Lydia Polgreen’s opinion piece in The New York Times on 26 October 2026 argues that Narendra Modi “has finally met his match” in India’s young protesters.
Of course, the protests are real and the impact has been genuine. The education minister resigned in July over the NEET paper leak, and the voter-roll revision has flaws that two of the three election commissioners put on record.
But the trouble lies in the gap between what the column reports and what it concludes, and in a slant that runs through the whole piece.
A generation built from four interviews
Polgreen spoke to a 20-year-old student, a rickshaw driver, a teacher and the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University students’ union, and quotes one academic, Pratap Bhanu Mehta. Three are openly critical of the government, while the teacher is angry about exam corruption, worried that her daughter may not get into a good public university.
On these four interviews alone, Polgreen declares that educated, middle-class Hindu youth “are in open revolt”. The emphasis on “Hindu” is there to underline that Hindus themselves are up in arms against what critics like to call the “Hindutva government”. The column cites no polls, no fair count of the protesters and, as any journalist must, no voices of Indians who may support the government. Those would not fit the thesis of the NYT or the FT.
But there are polls that counter Polgreen’s argument. India Today’s Mood of the Nation survey, published in late August a month after the education minister resigned, projected that the governing NDA could win 326 seats if an election were held then.
The biases that are deliberate
The column puts graduate unemployment at nearly 40% for those aged 15 to 29. The State of Working India 2026 report notes that the rate has held between 35% and 40% since 1983. Unemployment is a national problem that is further compounded by technology, and Modi can be blamed for not delivering the “achhe din” he promised everyone. But does the blame rest fully on him? It is the kind of bias that Western writers like to float.
The second trope is about Gujarat. The column says Modi “allegedly” stood by as Muslims were killed. But it leaves out that the Supreme Court in June 2022 upheld the special investigation team’s clean chit to Modi and 63 others.
The real problem comes with the false interpretation of the 130 million names deleted from the rolls, which the NYT and FT both overemphasise. What does it take to investigate that? The 130 million is the count of names dropped from the draft rolls before any claim or appeal was heard.
By the Election Commission’s breakdown, about 28 million were dead, 63 million had moved permanently, 10 million were registered twice and 30 million could not be traced. The last intensive revision was in 2002-05. In the 12 states of the second phase, the final rolls held about 14 million more names than the drafts.
The economist Surjit Bhalla, himself a critic of how the revision was run, estimates that about 7 million eligible voters were removed without explanation where rolls are final, about 5 million of them in West Bengal. That is a serious failure. It is also about a twentieth of the figure the column states.
The column blames rising living costs squarely on Modi. The rickshaw driver says the gas that fuels his vehicle has more than doubled in price. The war with Iran has pushed fuel up in every major economy this year. In Delhi, compressed natural gas rose from Rs 77.09 a kilo in January to Rs 86.98 at the end of August, about 13%.
Over the year to September, petrol in the US rose 34%, motor fuel in Britain 30% and energy in the euro area 19%. US inflation reached 3.7%, Britain’s 3.5% and the euro area’s 3.8%, each driven by energy. India’s inflation was 5.54%, pushed up mainly by food. Americans, Britons and Europeans are paying the price of the current volatility.
‘The omnipotent autocrat’
The choice of words of columnists like Polgreen is often slanted. Polgreen calls Modi an “omnipotent autocrat” whose government “captured and muzzled the mainstream press”. But the opinion piece weakens the argument. The education minister resigned within weeks of the protests reaching Jantar Mantar. The scandal now driving the protests broke on the front page of The Indian Express, a mainstream daily, on 23 September. The next day, the lead editorials in The Hindu, Hindustan Times and The Times of India took up the story. In April, before West Bengal voted, leading English dailies had criticised the Election Commission’s conduct of the revision there. The charge in all reality holds for television, where prime-time anchors largely treated the Express report as opposition politics. India’s rank of 157 out of 180 on the 2026 RSF press freedom index is a fair concern. A muzzled press does not set the agenda for a national protest movement, but India’s mainstream papers set this one.
