It Could Happen Here - The Gen Z Protests that Shook India's Fascist Government

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

Robert and Mia discuss the recent Cockroach Janta Party protests against crises in India's education system and how they threaten India's ruling fascist government. Sources: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/the-human-toll-of-neet-11-reported-suicides-after-paper-leak-forced-retest-101781771406022.html https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/readings/aoc_print_2004.pdf https://frontline.thehindu.com/columns/surya-kant-parasite-remark-unemployment/article71041381.ece https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/what-do-indias-gen-z-protests-mean-for-modi https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ek3l9gp7go https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260806-india-youth-protests-highlight-mistrust-in-lapdog-media https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/26/come-back-my-son-indian-exam-leak-leaves-trail-of-death-despair-anger https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/27/india/india-cockroach-protests-what-next-intl-hnk https://frontline.thehindu.com/politics/cockroach-janta-party-gen-z-politics/article71065447.ece https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/indias-youth-protests-puncture-modis-063558309.html https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g43l251vyo https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-68282270See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook. Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers. The show's famously super accessible so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller, Danny McBride, Riz Ahmed, and

Mary Steenburgeon. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nick Totoro. You probably know me from NYPD Blue, The Longest Yard, or Spike Lease Black Klansman. And on my new podcast, delivering happiness with Nick Totoro, I deliver pizza to a new guest. I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins. What are you doing my belt? To Bill Burr.

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And listen now. Also Media. Welcome to Akadap and Here, a podcast where sometimes the here is the world's largest democracy. And that, I think, I'm actually not sure how many Americans are aware of it. This is, in fact, India, a very basic fact about democracies around the world. I mean, if you're calling either the U.S. or Eighty. India, the world's largest democracy, you've got to put an asterisk. Yeah.

A couple of them in there. Either way. We'll get to that in a second. So. Land of asterisks. Yeah. Age of asterisks. Yeah.

With me to talk about the age of asterisks and maybe how to get out of it is Robert Evans. Yeah. Yeah. Asterisk on that too. Why not? Oh boy. And I'm Mia Wong.

I guess asterisk there too? Sure. I don't know. I got nothing. I got nothing. Well, what are we talking? about today, Mia? We are talking about the fact that a couple of weeks ago in India, protesters managed to accomplish something that is unprecedented in the 12-year reign of Indian Prime Minister

and enemy of the show, the Butchara Gujarat himself, one Prime Minister Modi. Narendra Modi, thank you very much. Yep, hate him, Jesus Christ. Yeah, yeah. The entire time he has been in power, no one has successfully been able to manage to force him to make a cabinet member resign. No. And protesters just did this. Yeah. This is the first. It's not the first, because the most recent set of elections didn't go great for him, but this is like the biggest break in his armor we've seen since the Modi regime kind of clanked into place. Yeah. And to understand sort of what that means, we need to talk a bit about why Robert was like, yeah, asterisk, that's a democracy on both this in the U.S. Yeah. Which is that.

So Modi's ruling party is the BJP, and I would classify the BJP as the world's largest fascist party. It has a horrifying 140 million members. Jesus, age Christ. Yeah, not good. Very bad. Oh, boy. Yeah. Yeah, and it's also like not the only ultra-right-wing Hindu nationalist party in India.

There are also others. So, yeah. Great, great things happening here. Yeah, this is why you've had ethnic cleansings against Muslims and other. non-Hindu groups and chunks of India over the mode of years. Yeah. So they've been in power, like, effectively uncontested. I mean, they didn't do great in last elections, but they held on to power,

and they've been in power for 12 years now, dream which they have both transformed Indian politics and also just continued to get more and more right wing. Yep. There's something I think is worth mentioning with the BJP, which is that it's not like most political parties, even fascist ones, in that it's not like it's a political party that, like, developed a paramilitary, right? The BJP was developed as the political wing

of, you know, a very, very far-right anti-Muslim, like Hindu nationalist paramilitary group called the RSS, which was responsible for a whole bunch of absolutely hideous crimes even before the BJP took power or even existed. So, again, like, this is a ruling

party that is like the political wing of a paramilitary, not the other way around, and it's been running India for 12 years. And as Robert sort of mentioned before, the BJP has faced some challenges to their power. They've also faced large-scale protest movements before, most notably sort of the farmers' protests in 2020 and then 2024, which were about attempts to implement right-wing market reforms to India's like agricultural markets, but they've successfully been able to maintain this policy of just refusing to dismiss government

ministers in the face of protests until now. So what has actually been happening? Yeah. So these protests have been rallying under the banner of, I guess, kind of a meme organization or meme. Yeah. It started as a joke, right? Yeah, yeah. It's called the Cockroach Janta Party, which is named after these comments they were made by India's chief justice of like the Indian Supreme Court. Yeah.

