It would be myopic to present the current student protests only in light of short-term politics. What the younger generation of India is doing is profoundly important, both for India and the world.

For decades, the Canada-U.S. relationship has been defined by one of the world’s closest cross-border partnerships. Recent political and economic tensions have challenged that relationship. Canadian and U.S. flags fly atop the Peace Arch monument at the Douglas-Peace Arch border crossing in Surrey, B.C., in 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

The COVID-19 pandemic was a global emergency, but its health, social, and economic effects were highly uneven. In India--one of the world's most unequal democracies--the pandemic and government responses unfolded across a hierarchical social landscape and uneven institutional terrain, producing starkly different experiences of risk, protection, and loss.

Exams are designed to privilege rote learning-based multiple-choice questions, making syllabus completion rather than subject mastery the goal, and rote-based pedagogy the means

If any Hindu thinks that there should be no Muslims in India, he will not remain Hindu”, thus spoke Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief, at New York’s Madison Square Garden on 29 August.

Addressing a large gathering of young women in Pune during a student outreach programme called ‘Chhatron Ki Goonj’ on 22 August, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said that an “adarsh naari” — an ideal woman — in India is “put in three boxes”. She is seen only “as a daughter, as a wife, or as a mother.” Gandhi added that there was “nothing wrong with being seen as one of these, but it cannot be your only identity”.