the students who were staging a democratic protest that they considered their democratic right to all corners of the country and abroad. People were shocked; diehard supporters of the government and the Prime Minister, many of whose wards were in the protests, could not believe this is what a government that swears by democracy was doing to their children. The Prime Minister, whose popularity ratings tower head and shoulders over opposition contenders, may have lost more support in the last few days than he has in his last 12 years in power as an incumbent.  

 A Challenge the Government Took Lightly

Why Modi did not choose to meet the students earlier and waited for over three weeks for violence to break out and fasting activist Wangchuk's health turning critical before he responded boggles the imagination. All he had to do was to call a small delegation of the students, hear them out, put an avuncular hand over their heads and told them he shared their anguish and would act sooner than later. Since the students demanded accountability, including the sack of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, he could have told them that the government could not be pressured, it must weigh its actions and its political repercussions, but would not disappoint them. 

The students, who by all accounts had no political affiliation, would have happily dispersed and called off their agitation following "assurances" from the Prime Minister. 

A Prime Minister, who otherwise is known to have the pulse of the people and has been idolised by a large section of the country's youth, chose instead to be aloof and disdainful to the students' pleas and possibly endorsed the strong police action. 

When things looked like going out of hand, he finally got his ministers to speak to the students, though the official condescension was evident in the very first contact when the students complained they were made to wait outside Health Minister J P Nadda's residence "for four hours for a ten minute meeting".

With the movement turning neo-political, and floundering opposition parties bereft of causes jumping on to the protest bandwagon, what could have been contained with defter handling threatens to become a cause celebre. Large students protests in support of the Delhi protesters and against the police action have been reported from all over the country, as far as the Northeast, and international media has reported it as the first large organised protest against the Modi government that has taken on national dimensions. 

"Young people in India — 40 percent of the world’s biggest country — have been taught that they are inheriting a country that is shining brightly, thanks to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership. Their disillusionment, with a lack of jobs and a troubled education system, now poses one of the biggest challenges to his popularity in 12 years in power," noted the New York Times. 
 
 Youth Anger Needed Better Handling 

 The youth eruption is a consequence of pent-up anger and frustration of the government's indifference to the repeated leaks of exam question papers for which millions of doctor, engineer, police and civil service aspirants prepare for years.  Over 20 students have reportedly committed suicide after the NEET exam paper leak for which they had toiled for over a year.   Opposition Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, running his own campaign for some weeks called "Student Echo", alleged there have been over 152 exam question paper leaks in the last ten years affecting millions of students, though this figure could not be independently verified. And, according to reports, due to shoddy investigation of these crimes, there have been not more than two convictions over the years, an investigative-legal failure that Modi has now promised to belatedly rectify with fast-track courts and tougher punishment.

This must easily rank as one of this government's biggest policy and administrative failures. A widely -shared young girl student's insta post summed up the hurt feelings of Gen Z when the government ordered the cutting off internet in central Delhi, shut down nearby metro stations, told shops and restaurants in Connaught Place to shut down denying food, water and washroom access to the protesters and invoked the tough National Security Act.

" What is the government terrified of? If you thought you passed draconian laws people would run home in fear! The crowd is only growing.... Is this General Dyer (an allusion to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre by the British)? This is the collective rage of an entire generation that is utterly sick of state terror".

The next few days will be crucial in deciding not just the future of this CJP-led protest but the direction of the government and the nation at large in what is one of its toughest tests.  South Asia, after all, has its own examples of what youth power may be capable of if mishandled. 

(The author is a veteran journalist, media editor and current affairs commentator. The views expressed are personal)