DawnPKme_economyAug 25, 2026, 3:34 AMImpact 32.4

March with hope, but verify

IT’S always uplifting to be hopeful, more so when the young ones give us an elusive glimpse into their hope. But youth is not a worldview or an ideology. Young ones have handed us despair too. They’re on the march against America’s alliance with Zionism. But they’re also part of the 90 per cent Israelis who advocate genocide in Palestine. Closer to home, the RSS cultivates youth as did the Nazis. To belong to the young communist league in the USSR was to embody the future of a dream that faded too soon. Young activists invoke mixed responses in South Asia where politics has suspended its left-right discourse for something called centrist and pragmatic politics. Pragmatism is too often a ruse for putting lipstick on the pig. The posture is worrisome but there are other reasons to be prepared for a determined pushback from the state if the wayward rulers with their monopoly over the means of coercion feel truly threatened, say, by the youth as glimpsed partly in Delhi’s Cockroach event. Consider the facts carefully. Twelve Latin American countries have recently veered to the right, reversing the region’s previous ‘pink tide’ of left-leaning governments. A wave of election cycles has