India is the Very Angry Future. Are We Ready?
Protests, political upheaval, and bans on technology are now a steady occurrence in the world's largest democracy. We should be watching closely.
A.I. Disclosure: I use LLM technology to help with story-tracking, research, fact-checking, document summaries, editing, and rewrites. I’m trying to use it responsibly, but I’m learning as I go. You can read my full ethics disclosure here.
On Monday, July 20th, as thousands of young protesters — calling themselves the Cockroach Janta Party, a deliberately humiliating self-label — marched on the Indian parliament in New Delhi demanding education reform, they were met with police batons.
The protesters’ outrage was over an ongoing scandal in India’s national exams: standardized tests that are the gateway to better jobs and higher education, corrupted by networks of cheats and institutional rot. (Two million aspiring medical students were ordered to retake the grueling NEET-UG exams after criminal groups were found selling the answers on Telegram.) For hundreds of millions of young Indians, those tests aren't just evaluative — they're the only door to a stable financial future. That door has been rigged, these protesters say. The merit-based system in a country that prizes education and produces an outsized number of the world’s engineers is being perverted. Who wouldn’t protest?
The reaction from police, presumably ordered to keep the crowds away from where Narendra Modi was speaking to parliament, is hard to watch. Protesters in their teens running away in sandals, choking on tear gas, as helmeted officers with shields and long batons swing indiscriminately as hard as they can. Indian journalists have reported more than 100 people injured so far.
India's exam system is a case study in how institutional corruption and algorithmic selection combine to eliminate pathways for the people who most need them — and how the people denied that access go on to react.
We’ve seen some upheaval here in the United States, but it’s been comparatively quiet so far, little more than the booing of pro-A.I. commencement speakers at the beginning of the summer. Something about the sight of Costco-sized data centers, obviously empty of people and driving up utility costs is driving people pretty nuts, however. The first ballot measure to ban data centers in a city passed by 88.34% of the vote in Monterey Park, California, recently. And Americans are clearly unhappy about the arrival of AI, with 71% of respondents in a 2025 Reuters/Ipsos poll saying they worry it’s going to put too many people out of work permanently.
But I believe what we’re seeing in India is a preview of enormous geopolitical upheaval we’re going to see as A.I. and the choking-off of opportunity dismantles the traditional exchange of hard work for advancement around the world. India is showing us what happens when a generation has been promised a shot at something better, and that promise is broken.
