Cracks in the Republic
For the students who never got a fair chance, and for the families who are still waiting for answers. If this piece moves you, please read it till the end and consider sharing it.
The Cockroaches at Jantar Mantar
On the afternoon of July 20th, somewhere between the barricades on Parliament Street and the tents where Sonam Wangchuk had spent eighteen days refusing food, video began surfacing of young protesters being struck with batons and dragged across the pavement, some of them crying, pleading with the officers above them to stop. Delhi Police would spend the following week insisting nothing of the sort had taken place. The footage, by then, was already everywhere: on Instagram, on X, on the evening bulletins of networks half a world away that had no domestic advertiser to protect and no minister to answer to. Two versions of the same Monday afternoon were now circulating through the country simultaneously, and only one of them could be true.
This is a story about that gap - between what a government says happened and what forty million people watching their phones can plainly see happened - and about what it costs a democracy when that gap is allowed to sit there, unexamined, for years at a time.
It starts, as these things so often do in India, with an exam.
The Trunk
There is a strongroom in a school called Oasis, in the small Jharkhand town of Hazaribagh, where sealed steel trunks are meant to sit untouched until the morning of an exam that decides, for two and a half million teenagers a year, whether they get to spend the rest of their lives practicing medicine. In May of 2024, according to the investigators who later pieced it together, a young civil engineer got into that room before the trunks were supposed to be opened, and the country’s trust in its own examination system walked out the door with him.
It was not an isolated failure. It was the latest entry in a ledger India has been keeping, whether it meant to or not, for more than twenty years - more than ninety documented cases of leaked or compromised exams, at the state and national level both, going back to a leak in the CAT entrance test in 2003 that shook the IIMs, and the AIPMT scandal the following year. But 2024 was different in scale and speed: NEET-UG, then UGC-NET, then NEET-PG, then CSIR-UGC NET, cancelled or clouded within months of each other, like dominoes set up years in advance and only now beginning to fall. Uttar Pradesh had to scrap a police recruitment exam meant to fill 60,000 posts. Somewhere inside all of it, students died - some of them by their own hand, having lost a competition they were never actually allowed to compete in.
Two years later, almost to the week, it happened again. And this time the country did not simply grieve. It marched.
A Chief Justice’s Insult, Repurposed
The strangest thing about the largest youth protest Delhi has seen in a generation is that it began as a joke at its own expense. In May 2026, the Chief Justice of India, irritated by a wave of online criticism, compared the country’s unemployed and its social-media agitators to cockroaches - vermin, in other words, best ignored until they scattered. A young communications strategist named Abhijeet Dipke picked up the insult and, instead of flinching from it, wore it. The Cockroach Janta Party was born within days: equal parts satire, protest movement, and dare.
By the 6th of June, it had planted itself at Jantar Mantar, the one patch of central Delhi where the Indian state still permits its citizens to assemble and shout. Established student bodies - the Students’ Federation of India, the All India Students Association - folded themselves into it. The demand was narrow and specific: the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, and an examination system that could no longer be quietly gamed by whoever happened to be standing closest to the questions.
For weeks, the tone stayed almost defiantly light. Protesters mailed diapers to the education ministry - a joke about a government that couldn’t stop its own exams from leaking. They danced in the heat. They banged steel plates instead of drums. And then, on the 28th of June, the Ladakhi engineer and educator Sonam Wangchuk sat down cross-legged in the middle of it and stopped eating. By the time the state finally moved against him, three weeks later, he had lost more than eighteen pounds, and had become, without ever campaigning for the role, the one figure the movement could not afford to lose.
So it lost him.
The Weekend the Government Blinked
Over the weekend of July 18th and 19th, plainclothes officers walked into the protest site and carried Wangchuk out to a hospital against his will and the will of everyone around him. There is a particular kind of fury that only can build in the vacuum left by a hero removed from a crowd, and it built for two days, until the crowd itself came looking for an answer.
On July 20th - the opening morning of Parliament’s Monsoon Session, as if scheduled for maximum irony - the Cockroach Janta Party tried to march on the building where the people who governed them were, in theory, meant to be listening. Delhi Police had planned for a crowd of seven or eight thousand. Something closer to fifty thousand showed up. Before a single baton was raised, the authorities had already made their choice: mobile internet across a mile and a half of central Delhi was switched off, metro stations sealed, barricades thrown up in the streets leading to Parliament. Only then did the riot police move in - with shields, with lathis, and with tear gas.
Ask a simpler question than any of the ones that will follow: what does a government that trusts its own conduct have to hide from live footage? Because the shutting off of the internet did not happen after the violence began. It happened before it - a government, quite literally, turning out the lights before it did whatever it was about to do.