The column also recasts the 2020-21 farm protests as a movement largely of India’s Sikh minority that “could be dismissed as separatist agitation”. The government did not wave them away. It repealed all three laws in November 2021. For those who know India, however, the protests spoke for one part of rural India more than for India’s farmers as a whole. The agitating farmers opposed three laws that would have let farmers sell outside state-regulated mandis, and they demanded a legal guarantee of minimum support prices. They were strongest in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, where government procurement runs strongest.
Across India, the 2019 official survey found that only 8.6% of paddy-growing households and 4.9% of wheat-growing households sold to a government agency. Punjab sells most of its paddy and wheat that way. The same survey also shows that a farm household in Punjab earned Rs 26,701 a month in 2018-19, and one in Haryana Rs 22,841. The national average was Rs 10,218, and in Jharkhand it was Rs 4,895. Let us also not forget that Punjab’s commission agents, who take 2.5% on mandi sales, backed the protests. But the protesters themselves were mostly not rich. A study of 460 Punjab farmers who died during the protest found an average holding of 2.59 acres. The cause they fought for, guaranteed state purchase of grain, matters most in the farm belt where incomes are already highest.
The column also warns of a compromised election commission that could silence Indians’ fundamental right and the pillar of democracy. The recent record shows the other way. The 2024 general election, run under the previous chief election commissioner, Rajiv Kumar, cost the BJP its majority: it fell from 303 seats to 240, and the Congress rose from 52 to 99. In May 2026, under Gyanesh Kumar, the Congress-led UDF won Kerala and Vijay’s new party, TVK, unseated the DMK in Tamil Nadu. West Bengal, where the voter-roll deletions were heaviest, went to the BJP, and that result deserves the scrutiny it is getting.
The column says Modi has suffered a series of embarrassments at the hands of the Trump administration. The low point came in August 2025, when US tariffs on most Indian goods reached 50%, half of it a penalty for buying Russian oil. By February 2026 the penalty was gone and the two governments had agreed a trade framework, which Trump announced “out of friendship and respect” for Modi. Indian goods now face an extra 10% under a US forced-labour measure, a lower tier than the 12.5% first proposed, and a US official said in July that a trade agreement was virtually complete.
Other leaders have fared worse. Volodymyr Zelensky was berated in the Oval Office and sent away in February 2025. Cyril Ramaphosa was ambushed there in May 2025 with a video built on a false claim of white genocide. Canada was told it could become the 51st state. India’s record with this administration is a hard negotiation that has brought its tariffs down from 50% to 10%.
The column says the pressure valve of migration, Polgreen’s favourite topic, is tightening, with the dream of sending a child to America dying and the Gulf a shakier bet. No doubt the American door has narrowed. Indians leaving the country to study fell from 9.08 lakh in 2023 to 6.26 lakh in 2025, with Canada and the US taking much of the fall.
But the educated have rerouted. Indians are Germany’s largest group of foreign students, a record 69,816 last winter, up 17.5% in a year. In Britain they took 23% of study visas in 2025, and they were the largest group granted settlement in the year to June 2026, at 35,384, up 51%. India is the largest source of new migrants to OECD countries, and 225,000 Indians took the citizenship of an OECD country in 2023, more than any other nationality.
The Gulf has held up too. Remittances reached a record $144.8bn in 2025-26, while the Gulf’s share fell from 47% in 2016-17 to 38% in 2023-24 as the US and Britain grew as sources. Gulf migration is also no longer a south India story. Of the emigration clearances issued to Indian workers between January 2021 and November 2024, Uttar Pradesh accounted for 4.26 lakh and Bihar 2.17 lakh, against 78,500 for Tamil Nadu.
Finally, Polgreen concedes
Near the end, Polgreen concedes the point the column was built to deny. There will be no sudden fall for Modi, Polgreen writes, because India’s governments have always changed through elections, and the next national vote is due in 2029. Leaders who can be voted out on a fixed date are not omnipotent.
