On July 23, the prime minister of India addressed the cockroaches for the first time. He chose to do so via vertical video, an unusual format for him that met the protesters on their own terrain. He expressed sympathy and promised action on the exam leaks. The next day, government representatives met Wangchuk in the hospital and agreed to consider the CJP’s program, following which he ended his fast. The day after, Education Minister Pradhan resigned, fulfilling one of the protest’s central demands.

Much of the CJP’s rhetoric seems aimed at countering the assumption, evident in Justice Kant’s remark, that the young are always the source of their own problems, and never the inheritors. Dipke summarized the movement’s thesis as “it is not [the youth’s] fault that they are unemployed. It’s not their fault that the exams are in a fiasco…. It’s the failure of the government and the political ecosystem, which has completely failed to address these concerns.”

The heart of the protesters’ ire is India’s network of public universities, a system defined by disparity. At the top of the pyramid are a handful of institutions like the federal Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) system, world-class centers of research that rival their American counterparts for student outcomes. Critically, and unlike American elite schools, entry into these institutions is open to anyone on purely meritocratic grounds. Score above a certain cutoff on the test—roughly the top 1.5 percent of IITs—and you’re in. Money can buy tutoring services and time off for studying but cannot directly curry favor with admissions committees.

For those who fail to make the cut for the best schools, the outlook is grim. Joblessness among recent college graduates collectively is estimated to be between 20 and 40 percent. Two-thirds of the country’s officially unemployed hold college degrees. If you define employment generously to encompass the various forms of semiformal, low-wage work that sustain much of the poor, then India is a country where the probability of getting a job is inversely correlated with education.

The simplest reason for this state of affairs is that, despite decades of growth, India’s economy fails to create enough good jobs to keep up with surging population. But if a dysfunctional labor market squanders the talent of India’s youth, the higher-education system is doing its best to ensure that the youth never develop those talents in the first place. According to a widely cited analysis, half of graduates are effectively unemployable because they lack the basic skills required for the industries they seek to work in.

For millions of poor and middle-class Indians, then, the choice is as straightforward as it is brutal. With most colleges offering scant improvements on the prospect of a life of drudgery, it is worth it to give up years of your life for a shot at the one thing that could guarantee a good education and a lucrative career, regardless of your background. The students that put their hopes in the exams are not wrong that success is available to them, however unlikely. The coerciveness of the situation lies in the fact that so many of them consider such a thankless gamble to be worth trying in the first place.

One illustration of the power of this coerciveness is the fact that CJP never proposed getting rid of the exam system or even seriously changing it. The movement’s five reform proposals include compensating students for test leaks and offering mental health counseling through tutoring centers. Sympathetic commentators have hailed the program as an attempt to elevate students from passive participants in the exam system to empowered rights-holders. One might ask whether such a shift would only render them co-wardens of their own prison. The students offered no real suggestions for loosening the test’s stronghold over their lives. Instead, they proposed ways of making testing itself less brutal and capricious, and also more fair, efficient, responsive—which is almost to say they proposed to intensify it.

Perhaps this was admirable realism on the CJP’s part. After all, several elements of its program are already on their way to becoming law, whereas a deeper confrontation with the exam system would require radical changes of a kind no one seriously expects from this or any other government soon.

But another possibility is that the modesty of the CJP’s official ambitions reflects a grim acceptance—perhaps even a desperate embrace—of the only institution through which a young person without dynastic wealth can seize control of his or her life. The political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta suggested in The Indian Express that “exams function as a legitimating ideology in a system marked by extreme scarcity.” People’s willingness to play along with a social order that contains so few opportunities for advancement depends on their belief that whoever is in charge of distributing the opportunity—in this case, the state—is acting fairly. The principle of equal access is foundational for this belief, and indeed, the exam system is genuinely open in ways that the rest of the society, so rife with casteism, economic inequality, and nepotism, isn’t.

But for many young Indians, fairness has another dimension which, in America’s warped prism, looks almost right-wing: a deep commitment to meritocracy. What destroys trust in the system is when those responsible for judging merit look corrupt or inept, as in the case of repeated exam leaks; it is not the fact that only a tiny fraction of the very best can ever succeed.

Mehta also considers whether Indian masses are hostage to false consciousness: Exams are “instruments of social control” that are “deliberately designed to atomize individuals” and foreclose any thought of political alternatives. In this context, Mehta sees the CJP as a welcome eruption from a generation that had seemed too docile and careerist to stomach political action. But while the protests certainly suggest that the young have rediscovered their appetite for politics, Mehta may be overstating how much they have moved beyond turgid careerism. If they really had, they might be trying to overturn the system which forces them to be careerists in the first place, rather than insisting that the system run more smoothly.

The CJP’s success was not preordained. BJP surrogates, including the now-former education minister, tried hard to dismiss the protesters as unpatriotic rabble. Shopworn accusations of foreign funding and Pakistani subversion made their appearance. The strategy of delegitimization failed this time above all because of the straightforward and conspicuous moral logic of the CJP’s cause: India’s students are in trouble, and the trouble is not their fault. The limited scope of the movement’s demands was no doubt an asset here.

But the government was also in a bind because the young are, in a very real sense, its core constituency. Six hundred and 50 million Indians are 25 or younger. Another 250 million are under 35. Modi might have preferred to challenge the idea that the CJP represents the interests of the youth, but what he could not do is say that the interests of the youth are not worth representing. Their sheer prevalence foreclosed the tactic he has so often used to undermine his opponents: painting them as shills for Islam, or liberal elites, or some other undesirable out-group. That fact above all explains why his government had to give way.

The CJP’s most important accomplishment, then, may be that it offered a fleeting glimpse of something that India has not had since the heyday of the independence movement, if ever: a truly civic politics. Its activists scrupulously disavowed all the caste, religious, and regional identitarian divides that otherwise dominate Indian public life. Its non-satirical demands were straightforward, even technocratic, and presented with minimal ideological dressing. One spokesperson has suggested that the future of the CJP could lie in grassroots “listening campaigns” organized around a single local issue at a time.

If this is the way forward for the CJP, it will be a test of how well a nonideological political movement can endure. For all the shape-shifting and horse-trading typical of Indian politics, its most durable actors have often been those with a clear set of contentious beliefs. This is true most of all of the Hindu nationalists, who endured decades on the political fringe before emerging to govern the country. There is also always the risk that, without a strong credal core, a civic movement like the CJP will become a creature of the system. Modi certainly seems to be hoping for as much with his belated light-touch approach to the protests. A Hindu state with fairer testing practices would be a more than satisfactory outcome for the BJP. Will the CJP, in whatever future form, have the mettle to oppose it?

For now, however, the CJP seems to be showing the strengths of the anti-ideological approach. The political scientist Rahul Verma put it well when he wrote, “The BJP’s greatest success since 2014 has been its ability to convert almost every political confrontation into an ideological contest”—which is to say, a contest of a righteous Hindu majority against some designated “anti-national” foe. Against that strategy, Verma continues, the CJP “asks a simple question: Can the state conduct an examination honestly? Administrative failure is much harder to politically reframe than ideological disagreement.”

India’s rulers like to pretend that their project is one of cosmic civilizational revival. But they should remember that, in India’s vital democracy, even their political fortunes depend on fulfilling a much more mundane social contract: equal treatment, just rewards for hard work, and a fair chance at the good life for all.