What the Footage Would Not Let Them Deny
What followed is contested in exactly one detail - whether it happened - and not contested at all in every other. Video from that afternoon appears to show lathis fitted with nails, not the plain wooden batons Indian police are supposed to carry. Delhi Police denies it, as police forces in Kerala and elsewhere have denied nearly identical allegations before them, almost always without consequence to anyone. Multiple accounts, including sourced reporting from legal journals as well as television, describe officers working the crowd that day in plain clothes, stripped of the name plates and identification badges that Delhi Police’s own standing orders require whenever an officer is on duty. In the days after, quietly, without ceremony, the department ordered its personnel back into proper uniform - the kind of correction a force only issues once it already knows, privately, that something went wrong the first time.
There are allegations, too, that some of the tear gas fired that day had expired - a claim still unproven, but one serious enough that if it is ever confirmed, this stops being a story about crowd control and becomes a story about a state knowingly exposing its own citizens to a health hazard for the offense of asking it a question.
By Delhi Police’s own count, nearly a hundred and eighty people were hurt that day - a hundred and eighteen of them police, sixty of them protesters. Reporters for NPR, the BBC, and Al Jazeera, standing in the crowd rather than reading a press release about it, described young people struck and dragged across the pavement, some of them crying, some of them pleading simply to be let go. Delhi Police told the country, on camera, that no such violence had taken place. Both of those things cannot be true at once. One of them is a lie told by an organ of the Indian state to 140 crore people, and as of this writing, no one responsible for telling it has been asked to explain why.
There are further claims still circulating - that women in the crowd were struck, that children were caught in it, that some of the men swinging lathis that day were never regular police at all. They are the kind of claims that deserve neither casual repetition nor casual dismissal. What they deserve is an inquiry that does not report to the very force it is investigating, with findings that are published, not filed away.
The Names We Actually Have
Reporting on the human cost of the 2026 cancellation and re-exam has not been consistent, and the toll has been counted differently by different outlets as it rose through May and June - ten, then thirteen, then fourteen, and climbing. Most of the young people behind those numbers were never named in the press that reported them, which is its own quiet failure: a country that can produce a real-time casualty count for a cricket score should be capable of remembering the students it lost with more than a number attached to a district.
Of the names that were reported, a few can be recorded here, so that they are not only a statistic:
Anshika Pandey, 20, of Delhi, who had spent three years preparing for the exam, died by suicide shortly after the cancellation was announced. Renu Meena, 18, originally from Alwar in Rajasthan, living away from home in Delhi for her coaching, died in her accommodation. Pradeep Meghwal, 22, who died in his rented room in Rajasthan after appearing for the exam that was later voided. Umesh Mali, 22, who died in Sikar, Rajasthan, and left behind a note apologising for leaving. Anukeerthana, 19, of Kovaipudur in Coimbatore, who sent a message to her family expressing her anxiety about facing the exam a second time before she died. A 17-year-old in Ahmedabad’s Tragad area, who died hours before he was due to sit the re-examination, and whose name local reporting did not carry.
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There were others - in Lakhimpur Kheri, in Jhunjhunu, in Sikar again, in Kalaburagi - reported in a line or two by local press and then not followed further by the national outlets that could have kept their names alive. They deserve to be remembered as fully as the ones whose names made it into the bigger papers, and the fact that they mostly weren’t is itself part of what this piece is arguing against: a system that moves on quickly from the people it fails.
This is also not new, and it did not begin in 2026. Tamil Nadu’s ruling party has cited 119 NEET-linked coaching-student suicides in that state alone over eight years. A five-year analysis of media reports found roughly 93 such deaths nationally between 2021 and the start of 2026, climbing nearly every year - four in 2021, thirty-two in 2025 alone. Kota, the coaching town that has become shorthand for the entire ecosystem’s pressure, recorded twenty-six student suicides in 2023 in a single calendar year. Among those named in that town’s own grim record: Kaushal Meena, sixteen. Nisha Ahir, twenty-two. Faureed Hussain. Harshraj Shankar, seventeen, who had come from Bihar’s Nalanda district in search of a medical seat. Hrishit Kumar Agrawal, a class 12 student, also from Bihar. Ayush Jaiswal, seventeen. Mohammad Urooj, twenty.
To every one of these families: no fast-track court, no press release, no promise made from a podium gives you back what a broken exam system took from you. The country that failed your children before they ever had a fair chance to sit an exam owes you more than condolences. But condolence is where accountability has to start, and it should not have taken this piece, or any piece, to say their names out loud.
If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide or overwhelming academic or personal pressure, please reach out for support - in India, the Kiran mental health helpline is available at 1800–599–0019, toll-free and around the clock.
The House That Refused to Sit
When Parliament actually convened that same Monday, the opposition did not wait. Within the first hour, MPs were on their feet demanding a real discussion of what had just happened three kilometres away. Both Houses were adjourned before noon. They were adjourned again the next day. And the day after that. By the end of the week, four consecutive sittings had been lost to an argument the government simply would not have out loud, on the record, from the dispatch box, where it could be quoted, contradicted, and held to. Rahul Gandhi called Narendra Modi the most anti-youth prime minister India has had in living memory and said, without much elaboration needed, that tear-gassing students is not what democracies do. Akhilesh Yadav stood up to connect the Delhi crackdown to a string of paper leaks running the length of Uttar Pradesh. And still, session after session, no minister rose to answer a single specific question about the 20th of July.
