Patna, India – As 20-year-old Ajay Kumar scrolled through social media on his mobile phone in Muzaffarpur district in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, he came across rumours that a crucial examination for a government job he had appeared for had been compromised.
Ajay is a Dalit, a community that falls at the bottom of India’s caste hierarchy and has suffered centuries of marginalisation. He had pinned his hopes for the future on a job reserved for his community under the government’s affirmative action programme.
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But the leaking of the examination paper in December last year dashed those hopes.
That’s when he came across a video of students as old as him – and just as angry – protesting the paper leak in state capital Patna, some 75km (46 miles) away. He immediately hopped on an overnight bus and found himself among thousands of protesters the next morning.
Ajay spent the next 100 days in biting cold, demonstrating and often sleeping in the open, huddled with hundreds of other students. Their demand was simple: A re-examination. But in April this year, India’s Supreme Court dismissed the students’ petitions to conduct the re-examination.
A furious Ajay contained his anger for months. On November 6, as he voted in the first phase of a two-part election to choose Bihar’s state legislature, Ajay pressed a button on the electronic voting machine hard, hoping his choice would avenge the struggle of students like him.
Whither Bihar’s Gen Z?
As Gen Z protests topple governments across South Asia, regional giant India – the largest and most populous of all – has been an exception. A Hindu majoritarian government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has been in power since 2014. In Bihar, a coalition of BJP and its partners has been governing for most of the past two decades, under the leadership of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.
Yet, Gen Z anger is palpable in Bihar, which neighbours Nepal, where young protesters toppled the government in September, demanding an end to corruption and elite privileges.
Bihar has the youngest population among Indian states. Government data show 40 percent of the state’s 128 million population is under 18, while about 23 percent is between 18-29 years of age.
At the same time, one in three Bihari families live in extreme poverty, according to the World Bank, also making it India’s poorest state.
The anger of its youth has meant that Bihar witnessed 400 student protests between 2018 and 2022, the highest in the country, according to national government data.
And many like Ajay are seeking to channel that anger into electoral changes.
The two-phase election in Bihar, held on November 6 and November 11, saw more than 74 million eligible voters elect their representatives for the 243-member regional assembly.
The results will be declared on November 14.
As more and more youngsters express discontent with their ruling elite across South Asia, political observers believe the Bihar election will indicate whether Modi – who campaigned extensively in the state – is still able to retain his hold on the crucial demographic in India, home to the world’s largest youth population. Of India’s 1.45 billion people, 65 percent are less than 35 years of age.
Or will Modi’s principal opponents – led by a much younger Tejashwi Yadav of the Bihar-based Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) party and Rahul Gandhi of the main opposition Congress party – be able to tap into the frustrations of Bihar’s youth?
Anger and despair over jobs, education
Bihar languishes at the bottom of most of India’s multidimensional human development indices, which take into account factors such as nutrition, child mortality, years of schooling and maternal health, among others.
Pratham Kumar, 20, is from Jehanabad district in southern Bihar. He had to move to state capital Patna because colleges in his hometown offered “no teaching, only degrees”.
But studying is a struggle even in Patna, he says. The university hostel does not have clean drinking water, the wi-fi router has been non-functional for months, and students like him often end up mowing the lawns of their cramped hostels since hostel authorities don’t have adequate housekeeping staff to do so.
“Across Bihar, the state of education