Calling young unemployed people, quote, parasites and cockroaches. It's a little bit of a reversal of like the Hillary Clinton deplorables comment where this This person in politics uses a derogatory nickname to refer to a group of people he's opposed to, and they kind of take it on as a badge of honor. Yeah, and because it's fascist, right. Right. It's also, yeah, fascist. The Chief Justice Supreme Court is calling them cockroaches. Jesus Christ.

Yeah. This party is like obviously a joke. It's like CJP, like cockroach instead of BJP, etc., etc. The main focus of these protests are a series of scandals in India's education system. and it feels kind of redundant to say like, oh yeah, like what kind of education do you get has a huge amount of, you know, sort of determinants in like what your life turns out to be and what your economic conditions turns out to be in a sort of more intense version of like the way that American standardized testing works. But there are a bunch of these standardized tests that you take that can determine a whole bunch about what your future is going to be. And I think mostly mostly, there have been a couple of big scandals recently, but the most of the most of the most of the, famous one is called the

Neat scandal. Neat and EET is basically it's India's like pre-med exam basically. Yeah, it's this huge exam that everyone who wants to go into pre-med has to take and get a certain grade on as I understand it basically. Yeah. So it's one of these, especially for kids

who aren't rich, it's like a massive barrier that you have to get past if you want to like have a better life basically. Yeah. And these tests and specifically, the meat in particular, I mean, this is just the one if you want to become a doctor. But, like, you know, there's a huge number of people taking these tests.

I'm going to quote from Al Jazeera, nearly 2.3 million test takers across India. And at examination centers in Doha, Dubai, Singapore, and Camp Mandu, appeared for the neat this year on May 3rd, battling out for less than 130,000 spots in medical colleges. So a very small percentage of these 2.3 million people who are taking this test can even possibly get a score good enough to get them into a very small number of spots in these medical colleges. And then it turns out for this year's test that the answers to the test had been leaked ahead of time and were being like sold on a telegram channels. Oh, yeah.

And this turns into a massive scandal and the government forces the students to take the test again. And this is a complete disaster. 11 students died by suicide as a result of it. Good God. It's really bad. Because it's like a mix of everything you've heard about, particularly in Southeast Asia, you've got a lot of, like, fresher as a kid to do well in exams like this because there's not, both for cultural reasons and because there's not other ways legally to, like, get those jobs if your family's not rich.

And also the people whose families are rich often can pay to get the answers ahead of time, which is what the leak of this shows, right? Like, the fact that it leaks out is because people's rich kids are getting these. Yeah. Well, and also, like, if you're rich enough, you can send your kid to, like, a private college, right? Right. That's that too. You know, but if you're a working class kid, you cannot afford one of these, one of these private universities.

Yeah. And so your only way in is through these tests. Exactly. And these tests are also, you know, they're like a huge sort of extraction engine inside of the Indian economy where, like, you know, one of the things that Alta Zira talks about is the story of this 21-year-old kid who is one of the people who died by suicide. who in order to get through these tests, you have to go through these like massive, extremely expensive coaching centers effectively in order to study enough for it. And these things are, these things are really expensive to the point where this kid's family like sold their ancestral lands in order to be able to pay for test coaching so that this kid could become a doctor.

