It was a warm blue Sunday afternoon in London, with tourists flowing around Trafalgar Square. From here it should have been easy to look away. But the Indian students and graduates who gathered under Nelson’s Column on the afternoon of 26 July could not. Everybody had been shaped in India. Their families still lived there, and many said they would pack their bags willingly if holding on to a job or visa in Britain became too difficult. Some were already planning their return.
Event Context
That route, though, is narrowing now as Britain and the United States both tighten their immigration rules.
At home, Mathew said, education was being starved of public money. Karnataka was merging and closing low-enrolment schools by the radius in the name of “rationalisation”, while public spending on education remained inadequate and too few jobs awaited students at the end. A similar logic, he argued, had now reached Britain. Tighter visa rules had slowed the inflow of international students, and universities were shedding staff as the international fees that had once kept them afloat dwindled. Yet the money had not stopped chasing Indian students. Southampton had opened a campus in Gurugram, inaugurated by Dharmendra Pradhan himself. Liverpool was planning a campus in Bengaluru, and Bristol another in Mumbai, among around nine such ventures promoted by Narendra Modi and Keir Starmer under the two countries’ new trade partnership.
Player Focus
If anyone had earned the right to insist that these issues all converged, it was Nikhil Mathew, the founding secretary of SFI-UK. Having previously lived in Bangalore, he now teaches in Glasgow after completing a PhD in International Development at the University of Edinburgh. He said the organisation’s energy actually went mostly into the everyday troubles Indian students learn to expect in Britain: racism, discrimination at work, sexual harassment, a landlord who would not return a deposit. As you fix the small things, he said, the bigger ones come into focus. People begin to see it is all part of the same fabric: students, farmers and everyone else.
Team Analysis
The day before, on 25 July, Dharmendra Pradhan had resigned as education minister. His departure gave the Cockroach Janta Party its first major victory, barely two months after the movement emerged. And it was more than a scalp. It signalled the arrival of a fearless, irreverent mood whose winds had carried from Delhi to the diaspora standing here.
Mrunal Mathuria, 31, an MBA graduate from the University of Greenwich, had left something more deliberate behind. He and a friend had built an app encouraging young Indians to improve their neighbourhoods, yet he left. The air and the water were making him ill, polarisation was rising, and he had come to believe Parliament would never seriously debate any of it. But he did not pretend the exit was anything but a privilege. “Many people want to leave but they can’t,” he said, and his own passage had been paid for with a large slice of his family’s savings. Even so, working part-time here, he out-earned what a full-time job had paid him at home. Many Indians take jobs far outside their field to service their debt, he said. “Isn’t this also a failure of our education system?” he asked.
The government, however, has defended its education reforms by pointing to expanded access to higher education, greater emphasis on digital learning and the arrival of leading foreign universities in India.
“These are all global interconnections,” Mathew said.
Those interlinkages were visible in the protests themselves. By its own account, Trafalgar Square capped a week of sister protests that ran from Edinburgh and Glasgow to Leeds, Manchester, Oxford and Liverpool, as well as outside the Indian High Commission in London.
Asked about the growing precarity of visas, he shrugged, echoing what others had told me. “If the rules become too hard, we’ll simply go home.” That, after all, is what the founder of the CJP movement, Abhijeet Dipke, did. After completing a master’s degree at Boston University, he abandoned the prospect of a settled life in America and flew home. The traffic runs both ways.
Not all of them shared such certainty, however. Manoj Parameswaran, 40, who heads SFI’s Leeds unit and is finishing a PhD in the sociology of religion, grew up in Thrissur, where almost every science student made the same pilgrimage to the town’s coaching centre. Going home, for him, is not a simple matter. As a scholar of religion, he doubted he would enjoy the same freedom at home to study his subject critically.
Match Outlook
“Everyone here has a link to India,” said Aritro, from Kolkata. He held a master’s in colonial history from the LSE. “ If I were in India, I would be at Jantar Mantar. I couldn’t be there, so I’m here.” Distance had done nothing for Mehul Verma either. The 26-year-old graduate in Sport and Exercise Science was moving back in August. He had watched the crackdowns unfold on his phone. He had stopped sleeping, sometimes weeping at odd hours over what was being done to people his own age.
Anubhav Barua, 33, from Guwahati, trained as an architect in India before studying at Queen’s University Belfast and eventually moving into tech consulting. He left because the profession at home felt ‘rigged’. In his experience, the industry placed little value on professional ethics, and ‘client pressure’ could mean starting work at 9.30 am and leaving at 4 am the next day. His Belfast degree had also cost him less than a comparable course in India, plus Britain had allowed him to work legally while studying, earning enough to begin paying off his debt.
What had dragged another protester out on a Sunday was anger. He described India’s Gen Z as the harbingers of change and admired their nerve, their sheer temerity in holding authority to account. “The blood of the revolution is still warm,” he said.
Yet beneath the optimism lay harder truths. “In India, a degree is the only passport to a dignified life,” a young woman said. “And it is the pursuit of that same dignified life that has brought us here (the UK).”
Vidhya Shree Murugan, 25, who had also completed her Master’s at Leeds, was the one person who had actually spent a year preparing for NEET after class 12. Growing up in Tamil Nadu, she had seen first-hand how access to coaching, money and schooling could shape a student’s chances. Behind every rank, she said, lay a student and a family who had invested years of sacrifice. She had financed her studies through family savings, an education loan and part-time work at the University of Leeds.
By late afternoon, the London light was still warm, and the chants still rang across Trafalgar Square. Pradhan had resigned, but everyone gathered knew they had come for something larger, something unfinished: an education system a generation could trust, a police force that did not answer students with batons, and a republic that treated its young as citizens rather than cockroaches.
One could leave India. Yet beneath an English sky, these young people were discovering that India does not leave you. And increasingly, they did not want it to.
