Of Rights, Entitlement and Worth: The Gen Z Protest as a Demand for Citizenship

Gen Z is no stranger to critique. Perhaps the most common of them is that we are entitled. In light of the recent Cockroach Janata Party (CJP)-led protest where the ‘Gen Z’ has demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for resilience, humour and conviction, I want to unpack what that critique means. 

In its most negative connotation, entitlement is a demand for something undeserved. We call those entitled who have not earned what they ask for. When used to describe Gen Z, this is exactly what critics are saying: that we ask for much but don’t work for it. This ties in neatly with the idea of youth being “worthless” – another popular critique for Gen Z (Read: cockroach).

One of the criticisms levelled against the protestors, for instance, is that many did not study hard enough for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), or aren't NEET students at all. This doesn’t just imply that they don’t belong at the protest; the truth is more sinister. It implies that they don’t have the right to make demands at all. You don't have to look far for the accusation stated plainly. Days after the protest, a sitting BJP MP dismissed the students as a "gutter generation", and when she turned to the young women among them specifically, she added that they weren't good at studies either – as if that settled the matter of whether they had any standing to ask for something in the first place. This accusation only lands if you already accept a prior claim: that rights and dignity are things you earn, not things you are owed by default. That's the claim I want to take apart.

A right that has to be earned isn't a right at all – it's a privilege wearing the wrong badge. The entire trick of the entitlement accusation is that it takes something unconditional and quietly re-labels it as a reward, so that anyone who asks for it without having earned it looks greedy instead of being correct. 

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To understand how deep this runs, I want to start at the very beginning – with the politics of worth itself. World over, but perhaps nowhere more than in India, a person's individual, social and political worth is often tied to things outside their control. Some lives are deemed worthier than others depending on factors like religion, caste and gender. What's troubling is that this perceived worth then dictates a person's ability to claim their rights. It is easier for a Hindu woman to demand accountability from the state for violence than it is for a Muslim transgender woman to demand the same, for example. Or for a rich woman over a poor one.

People protest against the education system and NEET paper leak at Jantar Mantar, in New Delhi on July 24, 2026. Photo: PTI/Kamal Kishore.

Worth economy

Capitalism claims to offer a workaround to this system by selling us the idea that you can build your worth over time through economic productivity and achievement. And that once you've built it, you may claim your rights more easily. So, alongside caste, creed and gender, economic achievement has become a tool for worth-building. In some cases, the worth you’ve earned through wealth, success or contribution can even transcend the identity markers that once deemed you unworthy. 

However, this workaround is collapsing and Gen Z knows it: not only has it reproduced inequality (World Inequality Lab's 2023 report) but, the system that supposedly lets you participate and level up in the ‘worth-economy’ has also become corrupt. This prevents capitalism from delivering even the gains it promises. That's what the NEET paper leak revealed so plainly. 

Not only was the exam compromised, but an entire generation had organised its ambition around a myth: that if you did everything right, you would ascend. The leak was proof that you can do everything right and still not ascend, because someone (and almost always someone with more money than you) is cheating the very ladder you were told to climb.

It's worth noting here that the state itself acknowledges that the ladder was never level to begin with. That's what reservations are: an official admission that some people start the climb from lower ground. But "merit" does not recognise this difference in starting points. Unsurprisingly then, reservation beneficiaries get accused of a similar crime as the protestors do: that they haven't earned their seat, that merit was diluted to make room for them, that they took something that wasn't theirs. It's the same worth-logic, just redirected at a different target. The backlash against reservations was never really about fairness. It was proof of how deep the worth-economy runs. People would rather resent a policy correcting an unequal starting line than resent the unequal starting line itself.

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There's a third, subtler critique buried in here too, one that Gen Z's protest gestures at without quite naming. What happens to those who can't, or don't want to, participate? And what happens to those who do participate and still don't succeed? Every year, hundreds of thousands sit for NEET and are not selected. By the logic of the worth-economy, their failure to ascend should cost them something: standing, dignity, the right to be taken seriously. But a government's obligation to its citizens cannot expire the moment they fail an exam. If anything, it's the opposite: a student who tried and didn't make it is exactly who public provision exists for, not a category the state gets to write off. These categories of people, whether deemed worthless or not, cannot have their rights treated as conditional. 

It is the connection between proving worth and claiming rights that I, and my fellow Gen Z, are challenging. Rights are not a reward for productivity, or for merit. They are a condition of citizenship. Demanding them does not make one ungrateful, or entitled.

Right to education

This is also where the state's own purpose gets lost. A government was never supposed to exist in order to sort the worthy from the unworthy. It exists to uplift the people who start with less, not to wait until they've proven they deserve lifting. A government that makes rights conditional on worth hasn't just failed its citizens. It has abdicated the one thing it was actually designed for.

In the context of this protest, let's look at two particular rights this movement has revolved around. The first is the right to education, and the second, exposed later, the right to protest.

A protester holds a placard during the ongoing protest over the NEET-UG examination irregularities at Jantar Mantar, in New Delhi, Thursday, July 23, 2026. Photo: PTI.

An important conviction running through this movement is the insistence that we don't have to earn either of them. They are simply ours, by virtue of our citizenship to this country. Every child has a right to an education regardless of what they do with it. A student with low grades in school has not forfeited their right to further education: they are not less worthy of completing their studies. I can and do understand universities must be selective based on merit in that a student with low grades does not have a right to attend the best college but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a right to receive quality education. 

The provision for this is the responsibility of the government. There's a difference between the right to be considered and the right to win, and critics collapse the two on purpose, because it lets them punish a demand for the first by pointing out we haven't earned the second. But the right to education cannot be conditioned on the perceived worth of a student. Public education has to be made available to all. 

The right to protest works the same way. You don't need to have suffered enough, sacrificed enough, or scored high enough to hold your government accountable. That right activates the moment you become a citizen – not when someone decides you've earned the standing to complain. Voting is a right owed to all; so is critique. None of this means the relationship runs one way, or that rights are unconditional in every sense. Citizens do have duties too. But the duty is to participate in the democratic process and to not infringe on the rights of others. Duty does not require us to have earned the standing to speak, or to phrase our anger in a way that satisfies our critics. A generation shouting in the street is not failing its duty. It is doing exactly what the duty asks of it.

We can and must, continue to negotiate the relationship between the Indian citizen and the Indian state. Our rights are not tied to our worth in the eyes of any society or state. We are not out here trying to prove ourselves – we're out here because the state keeps forgetting what it owes. Call us entitled if you like. We'd rather be entitled than convinced our rights are something to be won.

Lyala Naomi Khan is a third-year law student at SOAS university in London.