And she had passed the test after like not getting high enough scores like the previous two times. And then he had to take it again. There's, there's stories like this all over. deal. And it's just a nightmare. Yeah. So much of this, too, shouldn't be separated from the broader issues Jinzy and Jin's Alpha are having all over the world, right? Yeah. Like, this is part of that. Like, this is, we are fucked. We have no way of making it in the economy you've left us. And one of the tiny slim slippers of a way to get ahead is just a scam, too. Yeah. I get it. They should be pissed. Yeah. And, like, it's particularly intense in India.

because there was a story recently that CNN was talking about where there's a study that showed that there's a 40% unemployment rate for graduates under the age of 25. Good God. That is nightmarish. That's end of civilization kind of shit. Like, any sane government would be worried about a revolution in these conditions. Those are the kind of unemployment levels that got you the Arab Spring, right? Like, that's how this stuff happens. That in Facebook.

Yeah. And Twitter, I guess. Yeah. Well, yeah. Facebook playing both sides on that one. Russia. Iran. Yeah. A variety of foreign intelligence agencies from all over the world. A lot of things. Like, a lot of things. Yeah. And speaking of things that have a lot of problems, the education system as well, like there's other issues with it. Right. The BJP, again, they've been in power for 12 years. So they've installed a bunch of RSS guys like in the Department of Education. And so you get this curriculum that, in something that I think is very familiar to Americans where you're just getting all of this right-wing nationalist bullshit just like attempting to be pumped into the education system. They're doing that too.

Yeah. And conditions over this are bad enough that, yeah, people take to the streets. Yeah. As they should and did. Yeah. It's, I don't know, like a lot of the stuff reading this, it was like, oh, I've like been in this protest. Like, so originally these, originally the protests are,

not that large in scale, but there's a big march on July 20th. That's, you know, like a march at the parliament. And there's a giant police attack on it. That's an attempt to crush the movement entirely. And it doesn't work. It does exactly the opposite. It has, you know, a very, very familiar pattern of a bunch of people watch, like, a bunch of, like, actual literal children who are protesting, like, the answers to the test

got sold to a bunch of rich kids. Then they get the shit beaten out of. And this suddenly like accelerates the protest massively and massively increases the number of people who are in the streets. And, you know, this eventually does the unthinkable, which has forced the government to make the Minister of Education resign. And they're also able to get some reforms. The Modi government in theory says it's going to address like some of the kind of like bureaucratic things around why it's so easy to get these questions. They also promise not to arrest any of the protesters. a thing that is never true.

Every single time you are promised this, they are always lying. Oh, yeah, yeah. But is also the thing that a government does when it is scared? Yeah, it's a sign that they know they can't start talking about cracking heads from the jump. Yeah, yeah. And I think we're going to get a bit into more of the reason why the government was so alarmed about this later. But one of the things where I think this probably, unfortunately, was good strategic timing by the government, is that these protests were sort of like

crystallizing into these more general like anti-mody protests and by sort of heading it off at the past year over an issue where like in theory the BJP also wants the test to work normally although obviously this does beg the question like okay so if it's

government officials who are selling the answers to the tests like who is running the government which is you know another part of this and another thing that is a part of this. is these products and services, Robert. Oh, God, I love a good product and a good service.

Get Bell, Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus. From $94 a month, price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather you know them.

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this is here. Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook. Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers. The show's famously super accessible so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on.

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Haven't looked it up. She was prominent around the same time. Yeah. Then Mary Steenbergin. Why are you guys talking to me? I'm worried. I'm worried. Did you understand the movie?

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Do better or do less, so I don't have to do so much. So join Yomeneke each episode as she answers, one question. Who's the problem? I'm Yamanika, and I'm out. Listen to you're the problem with Yamanika on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Oh, we're back. We're filled with the bounty of products and services, and we're ready to hear more about the cockroach Janta. Yeah, so again, kind of very familiar to a lot of protests that we have seen over our lives. These are very, very social media-driven protests. in a way that's also similar to a lot of the protests

that have been happening in actually particularly in neighboring regions protests in like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka etc etc and you know if if you watch any of like the Instagram reels or whatever from these God I don't know it's so just depressingly familiar in a lot of ways

where it's very funny reading people talking about this because they're like ah it's these like irony meme driven you know, like kids making these like irony, meme-driven things about like getting the shit beaten out in by riot police and like, you know, it's like people doing fit checks and then like getting like beaten with batons. And it's like, oh, yeah, okay. We've all been there.