A government secure in its own conduct does not need four days of procedural cover to avoid describing that conduct out loud. Silence of this particular, repeated shape is not the behavior of the innocent. It is the behavior of people waiting for a news cycle to move on.
This did not happen in a vacuum, either. India now ranks 157th of 180 nations on the World Press Freedom Index, a fall of six places in a single year - and the organisation that compiles it does not gesture vaguely at conspiracy to explain the drop. It names, specifically, rising violence against journalists, media ownership concentrated in fewer and more politically loyal hands, and outlets whose alignment with power has become, in its words, increasingly overt. A Parliament that will not compel its own executive to answer for its police, sitting beside a press that is less and less able to compel it either - that is not a bad week for Indian democracy. That is closer to a diagnosis.
The Luxury of Looking Away
There is another silence worth examining - not from Parliament, but from the rest of us.
For every student who travelled to Delhi, slept under tents, marched through the heat, or stood in front of police barricades, there were millions of us who watched from the safety of our phones. We scrolled past another reel, another headline, another video of a student being dragged across the road, and then returned to work, lectures, meetings, or whatever came next.
That instinct is understandable. People have jobs to keep, families to care for, exams of their own to prepare for. Not every citizen can protest, nor should a democracy demand that they do.
But every democracy does ask something smaller of us: to pay attention.
Indifference is rarely loud enough to make history books. It is quiet. It looks like deciding that someone else’s examination scandal is not your problem because you have already graduated. It looks like believing that police violence against protesters is acceptable because you were not among them. It looks like assuming that institutions will somehow correct themselves without anyone insisting that they do.
The examination system does not belong only to those who sat for NEET this year. It belongs to every parent who hopes merit will matter, every student who believes effort should count for something, and every citizen who expects public institutions to be worthy of public trust.
Democracies do not fail only when governments abuse power. They also weaken when ordinary people begin to expect too little from those who govern them.
History rarely asks where we stood when everything was easy. It asks what we chose to ignore when looking away was more convenient.
What Fast-Track Justice Actually Fast-Tracks
Three days after the crackdown, with the country still absorbing what had happened, Prime Minister Modi posted a promise online. Fast-track courts, he wrote, would deliver swift and stringent punishment to anyone found guilty of leaking an exam. Nothing is more important than the welfare and future of our youth. No number of courts. No timeline. No jurisdiction. The protesters at Jantar Mantar rejected it within hours as theatre and stayed exactly where they were.
Understanding why requires looking at the two men the government itself has already named. The CBI says the source of the 2026 leak was not an outside hacker or a criminal syndicate operating in the shadows, but P.V. Kulkarni, a retired chemistry lecturer from Latur who had spent years setting question papers for the National Testing Agency, and who allegedly used that very access to dictate answers to paying students in his own home in Pune. The threat was never at the gate. It had a key to it.
And that same week, the man India had been told for two years was the mastermind of the entire 2024 catastrophe, Sanjeev Kumar, known as Sanjeev Mukhiya, hunted for months with a bounty on his head, walked free. The CBI announced it had found no evidence linking him to the actual theft of the paper he’d been made a household name over. No chargesheet was ever filed against him in that case. Only unrelated charges in Bihar keep him behind bars at all.
Sit with those two facts side by side. The man the country was told was guilty is free. The man now accused was never outside the system to begin with - he was inside it, trusted, credentialed, employed. A faster court does not touch either problem. It says nothing about who vets the people handed the questions in the first place, who audits them, and who, anywhere above the men actually caught, has ever once been made to answer for the fact that this keeps happening, year after year, under the same government, without a single structural fix that has held.
What Is Actually Owed
None of what follows is a radical list. It is the ordinary price of governing a democracy, the bill that eventually comes due to anyone who asks a people for their trust.
Someone should ask the fast-track courts how they intend to succeed where the CBI’s own case against the 2024 kingpin failed. Someone should ask the Education Ministry who signed off on giving an outside coaching lecturer access to a national exam paper, and why that question is only being asked now, after the damage was already loose in the world. Someone should ask Delhi Police to publish, badge number by badge number, exactly who was deployed at Jantar Mantar on July 20th, and why so many of them wore no badge at all. Someone should ask the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, plainly, whether a formal motion to debate the police action was ever tabled, and if it was, who declined to schedule it, and on what grounds. Someone should ask why the underlying safety data behind the country’s ethanol-fuel mandate still hasn’t been made public, four years into a policy now filling nearly every tank in the country. Someone should ask what a government presiding over a currency at record lows intends to do for the households actually living inside that arithmetic, rather than the households reading about it after the fact.
A country of a billion and a half people does not owe its government indefinite patience.
It owes them an answer - not a tweet, not an adjournment, not another promise about future courts moving faster through a system nobody has yet explained.
An answer, spoken once, plainly, by the people who are responsible, to the people who have been waiting for one.
