Fear evaporates as India’s youth confront State power on streets. There were 152 paper leaks in the last 10 years with zero convictions
Bharat Bhushan
Pan India protests against the events of July 20 have marked a significant shift in Indian politics, moribund for 12 years under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. What began as a narrow protest about examination leaks has become a generational statement about the lack of institutional accountability.
The climate of fear systematically cultivated over the last decade, has been shattered by the youth protests led by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) in New Delhi. A whole new generation of voting age is reclaiming the democratic right to challenge State power on the streets.
The brutal police crackdown on July 20 transformed the movement. From a complaint about exam leaks, it has become explicitly anti-Modi, driven by the use of disproportionate force, that allegedly included pellet guns — to thwart the youth march towards Parliament.
The Modi government failed to recognise that protests against the NEET exam paper leak were not just about the single issue of entry into professional universities. Such competitive exams are gateways to social mobility — they control entry not only to higher education but also to jobs, a steady income, and upward social mobility.
Complaints about testing are not by the wealthy who can ‘buy’ their children better opportunities by sending them abroad for higher education. They express deep anxieties about unequal access to good school education, and to coaching and resources that prepare youngsters for competitive exams. They also articulate concern about regional and rural-urban disparities, and the disadvantages of low family income. The exam and how it is conducted become the crystallising point for these underlying structural inequalities.
Mismanage the examination process and a signal goes out to youth and their parents that the meritocratic promises held out by educational authorities, testing mechanisms, and the government’s supervisory mechanisms are untrustworthy. So, a protest about a specific exam — and there were 152 paper leaks in the last 10 years with zero convictions — becomes an expression of anger about equity, meritocracy, and institutional accountability. It is viewed as a system gamed to deny equal opportunities to an entire generation.
No wonder that the protestors are talking of wider reforms to secure their future.
Although the youth movement remains avowedly non-political, the Opposition has joined forces with it realising that the youngsters were making a generational political statement against the Modi regime. There is no guarantee, however, that their attempts to remain on the right side of youth sentiment will translate into shifts in voting as of now, but the prospect is nonetheless tantalising.
But most important politically, the atmosphere of fear created over the last decade or so has suddenly evaporated in the face of the unexpected chutzpah of India’s youth. The savage crackdown by the security forces — the Delhi Police and the Rapid Action Force (RAF) — have also had a significant impact.
Besides allegedly hitting the protestors on their head and breaking their limbs with batons, there are several shocking pictures and videos on social media of the savagery of the security forces. One shows a policeman pushing a baton suggestively into the rear of a young woman turning away from him. Another with a policeman with a baton fixed with nails — despite the Delhi Police denial of the images being from another protest, Altnews factcheck shows otherwise — that the batons were used at Jantar Mantar.
While the Delhi Police has denied using pellet guns, reports suggest that they were used by RAF personnel — at least four victims have been treated in nearby hospitals, including a journalist of Outlook magazine. The RAF comes under the Central Reserve Police Force, controlled by the Union home ministry, taking the blame for their alleged use to the door of the minister in-charge, Amit Shah.
Pellet guns are seen internationally as symbols of disproportionate state violence. They were used widely against young protestors in Kashmir. Using a weapon controversially used in counter-insurgency operation in a conflict zone, against unarmed youth protestors in the national capital demanding exam reforms, is excessive and vicious. It will only intensify public outrage.
The ruthlessness of the police is turning the movement into a major challenge for the government and for Modi himself, as is evident from the placards and slogans of the protestors. Some that can be mentioned in public include: ‘Whenever Modi is scared, he brings out the police’, ‘Modi must resign’, ‘Remove Modi, Save the country’, ‘Modi teri tanaashahi, Nahin chalegi, Nahin chalegi (Modi, your dictatorship, won’t last, won’t last’, ‘Down with Modi’, ‘MODI – Murder Of Democratic India’, among others.
What makes the current chants different from earlier culture of political sloganeering is their scale, aggressiveness, and the demographic it is coming from — cutting across religious, caste, and urban-rural divides. This demographic segment of aspiring youth eager to join the middle classes was the one that Modi and the BJP claimed was their bulwark.
A movement of such diversity resists easy categorisation. This is making it harder for the government to neutralise it by its usual strategy of labelling its critics as anti-national. Whereas it attempted to brand earlier protest movements as political extremists such as Punjab farmers as ‘Khalistani’; anti-CAA protestors as representing sectarian ‘Muslim unrest’; linking civil rights’ activists in the Bhima-Koregaon case to ‘Naxalite extremists’, and the infamous attempt to label JNU students as being sympathetic to Kashmiri militants. How is it possible to make out an argument for yet another ‘tukde-tukde gang’, of a movement that was only demanding the integrity of exams?
Modi’s leadership style leaves little scope for a magnanimous climb-down. He has never acknowledged a mistake, and would resist appearing as having to give in to making direct concessions to the protestors. Hubris and the governance style he has cultivated make it unlikely that he could end the protest through personal initiative.
His midnight announcement of fast-track courts to deal with paper leaks has been rejected by the youth as a “cruel joke” and as “band-aid on a fracture”. Such courts make no sense when the CBI has found no evidence against the main accused in the NEET paper leak case of 2024. It is not a systemic change to tackle the problem.
Clearly, Modi is in a tough spot. He will find it difficult to avoid the optics of having caved-in to public pressure if he concedes the initial demands of students for the resignation of the education minister, an enquiry into the educational testing infrastructure, and compensation to the parents of students who committed suicide.
If he cracks down further, he risks further alienating the youth demographic which has paid him electoral dividends in the past. The snowballing of similar movements in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal into movements for regime change is an ever-present spectre.
https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/cjp-protests-exam-anger-becomes-a-political-reckoning-4085518
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