I've been having a very like, I'm feeling old moment. You're watching these because it's like, oh, God, I remember these from like 2013 when we were doing the same shit. Well, that's one of the tough things too as you get older is both, you know, and this is less the case when we're talking about a foreign movement, because I don't think I have any ability to influence that. When you're talking to, like, younger activists, it's a mix of wanting to, like, let them know about the pitfalls and problems that previous generations have encountered when you see them, you know, kind of heading in that same direction

and also not wanting to be like, well, just because I'm burnt out doesn't mean you should be. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you shouldn't be excited about this thing just because I can't get excited it anymore. Yeah, and it's like, you know, and that's always the thing with these kind of protest is like sometimes you win. Yeah, and sometimes you win. And there's never got, David Graber had this quote. I forget who. Yes, I know the one you're talking about where he's, he's talking about, like, dealing with like the surprise of victory. Oh, I was actually going to do a different one. Oh, okay. But that one's also good. But he had this quote with a revolutionary in Egypt, like from the 2011 like uprising there. And, you know, she had this.

quote where it was like, you do these protests all the time and sometimes 30 people show up and you're depressed and sometimes 100 people show up and you know, you're really happy. And then one day 800,000 people show up and you kind of forgot that could happen. Yeah. And that's kind of what this is, right? Where it's like, yeah, that's exactly how it goes, right? It starts as like a bit from a dude who's not even in India at the time, right? He's at a school in the U.S. and he, but he, and so he just makes this kind of meme page and it takes off. Yeah. And then suddenly, you know, you actually have, part of this is also like weird stuff

about how algorithms work, but like part of what's been happening here too is that there's been a huge shift in the regime in India's ability to control social media, which is something they've been very, very good at up until this point. They've been really good at controlling

both sort of online discourse and also have taken almost complete control over just the regular mainstream media. And these protests and like the way that people are just sort of casually being like, fit check going out to a protest and like the way that the stuff spread algorithmically and the way that you know you have people going out for protest stuff and that also mixes with just you know people who are going out just to film it for like their Instagram reels and it but all of them

all of them end up like in the streets and you get the situation where like the mainstream media is just like absolutely refuses to talk about the protest whatsoever but then you know if you're like on instagram you're on any social media site you it's the only thing that you're the only thing you're seeing. And this kind of weakens the control that the BGP has been able to maintain over all of these spaces. Yeah. But that doesn't mean that like they've, you know, lost control completely. You know, the BJP is like kind of in their counterattack phase right now. And you get a really bleak look at how like right wing governments with longstanding sort of right wing online bases and media bases work where. Yeah. They do these like harassment campaigns against women who went out

protesting. They sure do. Yeah. It's like all the stuff that. you're familiar with, right? Like, they'll show clips of people like on news channels and then people will like docks them and like start stalking them and they get threats and... Yeah, I've heard people had to like hide and stuff.

Yeah. Especially like female activists while they were during the protests. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also, you know, it's like large scale threat to sexual violence are... Yep. A very common part of this and that's...

God, yes. You know, that's like how these people are able to maintain power. But even as this sort of digital counterattack is happening, and it's extremely brutal and it's really a mess. The control of the mainstream media is also slipping. One of the things I learned, like, reading about this is there's a term that, I guess,

generally kind of like opposition people are using with the protesters also use where they call, they call the, like, the mainstream press like Goody Media, which is like, it's like lap and Hindi. So it's basically like calling them like lapdog media instead of being watchdogs, which I love. I don't know. I like it a lot. Yeah, I do too. That's great. It's good. I don't know. I don't know exactly how to steal that for us, but I love it. It's great.

Yeah. We should be thinking about that. Yeah, but part of the problem with having, you know, this kind of like incredible degree of like media centralization that the regime has been able to pull together is that, you know, after being in power for so long, having their narrative be like completely hegemonic for so. long, they're running into like the cracks, you know, these sort of cracks forming in their nationalist messaging because like they're running into the fundamental problem that you can't eat national pride. And so if literally the entire media all the time is trying to ignore if these protests are happening and then also was telling you that your country is great and like Modi is great and you're such a world, great world leader. But then, you know, you can't feed your family. That's an actual problem. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And like,

