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 is so poor that you just enrol yourself in a college for a degree on paper, but if you actually want to learn, you need to enrol in private coaching classes at an extra cost,” he fumes.
Pratham is now looking to move out of the state – the only alternative for millions of students and unemployed Biharis. A 2020 study by the Mumbai-based International Institute of Population Sciences (IIPS) found that more than half the households in the state depended on remittances from their loved ones who had migrated to other states or abroad.
Pratham’s friend, Ishant Kumar, is from Darbhanga, another district in Bihar. He is angry at the young forced to migrate in search of a better life, and points to instances of anti-migrant violence in parts of India, often targeting Biharis.
“The poverty here pushes young Biharis out, and then, they are insulted, assaulted and have no dignity,” he tells Al Jazeera. “From Kolkata to Maharashtra, only Biharis get attacked and mocked at.”
Ishant is angry that successive state governments have not done enough to stem migration. “The cream of Bihar migrates and contributes to the development of other regions in the country. Instead, why can’t we create opportunities here for them to grow?” he asks.
In Vaishali district, 23-year-old Komal Kumari believes she has already wasted two years of her life due to government inefficiency.
Komal, like Ajay, is a Dalit. Her family survives on a 9,000-rupee (about $100) monthly stipend that her mother earns as an “anganwadi” (childcare) worker employed by the government. Komal, like millions of girls across Bihar, was promised a 50,000 rupee ($565) cash transfer in 2021 by the Bihar government that the BJP is part of, if she earned a graduate degree.
Komal, who completed her Bachelor of Arts with political science honours in 2023, has been waiting for that money for two years now.
She’s hoping to qualify for teaching jobs, but for that, she needs a two-year degree, a Bachelor of Education (B.Ed), which would cost her approximately 75,000 ($846). But she has no savings – she has already spent nearly 100,000 rupees ($1,128) on her first college degree and at coaching centres she went to, to improve her chances at examinations for several government jobs.
Now, she can’t pursue either the B.Ed. or the coaching for government job examinations.
And she is angry. “I spent so much money only because the government had promised a cash transfer. If they had been prompt, I would have not wasted two years, waiting around.”
‘Students constantly angry here’
Ramanshu Mishra owns Ramanshu GS classes, a popular coaching centre in Patna for young Biharis eager to apply for government jobs. He says Ishant and Komal are speaking for most students in the state.
“Students are constantly angry here. When they are studying, they are angry at poor educational facilities. When they finish studying, they are angry at the lack of employment opportunities,” Mishra tells Al Jazeera.
Government data show the joblessness rate in urban Bihar between 15-29 years of age is at 22 percent, much higher than the national average of 14.7 percent.
This is why Bihar becomes a testing ground for both Modi’s BJP, which is a leading partner in the incumbent National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in Bihar, and its challenger, the opposition INDIA alliance, led by the RJD and the Congress. The INDIA alliance has announced 36-year-old RJD chief Yadav as its chief ministerial face, while the NDA is banking on 75-year-old Modi and the incumbent chief minister, Nitish Kumar, who is 74.
“The verdict will show whether the youngest state of India chooses a young leadership [opposition alliance] or whether it chooses to be with the old [NDA],” Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a journalist and author of Modi’s biography, among other books, told Al Jazeera.
Both sides have been trying hard to woo the young. In an election speech last month, Modi said his government’s policies enabled Biharis to make money through social media ‘reels’. “I have ensured that 1GB data costs no more than a cup of tea,” he said.
The Modi-led NDA committed in their election manifesto to creating 10 million jobs in Bihar, if voted back to power, while the opposition INDIA bloc’s central poll plank in the election is their promise to ensure one government job per family in Bihar within 20 days of coming to power.
The Congress party’s Gandhi, 55, has also repeatedly urged Gen Z voters to “stay vigilant” and stop electoral malpractices he has alleged have been occurring in several Indian elections in the past few years. Gandhi has alleged that the ruling BJP has been committing voter fraud by adding ineligible and fake voters to the country’s electoral rolls. The opposition has also criticised the country’s Election Commission for being complicit in it. The Election Commission had faced criticism for a controversial revision of Bihar’s electoral rolls on the eve of the elections, which resulted in 3.04 million voters being deleted disproportionately from districts with high numbers of Muslim voters – who typically vote against the BJP.
“If the opposition’s young leadership loses, it will put Modi in a very advantageous situation,” Mukhopadhyay said. “Because it means that even though he is 75, the youth continue to plug for him.”
(Ajay Kumar’s name has been changed since he fears his participation in the protest could dent his career prospects.)
