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

Associate Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs
Co-PIs: Yamini Aiyar, Visiting Professor of the Practice of International and Public Affairs; Bhanu Joshi, Research Affiliate, Saxena Center, Brown University.
Project Title: WELFARE, SECURITY, REPRESENTATION: What drives women’s political preferences?

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.

The National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, Brown University, USA and Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), Chennai are jointly organising a Workshop on ‘State, Citizenship and Mobilisations in Contemporary India’ on August 8th-9th, 2026 at NLSIU, Bengaluru.

The National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, Brown University, USA and Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), Chennai are jointly organising a PhD Workshop on ‘State, Citizenship and Mobilisations in Contemporary India’ on August 10th-11th, 2026 at NLSIU, Bengaluru.

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”.

Over five weeks this summer, my travels have taken me to Delhi, Chennai and Sri City, Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune. I arrived roughly two weeks before the Jantar Mantar march to Parliament. The sea change after that march is unmistakable. The public sphere is freer, and the discussions far less constrained by fear. I would normally have predicted that the Hindu nationalist elite would lambast the protests of the young — their mockery, their satire, their choice of words and images for India’s post-2014 establishment — as Bharatiya sanskriti ke virudh (against Indian culture), even an insult to it

Yamini Aiyar is a Visiting Professor of Practice at Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

In The Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru made an observation about MK Gandhi, capturing a feeling that was experienced widely but never articulated as sharply. To slightly paraphrase Nehru: “The dominant impulse in India under British rule was that of fear; pervasive, oppressive, strangling fear; fear of… the police; fear of the official class; fear of the laws meant to suppress and of prison… And then Gandhi came… Suddenly, as it were, the black pall of fear was lifted from the people’s shoulders.”