Patna, India – As 20-year-old Ajay Kumar scrolled through social media on his mobile phone in Muzaffarpur district in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, he came across rumours that a crucial examination for a government job he had appeared for had been compromised.

Ajay is a Dalit, a community that falls at the bottom of India’s caste hierarchy and has suffered centuries of marginalisation. He had pinned his hopes for the future on a job reserved for his community under the government’s affirmative action programme.

But the leaking of the examination paper in December last year dashed those hopes.

That’s when he came across a video of students as old as him – and just as angry – protesting the paper leak in state capital Patna, some 75km (46 miles) away. He immediately hopped on an ove

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