Tom Sasse

speaker

129 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 12 Jun

Tom Sasse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Quid game: challenges for South Korea’s president · 12 Jun 2026 podcast

And actually, Modi's most difficult moment as Prime Minister was a giant protest in twenty twenty twenty-one.

hundreds of thousands of farmers blockaded national highways in India and forced him to drop a set of new farm laws.

So all that is to say that these kind of protests absolutely have been a vehicle for change before in India, including under this government.

But this one is very much in its infancy.

Well, you're right.

I mean Indians and young Indians in particular have a lot to be angry about.

It's not just education scandals, there's a real lack of jobs, lots of them are graduating and finding it hard to meet the higher aspirations that they have.

Nareen, a twenty-five year old from Jaipur, like many others that I met at this protest, had travelled few hundred kilometers to get there.

And others that I spoke to explained that they'd been afraid to criticize the government and this was one of the first times they'd seen the youth really fight back.

I met a young woman called Ezabu, she was holding a placard saying freedom from fear but she only wanted to give me her first name.

I mean, it's true that you hear some of the same kind of messages at those protests, but I would be quite cautious about drawing too many parallels there.

So in those countries that you mentioned, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, you really had a whole swathe of young people turning against really quite corrupt dictatorial regimes.

That's not the situation in India.

So the BJP.

MP which is ruling nationally, Mr Modi's party is still by far the most popular party in India, including among younger voters, but there are real frustrations among the youth with how the system is working.

Well, to be honest, Rosie, this has generated a lot of interest online.

There's quite a furori over the last three or four weeks since it emerged.

But I actually came away from this protest a little bit more skeptical about how big this thing will get.

For one thing, the protest itself was very small.

There was only around one or two thousand people there.

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