Youthquake — unlike India’s targeted protests, SA’s young people are misdirecting their economic fury

For 12 years, Narendra Modi has governed the world’s largest democracy on a basic formula: sustained religious mobilisation wrapped in the promise of economic development and material progress. This month it met its most serious test, and one set mostly by people too young to remember India without him in charge.

For five days, tens of thousands of young Indians occupied streets in cities across the vast country, in the largest mobilisation against the prime minister thus far in his tenure. The protests have already forced Modi’s government into a humiliating climbdown and claimed the scalp of a minister in his Cabinet; a concession Modi has spent a decade refusing to make to anyone.

The trigger was something as unlikely as an entry examination. In May, authorities found that the national medical school admissions test had been compromised by leaks. More than two million candidates were told to write it again, having spent years and — in many cases — a family’s savings preparing for it. At least 12 took their own lives. A police investigation traced the leak to insiders with access to the exam process. Students demanded the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the education minister, after a tenure marked by repeated such leaks across the country.

Compounding the outburst of anguish and grief was the contempt shown by the government. The chief justice of India described the country’s unemployed youth as “cockroaches”, a remark he later insisted applied only to those holding fake degrees. Within weeks, Abhijeet Dipke had founded the Cockroach Janata Party, a pun on Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It now has more than 25 million followers on Instagram, against the BJP’s 9.4 million.

The frustrations, though, run much deeper than a crooked exam process. More than four in five unemployed Indians are under 30. Joblessness among graduates runs at nine times the rate among those who cannot read or write; a reality which asks questions of India’s entire development model. Real wages have stagnated.

India’s economy may have expanded by more than 6% annually in recent years, but the effects have not been equally felt. The number of young people entering the workforce is rising faster still. Graduates with top engineering and technology degrees are forced to take on exploitative gig-economy work, or jobs on construction sites for which they are massively overqualified.

AI is making a bad situation worse

Artificial intelligence is now closing the one door they had. India’s tech heavyweights such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and their peers were built on a form of labour arbitrage: large numbers of comparatively low-paid Indian engineers performing tasks for which Western companies paid far more. That trade is now being automated from below with AI coding.

The industry that once absorbed India’s graduates is now shedding them. Even in this much-vaunted IT sector — the ladder that was meant to carry a generation into the middle class — hiring has stopped. The five largest firms added a net 17 employees over the first nine months of 2025-2026, according to data in the Economic Times. Not 17,000, but 17.

The dilemma facing Gen Z of the Global South

This is not a context unique to India. It can be seen across the emerging world, in Africa and Asia: a ruling gerontocracy refuses to listen to a youth component imbued with talent and qualifications but no opportunities.

While South Africans should recognise the similarities, we should also note where the resemblance breaks down. South African anger has in recent weeks boiled over not as a movement but as a series of pogroms. Malawians, Mozambicans, Zimbabweans, Nigerians and others have been assaulted, and their businesses vandalised and looted. More than 3,000 foreign nationals have fled their homes and been repatriated. Thousands more are waiting to get out.

The grievances are real and familiar. Unemployment in SA is 33%, among the highest recorded anywhere. The Thomas Piketty-backed World Inequality Lab gives South Africa the dubious distinction of being the most unequal place on Earth. It is perhaps instructive that this week, in the rarefied air of one of South Africa’s most elite schools, Bishops, the question most preoccupying the entitled old boys is not the fracas playing out on its doorstep but that the Gay Pride flag should not be flown.

Unlike India’s impressive top-line figure, the SA economy has averaged less than a miserly 1% growth a year for a decade. The Human Sciences Research Council finds that anti-migrant sentiment has risen over two decades and sharpened since the pandemic, rising hand in hand with frustrations over miserable economic opportunities and lack of basic service delivery. Locals treat migrants as competitors for scarce housing, clinics and jobs.

Political opportunists

The two phenomena should not be equated. Much of the violence in SA has been organised, and by people whose interest lies in simply weakening the state. There is no equivalence between a mob dispossessing a Mozambican shopkeeper and a student movement demanding a minister’s accountability. But the contexts are the same: an economy that has stopped producing opportunities for its citizens, especially young people, and a political class that has stopped listening.

The difference lies in where the anger is pointed. India’s young people rightly identified the state as the author of their predicament and have addressed it directly. South Africa’s, meanwhile, have been instrumentalised by nefarious political opportunists and pointed sideways at people in situations even more precarious than theirs. This will not address the root cause: those corrupt and/or inept officials who have presided over a decade of stagnation and service delivery failure.

Whether these episodes remain isolated or converge into something the Global South has not seen since the Arab Spring of 2011 is the question. The ingredients are there: young populations, ageing leaderships, and now AI removing whatever opportunities there might have been.

Modi will spend the coming months trying to manage and contain the frustrations. Ramaphosa, considerably weaker and boxed in by Phala Phala, will be hoping for the same. He would be better served asking a harder question: why South Africa’s fury reached a Mozambican shopkeeper before it reached him. DM