Over the past year I sat across from thirty young men and women who took part in the July Uprising, many of them still students, some graduates without work, and I asked them to tell me what they remembered. I expected accounts of tear gas, blocked roads, the day the internet went dark. I got those. What I did not expect was how often the interviews drifted, almost against their own intentions, toward a different subject altogether: the years before July, the years of the library and the waiting.
They told me about being pulled into political processions where they had to stand in the sun for six hours, summoned to fill out a rally for some low-level Awami League leader. They told me about beginning to prepare for the BCS examination in their first year at university, sometimes before it, entire nights spent under a single desk lamp memorising a syllabus that tests nothing but the ability of going through a useless ordeal for long periods of time. They told me about hall politics, about the small daily humiliations of being repressed by seniors who answered to a party rather than to any student, about learning early which questions could be raised in a hall meeting and which could not. And almost every one of them, when the conversation reached the present, used some version of the same sentence. Almost nothing has changed.
Read against the numbers, that sentence stops sounding like a private complaint and starts sounding like a diagnosis. The IMF’s own figures on Bangladesh, released this month, put unemployment among highly educated young people above one in three, more than three times the rate among young Bangladeshis as a whole. The report calls it a mismatch, the wrong skills chasing the wrong jobs, and recommends the usual remedies, better vocational training, closer ties between universities and industry. I want to argue that the mismatch is not primarily between skills and jobs. It sits between the number of respectable positions this economy is willing to create and the number of young people it has spent two decades persuading to want one.
One student described a particular evening during his second year, when a senior he barely knew appeared at his door and told him, not asked him, that he was needed at a programme the following morning. There was no vehicle arranged, no water provided, no plan for what would happen if the crowd he was joining met the crowd it was meant to oppose. He went anyway, because refusing carried its own quiet penalties. He used the word body to describe what he had been that morning, not participant, not supporter, simply a body or a matha (head) the count required. That word, offered without any prompting from me, is doing more analytical work than most of what I could add to it.
Doubly Outside
There is a term I have been building for a different piece of writing, more academic in its home, that belongs here too, stripped of its footnotes. I call this population the reservariat. The word borrows from Marx’s reserve army of the unemployed, the pool of labour capitalism keeps on hand without paying to employ, and from precariat, the newer term for those whose work never solidifies into security. But the reservariat I mean is something more specific than either.
It is not a social class in the sense Marx or Weber would recognise, since it shares no common relation to production, only a common position in age and status. It is not the subaltern of postcolonial theory either, since these are young people with degrees, with access to universities and to the language of the state itself, however little that access currently buys them. What they share is narrower and, for that reason, harder to see: a generational position, temporary in principle and indefinite in practice, of being credentialed and idle at once.
Consider where these students and recent graduates actually stand. Politically, the majority of them belong to neither of the two camps that have organised Bangladeshi public life since independence. They are not Awami League cadres, and they are not BNP cadres either, whatever their private sympathies happen to be. Economically, they have not yet entered the labour market at all, so the old categories, worker and owner, do not apply to them either. A garment worker has a wage and, however weak, a claim to organise around it. A businessman has capital and a class position built on it. The reservariat has neither. It stands outside the party system and outside the class system at the same time, doubly outside, present everywhere and claimed nowhere.
That double exteriority is precisely what makes this population so easy to use and so easy to overlook. Being doubly outside means no party owes you anything and no union registers your absence. It is why a hall level politician can fill a rally with unaffiliated students and call it enthusiasm, and why a labour ministry can watch its graduate unemployment figures climb for a decade and call it a skills gap rather than an emergency of its own making. The reservariat is drawn upon, in the plainest sense of that word, reserved, held back, kept on call, by two systems that share nothing except a use for a body that cannot say no.
What that reservation costs, in the texture of an actual life, is something the IMF’s spreadsheet cannot capture, and my interviews kept returning to it unprompted. Almost every student I spoke to had taken up tuitioning at some point, teaching younger children mathematics or English for a few thousand taka a month, and while they were still enrolled this was treated as ordinary, even admirable, proof of hustle. The trouble begins after graduation, when the same tuitioning work curdles into something to be ashamed of rather than proud of, evidence that the degree bought nothing after all. Several mentioned, almost in passing, friends who had taken jobs at restaurant counters or begun riding for delivery apps and had said nothing about it to their own families. Not because the work itself was shameful, they were careful to insist, but because a family that has spent years funding a degree wants a story it can tell its relatives, and delivering food is rarely that story.
Underneath this sits something harder than pride. One young man told me, with a directness I have not managed to write about without flattening it, that he could not ask his girlfriend’s father for her hand because he had no stable job to offer as an answer to the obvious question that would follow. He was doing four or five tuitioning rounds a week just to keep himself afloat, working harder in a sense than most salaried employees, and none of it counted, because none of it could be named. In a country where marriage is still the primary rite by which a young adult is recognised as one, a stalled career is not simply an inconvenience. It closes the door on the next stage of an entire life, and closes it silently, without an announcement, so that the frustration it produces has nowhere obvious to go.
