Narendra Modi’s Election Challenge: Create Jobs. Lots of Them.

Aashique Ahmed Iqbal had no reason to think he wouldn’t find a job. Although from a modest background, he’d studied at one of India’s top schools, attended one of its best universities, and completed a doctorate in history at Oxford University after being awarded a highly competitive scholarship.

When he returned to India, in 2017, he was optimistic that he could find work as an academic. Over the past decade, India’s education sector has opened up. Well-regarded private universities have joined some of the country’s elite, state-run institutions to offer a quality education for not only India’s top students, but also its wealthiest. These schools actively sought out people like Iqbal—those educated abroad—and paid them relatively well.

But Iqbal’s return was anything but easy. He struggled to find consistent, full-time work, telling me that when he initially came home, “it didn’t seem necessarily unreasonable that I would get a job—maybe not necessarily the first one I applied for, but