The Empty Chair: Why Asia’s Youth Still Show Up – OpEd

October 3, 2026

By Dr. Fr. John Singarayar

Key Takeaways:

The essay traces India’s Cockroach Janta Party to a May 2026 chief-justice remark and NEET leak anger: spoon-and-plate sit-ins, empty chairs for students who died, and Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s July resignation plus compensation and a pledge not to prosecute protesters.

It sets that beside other youth flashpoints—Myanmar since 2021, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh 2024, Nepal’s 2025 revolt, the southern Philippines, Indonesia’s meal-program cut—as separate stories sharing disappointment that effort does not beat proximity to power.

A second wager is World Youth Day in Seoul in August 2027 (“Take courage”), a minority Catholic event; the author says Delhi’s empty chair is a memorial and Seoul’s an invitation, and that showing up is not proof it will work.

(UCA News) –It started, more or less, with an insult. In May 2026, India’s chief justice made an offhand remark in open court about young people who can’t find work, likening them to cockroaches.

He later said he had meant something narrower — people entering professions with fake degrees — but the word was already loose in the world.

A 30-year-old postgraduate student in Boston felt something snap and posted a question online: what if all the cockroaches came together? Within days, there was a website, a mascot and a name that parodied the ruling party’s name.


The Cockroach Janta Party began as a joke and quickly became the most serious youth movement India has seen in years.

What kept it going was not the joke. It was an exam. The national medical entrance test, NEET, the exam that helps determine who becomes a doctor and who does not, had been dogged by allegations of leaks and other irregularities. Anger settled on one demand: Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan should resign.

At sit-ins in Delhi, protesters banged spoons against steel plates — an echo of the gesture Prime Minister Narendra Modi once asked citizens to make for frontline workers during the pandemic, now directed against him. Organizers also asked people to bring candles for students who had taken their own lives after failing exams they said were rigged.

That detail tends to stop people mid-scroll. Being angry about a leaked test is one thing. Grieving over one is another.

At Jantar Mantar, protesters began leaving a steel plate and an empty chair at the edge of the sit-in — places for students who would never take another exam.


The protests eventually achieved one of their central demands. Pradhan resigned in July, after weeks of demonstrations over the NEET controversy. The government also accepted other demands from the protesters, including compensation for families of students who had died and a pledge not to pursue legal action against protesters.

But the story did not end there.

None of this occurs in isolation. Across South and Southeast Asia, a string of Gen Z‑led uprisings has reshaped politics since 2021.

The story begins in Myanmar, where the military’s 2021 coup triggered mass protests, a brutal crackdown, and a grinding civil war. Five years on, youth‑led People’s Defence Forces fight alongside ethnic armed groups, while the junta relies on air raids, conscription and foreign support to regain ground.

In Cambodia, a government assault on civil and political rights has seen record arrests for speech and activism in 2025–26, even as garment workers — many of them young — strike over unpaid wages, union discrimination and a minimum wage that does not cover rising living costs.

In Sri Lanka, mass protests in 2022 against economic collapse and elite rule helped topple a president and, two years later, brought a leftist coalition to power — yet young people still face high unemployment and austerity.

In Bangladesh, a 2024 student movement ended Sheikh Hasina’s long rule and restored a mainstream opposition party, but the underlying grievances — jobs, corruption, authoritarian habits — remain.

In Nepal, the Sept. 2025 “Gen Z” revolt began over social media bans and swelled into anger at corruption, nepotism and blocked opportunities. It forced a prime minister’s resignation, led to an interim government and fresh elections, and produced a ten‑point agreement on free education and healthcare, employment guarantees and digital rights — though activists marking the one‑year anniversary say many promises are unfulfilled and youth unemployment hovers near 20%.


Old insurgencies in the southern Philippines keep reigniting despite treaties meant to end them.

Indonesia has quietly trimmed its free meal program, a cut that will land hardest on families with the least room to absorb it.

These are not the same stories wearing different costumes; they are separate ones that happen to share a mood. That is a smaller and more honest claim than the grand, sweeping narratives op‑eds often reach for.

The mood, if it must be named, is disappointment rather than rage. Rage tends to burn out; this has not.

A leaked exam does more than cheat students who studied honestly. It signals, in plain terms, that integrity was optional and they weren’t told.

That is a bitter lesson at 20, just when people are supposed to learn whether effort or proximity to power pays. Disappointment is what you feel when the chair you were promised is still empty, and no one will say when it will be filled.

And yet none of this reads as despair.

Despair does not organize. It does not turn a judge’s insult into a movement with spokespeople sitting across from government ministers. Nothing was resolved in those early meetings in Delhi, but people showed up. Those who have truly given up stay home. The ones still in the streets are betting that noise works, even when the evidence for that bet is thin.

Halfway across the region, a quieter gathering is making a stranger version of the same wager.

In August 2027, Seoul will host World Youth Day, the global Catholic gathering that has never before landed in a country where Christians are a minority.

Only about one in ten South Koreans is Catholic, and roughly half describe themselves as having no religion at all, which makes the choice of venue almost provocative on its own terms.

Preparations began in November 2024, when young Koreans received the event’s traveling cross and a Marian icon from Portuguese pilgrims inside St. Peter’s Basilica, on the feast celebrating Christ the King.

The theme, borrowed from the Gospel of John, is short and pointed: “Take courage; I have overcome the world.” It reads less like a slogan and more like something said to someone who is, in fact, currently losing.

In Seoul, the cross will move through a city where most people have no religion; the pews will be full for a week, then empty again. The wager is the same: set a place, show up, and hope someone sits. But there is a difference. In Delhi, the empty chair is a memorial to futures stolen by leaks and lies. In Seoul, the empty chair is an invitation: a minority church, born in secrecy and martyrdom, is betting that a week of song, prayer and shared meals can make a dent in a secular, hyper‑competitive society where young people are among the most stressed and least hopeful on earth.


I don’t imagine the protesters in Delhi and the pilgrims in Seoul would recognize themselves in one another. Most have never heard of one another and never will. But both are staking something on the same unfashionable idea: showing up still matters even without much proof that it does. That is a strange kind of courage — no guarantees attached, no way of knowing whether it will be worth it. In both cities, someone is arranging chairs: one row for the dead, one row for the living.

Governments may respond to this particular wave, or they may not. Trust, once spent, does not refill itself through silence. And I do not think anyone involved — protester, pilgrim, or minister — actually knows which way this one goes.

Neither do I.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.


About Dr. Fr. John Singarayar
Dr. Fr. John Singarayar, SVD, is a member of the Society of the Divine Word, India Mumbai Province, and holds a doctorate in Anthropology. He is the author of seven books and a regular contributor to academic conferences and scholarly publications in the fields of sociology, anthropology, tribal studies, spirituality, and mission studies. He currently serves at the Community and Human Resources Development Centre in Tala, Maharashtra.
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