ISAS Special Reports

The purpose of this paper is to set research on youth, social change and politics in India, conducted by the Singapore-based Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) in collaboration with partners in India, 2 into the context of the patterns and possibilities of what we may call the ‘protest politics’ of the present. The paper begins with commentary on the wider global context, where we observe apparently comparable patterns of political action, in which youth have been centrally involved. The parallels and similarities should not be emphasised too much, but the events appear to involve some combination of the following features: