By Ramachandran Rajeev Kumar — 2026-07-25

Begin with the part that is not in dispute.

The undergraduate national medical entrance examination was cancelled in May after its question paper leaked. Roughly two million candidates were affected. It was the third such leak in five years. Separately, the Central Board of Secondary Education has faced allegations of irregularity in on-screen marking and revaluation. The Cockroach Janta Party's own demand for compensation refers to more than twenty students who died by suicide in the aftermath.

Those are not grievances that require sympathy to be taken seriously. They require arithmetic. An Indian entrance examination is a promise the state makes to a family with no other instrument: that on one morning, in one hall, surname and city and connection are suspended, and the paper is the paper. A leak is not an administrative failure. It is a breach of the only contract many families have ever been offered. Two million candidates did not lose an examination. They lost the year, the coaching fees, the sibling's deferred education that paid for the coaching fees, and the argument they had been making to themselves since Class VIII about why any of the effort was rational.

The students who assembled at Jantar Mantar on 6 June were right. Nothing that follows in this article revises that sentence.

I. The eighteenth of July

The Cockroach Janta Party was founded on 16 May by Abhijeet Dipke, a thirty-year-old public relations graduate of Boston University, as a piece of satire named after a remark made from the bench of the Supreme Court. Within three days its Instagram account had 11.1 million followers, against the Bharatiya Janata Party's 8.8 million. On 28 June the educationist Sonam Wangchuk began an indefinite hunger strike at the protest site alongside students of the All India Students Association. By 17 July he had lost more than nine kilograms in nineteen days and could not stand unaided. On 18 July the Delhi Police removed him to Safdarjung Hospital.

Some hours after that ambulance left, the founder of the Cockroach Janta Party said this:

"Now we will demand Narendra Modi's resignation."

It is worth being slow about what had and had not changed by the time that sentence was spoken. The examination had not changed. The leak had not changed. The custody chain that allowed the paper to escape had not changed. The twenty families were exactly where they had been that morning, and the two million candidates were exactly where they had been that morning. One thing had changed, and it was the target.

This is not a government allegation. It was reported by the National Herald, a newspaper with no conceivable interest in assisting the Bharatiya Janata Party. The pivot from an examination grievance to a demand for the head of a government elected in 2024 took a single afternoon, and it was announced by the movement's own founder, in public, without embarrassment.

II. What was said on the twentieth

Two days later, on the opening day of Parliament's monsoon session, the movement attempted a march to Parliament for which it did not hold permission. The figures from that afternoon are contested and should be read as claims rather than findings. The Delhi Police reported 118 personnel injured. Hospital sources indicated roughly sixty injured protesters. The Cockroach Janta Party put the figure at about 150 hospitalised and around seventy detained. Officers used tear gas and a lathi charge. The Additional Solicitor General told the court that protesters had pelted stones.

What is not contested, because it was recorded, is what some of the marchers were saying. Chants were captured on camera demanding that Parliament be ripped apart if the Education Minister did not resign, and one worker was filmed saying: "Sansad ukhaad diya jayega, India ko Nepal bana diya jayega." Parliament will be uprooted. India will be turned into Nepal.

That sentence is the most informative thing anyone has said in nine weeks, because it is not a metaphor. Nepal is a specific and recent event with a specific and recent body count, and the man saying it knew that. It describes a plan, and the plan is not about a question paper.

Consider also the figure whose fast supplied the movement its moral centre. Sonam Wangchuk arrives in Delhi from a statehood agitation in Ladakh that he had led for years and that ended, in September 2025, in violence which killed four people and injured more than seventy. The Centre alleged that the mob had been guided by his provocative statements. On 25 September the Home Ministry cancelled the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act registration of the Students Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh, the organisation he founded, citing financial irregularities and, among the findings, a grant received from Sweden used to fund studies on national sovereignty which the government judged contrary to the national interest. The ministry sent the Central Bureau of Investigation in. He was subsequently detained under the National Security Act and moved to Jodhpur jail.

He denies all of it. He says SECMOL never received foreign donations, that its dealings were legitimate transactions with United Nations and European bodies on which tax was paid, and that his remarks in Ladakh were taken out of context. Those denials are on the record and belong in any fair account.

But the FCRA order is also on the record, and it is a ministerial action rather than a partisan claim. It concerns Ladakh, not the Cockroach Janta Party, and this newspaper will not blur the two. What it establishes is narrower and sufficient: when Indians ask who is funding what, they are not being paranoid. They are asking a question the Home Ministry has already asked, in writing, about the most prominent figure at Jantar Mantar. A movement that borrows this man's moral authority has forfeited the right to call the question illegitimate.

III. The conversion

On 21 July the Congress president and Rahul Gandhi protested outside the Prime Minister's residence and were detained. Gandhi demanded an apology from the Prime Minister. By 22 July the protest had spread to Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Patna, Kolkata, Lucknow, Chandigarh and Surat; sixteen Delhi metro stations were shut until further order, and twenty companies of the Central Reserve Police Force were airlifted into the capital.

