Co-option or control? Modi’s youth dilemma

Speaking on the occasion of Veer Baal Diwas on December 26, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told students, “You are Gen Z and, in a way, Gen Alpha. It is your generation that will take India towards the goal of Viksit Bharat.” The eulogy to India’s youth projected them as the primary drivers of India’s economic development.

However, as the anti-CAA agitations showed, his government has no tolerance for youth protest. More recently, youngsters demonstrating against Delhi’s foul air quality were detained. Some were wrongly accused of links with banned groups, and arrested under serious charges that were later found to be false. Many spent more than a month in jail before the courts ordered their release, declaring their imprisonment pointless and serving “no fruitful purpose”.

How can the duality between public rhetoric and a record of crackdown, arrests, and detention be reconciled? Can youth be seen as both nation builders as well as a serious destabilising force?

For the past decade or more, the Narendra Modi government’s supporters have encouraged Hindu youth to adopt identity-politics, and moulded them into an unofficial communal militia attacking minorities for their eating, praying, or even sartorial habits. This has created a generation of politically energised but socially narrow-minded youth useful for Hindutva's partisan purposes.

But the section of youth that is deployed as foot soldiers of Hindutva only intersects marginally with the cohort that is being promoted as innovative, entrepreneurial, and flag-bearer of India’s global image.

The first is likely to be less educated, rural or peri-urban, and narrowly socialised; the second, educated, urban, and globalised. The two cohorts are structurally unequal. They have grossly uneven education opportunities, especially in STEM subjects and AI sectors.

If the less educated youth remain trapped in identity politics without real economic opportunities, the stark inequalities that define India today are likely to persist.

Government programmes like Skill India and Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKY), which seek to integrate less-educated and semi-skilled youth into AI-based or AI-adjacent sectors, have had modest success. In the last 10 years, PMKY has trained 1.6 crore youth nationwide, and more than 25 lakh have acquired new-age skills, including AI, robotics, and coding under PMKY 4.0 (2022-2025). However, considering that India’s Gen Z population is estimated to be 37.7 crore, this is a drop in the ocean. Moreover, given their weak STEM foundation, the skills of youth trained under these schemes are likely to be of inconsistent quality. There may also be a mismatch between training and actual industry demand.

Despite the expansion of educational opportunities in India, the access of non-urban and non-elite Indians to STEM education has gone down under the Modi regime. A clear indicator of this is that scholarships for poor and marginalised students in STEM and other fields have consistently declined since 2014. Both the number of beneficiaries and the funding have gone down.

While flagship schemes, such as INPIRE and the National Overseas Scholarships, continue, there is a decline in allocations and disbursements to the marginalised sections of students. Opposition parties have pointed out that the spending on scholarships for marginalised groups dropped at a rate of 25% each year since 2014.

Last year (2025), 66 Dalit, OBC, and Adivasi students selected for the National Overseas Scholarships could not get the scholarships for ‘lack of funds’. Among Pre-matric scholarships, the beneficiaries among OBCs fell by 77% in five years, minorities saw a drop of 94% in four years, and SC beneficiaries fell by 57%. Delays in disbursements of post-matric scholarships for the Dalits, ST, OBC and minority students have reportedly faced so many delays that many have been unable to pay hostel or tuition fees.

Scholarship cuts disproportionately hurt minority and marginalised students, undermining equity. As talented poor students are unable to pursue STEM degrees, disadvantaged youth are kept out of India’s AI-driven future, India’s talent pool will be severely limited, and attempts to produce world-class scientists and engineers will be weakened.

There is a rather obvious gap emerging between youth in the North Indian States (mostly governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party) and the southern States. This may be a result of structural disadvantages of the former — larger population size, a sharper rural-urban divide, and weaker educational infrastructure.

In JEE, the students from southern States show a consistently higher percentile score, especially with Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Maharashtra dominating the 100th percentile rank. These States are also ahead of others in terms of AI and research ecosystems, especially marked by the emergence of Bengaluru and Hyderabad as India’s premier IT-hubs, hosting startups, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and AI-research centres. In North India (UP, Bihar, MP, and Rajasthan), while the JEE participation is large, the top percentile scorers are fewer, except for Rajasthan, because of the Kota coaching centres. While AI adaptation is growing in north India (Punjab, Haryana, and Delhi NCR), the region has fewer globally recognised IT and AI hubs.

These structural realities of education and tech-ecosystems mean that Modi’s Gen Z rhetoric is likely to resonate differently depending on geography. Gen Z youth living in South India can clearly see and use strong STEM pipelines and natural pathways to AI and tech because of the global IT hubs that exist there.

In North India, Gen Z’s aspirations are still likely to be shaped by government jobs, civil services or migration, rather than AI-driven innovation and entrepreneurship. Since often they are not met, the protests the government fears have a higher potential of originating among Gen Z in North India. However, their mobilisation for the Hindutva agenda means they are unlikely to direct their frustrations against the government. The easier targets they are encouraged to focus on are the minorities, and those routinely dubbed ‘anti-national’.

The Modi government is clearly wary of youth mobilisation after having witnessed youth protests toppling regimes in Bangladesh and Nepal. That is why, by praising youth, Modi constantly tries to project himself as their ally, potentially neutralising anger and dissent before it gains traction. However, Gen Z in South India is busy with pursuing modern industrial careers, while in the North they are happy with their saffron bandanas and scarves, expending their frustration elsewhere. Both are co-opted into the government’s agenda, but in vastly different ways.

Bharat Bhushan is a New Delhi-based journalist.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)