Let us look at what uprisings delivered in the neighbours Polgreen cites. Sri Lanka’s 2022 revolt followed a sovereign default and inflation near 70%. The economy shrank 7.3% that year and 2.3% the next, and poverty, 13.1% in 2021, was still about 24.5% in the IMF’s later assessment. Bangladesh’s growth fell to about 4% in the year to June 2025, its slowest in decades, and inflation was still 8.3% in July 2026. Nepal’s uprising cost at least 77 lives before the March 2026 election brought a new party to power.
The column also declares that Modi’s aura is shattered and that the protests have transformed Rahul Gandhi. It offers no evidence for either. India Today’s Mood of the Nation survey, conducted between 1 July and 25 August as the exam-leak protests ran, found Modi’s share as preferred prime minister had slipped from 55% in January to 48.7%. Rahul Gandhi’s stayed at about 27%. Modi still leads by more than 20 points, and the same survey projected 326 seats for his alliance.
What the column doesn’t say
Polgreen turns to the political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta to explain why exams and elections matter. He is right that they are the two great levellers of Indian life, and few in government would disagree.
What the column leaves out is how Indian institutions answered both affronts. After the NEET leak, 47 officials of the National Testing Agency were dismissed, the exam was cancelled, the investigation went to the CBI, fast-track courts and a new law on paper leaks were announced, and the education minister resigned.
The voter-roll dispute was exposed by an Indian newspaper and documented by two of India’s own election commissioners, and it is before the Supreme Court. Within three days of the report, the Election Commission ordered an independent review of its software and extended deadlines. In October it ordered a drive to re-enrol excluded voters and capped bulk objections at 10 per person. Mehta, a long-standing critic of the government, is the column’s only expert voice.
The column’s sources, omissions and labels all point the same way. That pattern is the bias, and it can be read on the page without guessing at anyone’s motive. The headlines give the frame away. The column first ran as “Before Trump, There Was Modi. Now Look at Him.” and now runs as “In India, I Saw Things That Should Scare Trump”.
Both cast India as a chapter in an American story, and the reporting is fitted to that story. India has real questions to answer on exam integrity and on the eligible voters wrongly removed from the rolls. Those questions deserve reporting that counts the people asking them and the people who are not.
Polgreen ends by urging protesters from Paris to Madrid to look to Delhi as a guide. Her readers would be better served by a column that looked at Delhi in full.
What Polgreen’s earlier writing shows
Polgreen knows India. As a New York Times correspondent in Delhi from 2009, Polgreen filed fair and often warm reporting. Polgreen called the Delhi Metro “a feat bordering on miraculous”. In 2011, Polgreen profiled India’s “tiny but growing class of millionaires” among Dalits. But the opinion columns are different. Read side by side, they show three patterns.
The first is forecasts that did not come true. In February 2023, Polgreen wrote that a third-term Modi would likely “declare India a Hindu nation”. Sixteen months later, voters cut the BJP to 240 seats. Polgreen admitted the result “took everyone, including me, by surprise”. India has not been declared a Hindu nation.
The second is facts that come and go. In 2023, Polgreen wrote that courts “right up to India’s highest” had found Modi committed no crimes over the Gujarat riots. The 2026 column says only that he “allegedly stood by idly”, and leaves the courts out.
The third is the same trend read two ways. In December 2025, Polgreen reported that arrivals of Indian students in the US had fallen 44% putting the blame on American hostility for the fall. Polgreen also wrote that India, “the world’s fastest-growing major economy”, would give its graduates good options at home. In October 2026, Indian students’ fading hopes of studying in America appear among the pressures on Modi.
Polgreen’s India columns also tend to end in America. In 2024, India’s election offered “lessons for those battling revanchist movements elsewhere, including in the United States”. In 2026, India’s protests became a warning to Trump.
None of this makes Polgreen wrong about everything. The 2024 column gave India’s voters full credit, and the 2025 column defended Indian migrants in America against bigotry. But Polgreen’s verdict on India often follows a story that is told about America. Readers should weigh Polgreen’s India columns with that in mind.