And like normally the way that nationalists would sort of deal with this is to be like, yeah, you don't have jobs and your economy sucks because of like some either immigrant group or in this case it would sort of like the BCHP probably would be doing this with Muslims. But they've been in power for so long that it's like kind of hard to do that because it's like this is your country now, right? Like you have taken control of it. And yet. Yeah. And this kind of feeds into this, you know, question at a broader level about what these protests are actually. about. Because on a very basic level, they're about education reform and they're about these tests and they're about the education system as a whole. But on a broader level, it's more complicated

because these protests as, you know, protests often do function as a sort of aggregator of different kinds of struggle with, you know, different beliefs and motivations. You get a whole bunch of different kinds of people in the street. I want to read this quote from an interview Frontline India did with the guy who was the founder of the CJP, which is to say just like the guy who made the meme that went viral. Yeah, yeah. That is how he got the job, so to speak. And he's

done a really good job, by the way. Like, I think he's been really responsible. Yeah. He could not have anticipated this happening, but he seems to be really dedicated to the cause. Yeah, and I want to quote him here talking about what the ideology of this party, if it existed, would be. The ideology of the CJP

and many of our young people are also very progressive, liberal, secular, will be secular, democratic, and socialist, and we strive for social justice. And he also mentions three people that he's, you know, he's inspired by. And two of them, I think, are kind of not particularly surprising, given this kind of, like, this is kind of what, like, secular, progressive, democratic-y politics look like, which is, he mentions Gandhi and Nehru. But what's interesting, and what I haven't seen literally at all in any other coverage at this protest,

is that the third person that he mentions is Ambadkar, which... Yeah. I assume you having been there and spent a decent amount of time to India, I assume you know who Ambedkar is? No, no, no, I don't. No, not really. Interesting. Okay.

Not in a meaningful way, no. This is actually kind of a good proxy. I assume people listening to the show know who Gandhi is. You've probably at least heard of Nehru, who was the first friend minister of India. Yeah. Ambedkar is a lot less well-known. He's another one of the very important sort of independence era figures in India. But he is the guy around which the anti-cast movement rallies.

Was he in the 50s or 60s? No, he like first starts this in like the 20s and 30s. And then he's alive through independence. Oh, okay, really? That era. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's around like in the era of like revolutionary struggle against the British. Preed independence.

Yeah, yeah. And then he, you know, he like survives through independence and gets to see some of that. The partition of India and all that good stuff. stuff, yeah, all the fun things happen. Yeah, and this is a period, you know, if you look at like the 1910s, 20s, 30s, this is a period both about the anti-colonial struggle and then also like what the struggle is going to be, right? Like whose vision of India is going to come out of a post-independence world if there is one? And Ambikar's thing here is, yes, like we want, like we want independence and we want socialism

because, you know, a lot of the people, like, Nehrui is like a kind of socialist, right? like a lot of the independence activists are. But he's also in a position of we need to get rid of the caste system because he sees it as correctly as like an incredibly powerful sort of force of oppression in Indian society. And he thinks that that's not something that they should like wait until independence to deal with. And so he's a very, very important like leader in the anti-cast movement.

And he's probably, I think he's probably just like their best known intellectual. I would really recommend reading his book The Annihilation to Cast. Well, I say book, it's like not that long. Yeah. Like, it's probably like my favorite thing I've read from the writers of that era. It's an address that he's making basically to both,

I guess you'd call it like more conservative pro-independence activists and then also to the socialists to be like, hey, you should also talk about cast at the same time you're talking about British oppression and also glass. Get Bell, Pure Fiber Internet with Crave Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month.

Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather, you know them. Tony and Candace, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, the chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years,

but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO, rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia for, the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guestars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more.

Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song. I thought he was going to write. I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo, rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport.

And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers. The show is famously super accessible so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller. The definition of what is a movie has kind of changed anywhere too, right? What do you think it is now? It's images and words being spoken, captured by some sort of technology.

Danny McBride. He loves Nova. Oh, that's fantastic. And you make it on, you make your own. That's great. I call him Tarot Reed. It's a good name. They're all named after cast members of American Pie.

Yeah. Oh, gotcha. I call, I don't, I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Leachie Sobieski. Yeah, I don't think she was an American Pie, but I still like that. Haven't looked it up. She was prominent around the same time. Yeah. Then Mary Steenbergin.

