Around 35 years ago, India saw a similar student mobilisation, triggered by the tabling of the Mandal Commission report in Parliament. Today’s students and graduates mobilised because the state has failed to produce enough opportunities to distribute at all. It threatened the dominance of the ruling castes by opening up institutions through which the state distributed employment, educational, and economic opportunities. If Hindutva helped restore political power to the ruling castes, liberalisation helped concentrate social and economic power in the hands of capital and those who were already best positioned to accumulate it. The BJP’s great achievement has been to construct an alliance capable of absorbing enormous social contradictions without posing a challenge to the distribution of power.