The promise of jobs was one of the main planks of Narendra Modi’s 2014 campaign. But since then, far from creating jobs, his regime has destroyed jobs and created the worst unemployment crisis in India in the past half century. He responded to this by attempting to spin “selling pakoras” (street-vending, which is essentially disguised unemployment and in any case such work has never needed Prime Ministerial leadership to exist) as job creation. And now he is trying to get young India to forget his older promises by replacing them with newer ones; and by schemes like Agnipath which exploit the desperation of the unemployed to contractualise and casualise jobs in the armed forces.
BJP leaders and corporate heads are now promising jobs as security guards, drivers and so on to the Agnipath recruits after their 4-year stint. The Modi regime’s used to tout its ‘Skill India’ scheme – now it appears to be peddling casualised army recruitment as a replacement for Skill India! The question is – have these corporations offered any manner of dignified employment to former soldiers who have more years of training and experience than that offered by Agnipath?
Late at night or pre-dawn in any Indian town or city, one often sees young men, in cheap shoes or even barefoot, running many kilometres, all in an attempt to be able to compete for a job in the armed forces. It is young men like this who are erupting in rage all over India – because they know very well that Agnipath is offering them insecurity and exploitation instead of the secure job they were seeking.
The Agnipath protests are not isolated, either. Youth in India, fed up with the lack of availability of jobs, have given up looking for jobs (labour force participation among men has fallen from 46% in 2016 to 40% currently; among women it is even lower). Instead they prepare to appear for exams to get a post in the army, police, railways, banks, civil services, teaching services etc. And in the past eight years of Modi rule, they have again and again come out on the streets to protest corruption, lack of transparency and accountability when it comes to holding these exams, and declaring the results of these exams.
In 2017, young candidates for the Staff Selection Commission exams protested in Delhi and in Bengal and UP in 2021; Railway Exam candidates protested in 2018 and 2021; Teachers Recruitment exam candidates in UP have protested in 2018, 2019 and again in 2021. These protests have been met with brutal lathicharges often (most recently in UP and Bihar in 2021). The connection between the Agnipath protests and other job-recruitment and exam-related protests by youth becomes even clearer when one sees how the Bihar police picked up RYA Bihar Vice president Tarique Anwar in the name of “preventive detention” in view of Agnipath protests – and then arrested and jailed him for his participation in railway recruitment related protests earlier this year!