There is a name in the sociological literature for what happens when a young person is taught to want a particular kind of status and then finds every ordinary route to it blocked. Albert Cohen, writing about boys shut out of the status system built around them, called it status frustration, and argued that the frustration does not simply dissipate when the official route closes. It looks for another route, sometimes a destructive one, sometimes a merely private one, corroding quietly rather than erupting. The reservariat’s frustration has had, so far, only one collective outlet in living memory, and that outlet came and went in a matter of weeks. What remains after it is exactly the private, corroding kind, the kind that shows up as a young man unable to name his own income to a future father in law rather than as anything visible on a street.
Waiting for Godot
None of this is new to Bengal. The phrase educated unemployed was already circulating in Calcutta before Partition, attached to a generation of graduates the colonial economy had trained for administrative posts it never intended to create in sufficient numbers. Pakistan inherited the problem and did nothing to solve it. Independent Bangladesh inherited it in turn, and every expansion of the university system since, the founding of new public universities, the private university boom of the 1990s and 2000s, widened the pipeline of credentials without a matching widening of the positions those credentials were meant to unlock. The reservariat did not appear in 2024. It has been filling for the better part of a century. July only made it visible.
What July offered, briefly, was an outlet. For a population accustomed to being drawn upon passively, asked to stand in a crowd and say nothing, the uprising was the most visible demand made of them that they could answer on their own terms, and they answered it in numbers no party could have organised on its own. The promise embedded in that participation was not subtle. If the state that had ignored them for so long could be forced to fall, then perhaps the conditions producing the ignoring would fall with it.
A year on, that promise has the particular quality of a play that never resolves. Samuel Beckett wrote of two men on an empty road, waiting for a figure who sends word that he is coming and then never comes, and the waiting itself, rather than any arrival, becomes the entire substance of the evening. My interviewees did not reach for Beckett’s name, but they described his structure without needing to. The uprising came and discharged something that had been building for years. The government it removed is gone. The government that replaced it has not, by the account of the students I spoke to, altered the machine they were stuck in before. The hall politics continues in some form. The BCS queue has not shortened. The respectable job has not materialised. And so the discharge of July, instead of emptying the reservoir, appears to have refilled it, because a promise that goes unmet for long enough stops feeling like an unmet promise and starts feeling like a second betrayal laid on top of the first.
A population that discharges its frustration once, through extraordinary means, and receives nothing durable in return, does not conclude that extraordinary means fail to work. It concludes the opposite. Waiting for Godot is very funny on a stage and very dangerous in a country, because people who have already proven to themselves that the state can be moved by mass action will not indefinitely accept an administration that treats their patience as a renewable resource.
What the interviews describe is closer to a promise made and then broken by omission rather than by any single betrayal that could be named and resented cleanly. Nobody stood up after the uprising and announced that graduate unemployment would remain untouched. Nothing so honest occurred. The months simply passed, the queue for a stable, sanctioned job did not shorten, and the students who had allowed themselves to hope, briefly and for the first time in years, found the hope quietly withdrawn rather than refused. A refusal can be argued with. A withdrawal by neglect cannot, and it is this shapelessness that makes the resulting frustration so difficult for any single ministry to address and so easy for any government to underestimate.
The Water Still Rises
I keep returning to the young man who could not ask for his girlfriend’s hand. He is not a special case. He is, in the strict sense I have been building throughout this piece, typical. Multiply him by however many hundreds of thousands of graduates the IMF’s own figure implies, and what results is not a policy problem awaiting a training programme. It is a reservoir, filled steadily for a century, drawn down once in July, and refilled within a year, still rising.
I am not predicting a date or naming a trigger, because I do not know either, and any writer who claims to is overreaching in exactly the way the coming months tend to punish. What I am prepared to say is narrower, and I think harder to dismiss. The energy that produced July has not been addressed. It has been managed, briefly acknowledged, and then left to accumulate again in the same students, the same libraries, the same silences at the dinner table when the subject of a job comes up. A government that mistakes the absence of processions for the absence of frustration is reading the surface of a reservoir and calling it the bottom.
Addressing it does not require a single dramatic gesture, and I suspect part of why it has gone unaddressed is that no single gesture would in fact be sufficient. It would require treating graduate unemployment as a structural failure of the economy rather than a failure of the graduates themselves, and it would require opening some genuine share of political and institutional life, hall politics included, to the majority who currently stand outside it rather than being drawn upon by it. Neither is quick. Both are cheaper, by any measure, than discovering a second time what this particular reservoir does when it is next asked to hold still. The water underneath has not gone anywhere. It is still rising, and it is still, for the moment, waiting to be asked what it wants.