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Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Totoro. And listen now. The CJP founder, like, mentions this because he's from a low cast. background. And he goes, like, yeah, like, no, like, I wouldn't have been able to go to school in the United States and, like, have the successes that I've had in my life without Ambikar. I thought this was really interesting because it's not mentioned in any other reporting, even though it's, it's like, in an interview he's said. And also, I think this is a dynamic here that is, like, not well

understood in most places that, like, this is a still operative system of oppression that people are still fighting against, and that is, you know, relevant enough to be, like, one of the things that gets mentioned by the guy you starts this movement. And that's not to say the rest of the movement, like, necessarily is exactly this focused on it, which is one of the parts of this movement, that's both why it's exceeded and also one of the kind of messy parts of it, right, is that, on the one hand, this has become a really powerful vehicle for these sort of, like, broadly secular, like, pro-democracy, like, anti-dictatorship students. And there's always been, like, a fairly large, like, cohort of, you know, sort of, like, young left-leaning or leftist students.

I mean, there was a whole, I don't know what you'd call it, like social panic slash government purge against this idea of, like, quote-unquote, urban naxels, which is supposed to be like, oh, there's like these, like, urban versions of, like, the naxylate communist guerrillas that are in the universities, which is, you know, in a lot of ways very similar to, but a significantly more advanced and repressive version of the stuff that, like, you see the Trump Ministers. doing in the U.S. education system and the sort of like witch hunts over, you know, Palestine and stuff like that. So, you know, you have that group of sort of like center left and left as students who were a lot of people who started the protest movement. But also, there's also just like BJP kids.

Yeah. Who are in the streets because they're like, yeah, like we all got fucked in our tests. Because it's bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. It's the same reason how you've got a decent chunk, at least like a third of the 20 or something percent of the people who voted for Trump. in 2024 are more people who'd voted for Biden or for Hillary a few years earlier, right? They're people who maybe they went for this guy, but as soon as it stops working for them,

as soon as like the fascism isn't delivering what it promises, they'll get pissed. They'll get up wide up in the streets. You don't have to like them to recognize that as a phenomenon. Yep. Yeah. There's a kind of like third phenomenon too, which is as these protests go on, you get more and more of different kinds of like both rural and urban. workers. More urban workers and rural workers, but this is, you know, the thing about education

protests at their core is that this is something that cuts across like rural urban divides to an extent in the sense that like both poor rural kids and poor urban kids are still getting fucked by this, you know, by the exam system. But then, you know, you get workers starting to join it who also have these, I think, I don't know, the way that commentators talk about it is that they're unconnected. I think they're a lot more connected than that, but you get these workers

with these like cost of living crisis concerns who are also joining this protest. And I guess part of this is a girl who spent a lot of time studying and writing about Tiananmen. But this is kind of the exact class composition of Tiananmen and how those protests

unfolded, where you have its origins in like this specific student movement thing that has kind of specific student movement grievances that then, you know, goes into the streets around their specific demands and then everyone watches them get the ship beaten out of them. Yeah.

And that brings more and more people into the streets who have their own kind of specific demands around, like, the economic conditions they're in. And this is a very common, like, composition for, for revolts. I mean, it's the basis of everything from, like, I mean, God, like, it's part of the basis of the French Revolution.

You can look at, like, May 68. Yeah. Like, you know, So the revolts against Pinochet. Like, I mean, Occupy is like a lot to a large extent, like this class base, right? If you have a bunch of students who are very concerned about debt, and then that brings in a bunch more working class people who are like not students anymore. But that's also what makes it dangerous. It's a very old kind of alliance.

And it's a kind of alliance that can always materialize. Because students and poor workers are some of the first people to feel when the economic type. are shifting. And that, like, constantly creates these kind of uprisings, right? And, you know, they're dangerous enough that if you look at the last 30 years of Chinese politics, a whole bunch of the politics of modern China are about specifically making sure that this exact coalition doesn't form again. So, you know, when the old working class is sort of crushed with the, like, remains the welfare state in the 90s, like, there's a very deliberate attempt to buy off the students at the same time to make sure they never make common cause. And, like,

any time you've seen sort of student worker actions since then, there's this massive crackdown on it, because the Chinese government understands that this is a very, very dangerous political coalition. And it's a political coalition that has outlasted, I mean, literally like a lot of the like working classes that were originally in these uprisings, like the French revolutionary like artisan class. Like that doesn't exist anymore, right? Like the industrial working class in like France or like Italy in the 60s. Like that also doesn't exist anymore. But you still see this, like, specific configuration of classes doing these protest movements. Yeah.

