Narendra Modi caves to India’s Gen Z

Narendra Modi caves to India’s Gen Z

Protesters oust the education minister and promise to go home

In india, where politicians rarely bow to the public, Gen Z has humbled a government. On July 25th student protesters forced the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, to resign, meeting the core demand of a growing protest movement. Only last month, the minister had called the protesters a “b-team of disruptive elements”. But in a non-apology posted on social-media, Mr Pradhan, a close confidant of Narendra Modi, the prime minister, said he was stepping down, “allowing our children to devote their time to studies and focus on building their careers”.

The Cockroach Janta Party (cjp), an upstart youth movement, has been calling for the minister to go since May, when an exam-paper leak upended the dreams of 2.2m medical-school aspirants, who would have to resit the highly competitive exam. It has been a week since the protests escalated. On July 18th plainclothes cops abducted Sonam Wangchuk, a veteran activist who had been on hunger-strike in support of the protests, and took him to hospital, giving the movement another outrage to rally around. Two days later tens of thousands staged Delhi’s biggest protest in more than half a decade.

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