This month has been loud back home in India. Among Indian students abroad, it has been strangely quiet.

For weeks, the Cockroach Janta Party and thousands of students occupied Jantar Mantar in Delhi, demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over a series of exam paper leaks that hit millions of students. Activist Sonam Wangchuk joined in with an indefinite hunger strike, lasting weeks before he was hospitalised.

On 25 July, amid tear gas at the site, Pradhan resigned. Protest leaders called it a victory, though not the end of the movement. Compensation for families of students who died by suicide after the leaks remains a live demand.

Among plenty of Indian students overseas, none of this has come up at all. I don't think it's because nobody cares. I think it's because it's easier to care privately from here than to say anything about it in public.

It's tempting to call this apathy, but I don't think that's right. What I've noticed, watching myself as much as anyone, is something closer to studied neutrality—a decision to let the noise of home stay at home. It shows up as a scroll-past, a repost of something safer, a private message instead of a public one. It is worth asking why that neutrality feels so available to those of us in lecture halls in Melbourne when it isn't to a 19-year-old outside Jantar Mantar.

Some of it is practical: an awareness of how visas work, of what "political activity" might mean on a student record. Some are social: being "the political friend" in a diaspora group chat carries its own quiet cost. And some are just distance doing what distance does, making things feel abstract, someone else's emergency.

There's an irony underneath all of it, too. Most of us didn't leave India by accident. Somewhere in the decision to study abroad was an admission that the system back home wasn't going to give us a future worth staying for—the cramming, the coaching centres, the exams that decide a life in a single sitting, merit as a lottery rigged by leaks and loopholes. We left because we knew. So it's strange that the same knowledge goes quiet the moment someone else tries to fix the very thing we ran from. If we understand it well enough to escape it, we understand it well enough to say something for the people still fighting to change it.

But none of that changes what "apolitical" actually is here. It isn't the absence of a position. Matter of fact, it is one—available only to people who aren't the ones going hungry for it. A NEET aspirant doesn't get to opt out of the exam system that failed them. Silence, from here, is a privilege paid for by the lack of proximity.

I speak for myself too. I've caught myself reading the news, feeling something and closing the tab. Not every silence is a privilege; some of it is exhaustion, or fear of getting it wrong, or feeling too far removed to have earned an opinion. Staying quiet doesn't always mean not caring.

I felt that fear before, when writing a news piece on this same crisis a few weeks ago, hesitant about covering something so distinctly Indian from the safe distance of Melbourne. But afterwards, several told me it was the first time they'd properly understood what was happening. That mattered more than it might seem. Being informed isn't the same as being present at Jantar Mantar, but it's what makes solidarity possible instead of performative: the difference between reposting a headline and actually being able to explain why students back home are fighting so hard.

That made it seem worth it.

Though I was scared, I wrote it and someone, somewhere, read it and understood that what was going on was a cry for reform. For revolution. Because in all honesty, wherever we reside now—India is still home. Not in a flag-waving way, but in the plain sense that what happens there, happens to us, to our families, to the people we grew up next to. The same distance that makes silence so easy could just as easily carry a voice further—to people back home who might otherwise never even know what’s going on.

What we owe the people back home is more than a curated feed that never mentions them. It doesn't have to mean loud activism from another continent—it can be smaller. Read past the headlines, send the article instead of scrolling past, let the group chat get uncomfortable, on purpose.

Being far away doesn't excuse us from having a position. It just makes it easier to pretend we don't need one.