There's obviously always a lot of different motivations. And conflict against the state tends to be the thing that can, like, solidify a kind of identity that allows you to do any kind of mass movement, right? Like, this is, like, one of the few things that can, you know, fighting the police and having the state repress you. and that having the state as a force you can fight against, concretely that just appears when you oppose it, like is one of the things that, like, makes these kind of protests to open its work. And then also underneath that,

the economy is broken in a lot of the ways you saw, like in 2018 and 2019, which is like, I think the last big cycle of these mass protests where you have this economic instability. Right. And what I think is particularly similar between now and, like, 2018, was that technically speaking, if you look at the economy in India right now,

as long as you ignore the youth unemployment rate, it looks like the economy is growing. Things are good. Yeah. It's like the same thing as the U.S. where it's like, well, I mean, the economic indicators have been getting worse. But like, you know, technically speaking,

it looks like the U.S. economy is growing. But if you're living under it, it's like, no, it's not. And there's all of these sort of cracks and ripples in the global economy. In 2018 was like this where like the American economy was like doing fine. and a lot of like the major economies were in theory doing fine, but then, you know, there was a series of currency, like, crises. And, like, there were like these economic collapses. Yeah, there's like this hyperinflation in Turkey.

You get these things in, like, Chile. And then, you know, you start seeing these protests. You get, like, Haiti, get the yellow vests. You see, like, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Iraq, God, like Iran, for the first time of this giant cycle of protests in Iran. Myanmar, like, even, like, Russia briefly goes up. And I'm bringing this up to say that, like, one of the things about a protest like this, right, and there's been several other ones, there were a very big protest in Indonesia over the last couple of months. These protests often, A, recur, and B, are in some ways, an early warning signal before, like, there's going to be another giant round of these kind of protests.

Yeah. I mean, hopefully, right? Yeah. I mean, I think there's a decent chance of it because, like, you know, the economy still hasn't, like, hit rock bottom yet. No. And in the way that, like, you know, you saw that in 2020. We're like, yeah, the bottom finally fell out of the economy with COVID. Furthermore, maybe this is putting it a little bit too strongly, but like the people who do not like the regime, particularly the activists, have, like, tasted a little blood now.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's really hard once people win, once a movement wins for it to not try to keep winning. That's kind of the natural instinct. Yeah. And the BJP is, you know, obviously doing its best to suppress this. Yeah, to suppress or co-opt. Yeah.

Yeah. But the problem that they're facing is the fundamental problem of all of their regimes everywhere, which is that like it's a lot harder to maintain one of these kinds of regimes when you have been in power for a long time and suddenly the economy implodes. And that's coming for India, the same way that's coming for the rest of the world. and also in very specific ways of like, you know, I've talked about on this show elsewhere, the effects of the blockade of the Strait of Formuz

has been devastating in India in a way that it hasn't been in the US. Yep. And, you know, you also have like heat waves that are also, you know, both economically and just like living, devastating. There was an expression in the Hong Kong protest that they were drawing from a Mao quote,

but also it's way older than Mao, as like Mao says in the thing where he says it, but the Hong Kongers had this line that like a single spark can start a prairie fire. And the thing about the Indian economy is that it is throwing sparks off everywhere. And that doesn't mean that every individual spark is going to be the one that starts the fire.

But it means that as you continue to get more and more sparks, the odds that you see another one of these revolts increases. And hopefully the odds that one of these protests and one of these movements can finally knock off the fast. And, yeah, fundamentally transform Indian society rises. Yep. Or at least get Modi out. Yeah.

Just at a bare minimum. You know, I'll take the minimum if that's what it is. Oh, God. Okay. Well, thank you, Mia. And thank you the cockroach Janta over in India. Good work. Hell yeah.

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