And in Parliament, for a fourth consecutive day, both Houses were adjourned. The opposition's position was that the Education Minister must resign before the House would debate the education failure. The government offered an unconditional discussion. It was refused.

Read that sequence once more. The students' grievance was that a national examination had been broken and nobody had been made to account for it. The forum in which a national examination is accounted for is Parliament. And the parties claiming to stand with those students spent four days preventing Parliament from discussing it, because they wanted a scalp first. That is what it looks like when a grievance stops belonging to the people who hold it and becomes an instrument held by people who do not.

IV. India is not Nepal

The Nepal slogan deserves an answer rather than an expression of outrage, so here is the answer.

Dhaka in 2024 and Kathmandu in 2025 were capital-centric polities in which taking one square was very nearly taking the state. In Nepal, protesters entered the parliamentary complex on 9 September and set the building on fire; the Prime Minister was gone within days and an interim head of government was installed on the twelfth. In Bangladesh, the government of fifteen years fell within twenty-four hours of a single day's killing.

India does not have that shape. It has 970 million electors and a live electoral cycle in which the government's mandate is barely two years old. It has thirty-odd state governments, many of them held by the opposition, which means there is no single building whose capture transfers power. It has an army with no history whatsoever of arbitrating a political dispute, which is precisely the variable that decided both Dhaka and Kathmandu. And it has an electorate that has repeatedly declined to accept a street veto over a ballot, whatever the street's cause.

The Nepal template cannot be imported into a federal republic of this size. Anyone who has actually looked at the two cases knows it. The slogan was not analysis. It was theatre, and, more usefully, it was a confession.

V. The one way we could become it

Having said that plainly, this newspaper must say the harder half, because the same two cases teach it.

In Bangladesh the accelerant was not foreign money. It was an internet blackout, a curfew and a shoot-on-sight order, and about a hundred dead in a single day; the government fell the following afternoon, and more than a thousand were dead before it ended. In Nepal the accelerant was a ban on twenty-six social media platforms and a lethal response to what followed, and seventy-six people died. In both countries a grievance became a regime crisis at the exact moment the state answered young people with force.

Nobody can import that into India. We remain entirely capable of manufacturing it ourselves. The lathi charge of 20 July, the tear gas, the sixteen shuttered stations and the CRPF companies flown into the capital are not evidence of control. They are the one input the Nepal template actually requires and the only one this country's own conduct can supply. A republic confident of its own legitimacy does not need to close Rajiv Chowk.

VI. What answering the students actually looks like

On the night of 23 July the Prime Minister broke several weeks of silence in a video message recorded on a phone, calling the leaks extremely painful for lakhs of students and their guardians, noting that fast-track courts had already been established, and promising legislation. On Friday the Cabinet, which he chaired, approved amendments to the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act of 2024: imprisonment of up to ten years, fines of up to ten crore rupees, a five-year minimum. The Parliamentary Affairs Minister said the Prime Minister had instructed that it not be delayed.

The speed is real and deserves to be recorded, particularly against a movement whose spokesman dismissed the announcement as merely a distraction while continuing to demand the Prime Minister's resignation.

But look at the axis. Ten years, ten crore rupees, a five-year floor, fast-track courts: every instrument in that package activates the day after a paper has leaked and a cohort has already lost its year. Not one of them changes how a question paper is printed, who transports it, which strongroom holds it, or at what hour it is opened. And note which statute is being amended. The Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act was written in 2024 to deter exactly this. The paper leaked anyway. The state's answer to the failure of a deterrence law is a heavier deterrence law.

So there are now three parties arguing about this examination, and not one of them is legislating the strongroom.

What answering the students actually requires is unglamorous, and none of it needs anybody to resign. Publish the chain of custody for every national paper: printer, transporter, strongroom, opening time, and the officer accountable at each transfer, audited to the standard this country already applies to a payments system. Move to per-centre randomised sets or secure on-screen delivery, so a single breach cannot compromise a national cohort. Fix a published maximum interval between a credible leak report and a public statement, because the damage is done in the silence. Make redress automatic, so a candidate whose examination is cancelled through no fault of their own receives fee restitution and an attempt-count exemption by rule rather than by litigation. And place examination conduct under a regulator that is not the ministry conducting the examinations.

Put dates against those five. Then the Education Minister's position becomes answerable to a calendar rather than to a crowd, which is the only form of accountability that survives contact with the next examination cycle. He should not resign for the leak. He should resign for the calendar, if he misses it.

The students at Jantar Mantar were owed all of that on the sixth of June. They are still owed it today. What they got instead was a founder who wanted a Prime Minister, an opposition that wanted a scalp before it would permit a debate, a slogan borrowed from a burnt parliament in Kathmandu, and a government that has legislated the punishment and left the strongroom exactly as it found it.

They were right. Everyone who claimed to be speaking for them this fortnight has been arguing about something else.