By Ramachandran Rajeev Kumar — 2026-08-01

On Friday night, 1 August, the Prime Minister of India posted a video to Instagram. In it, a man of seventy-five referred to the abuse hurled at him from a protest stage at Jantar Mantar — abuse aimed, as he noted, "not just at me, but even at my late mother" — and said he wished to forgive the young people who had shouted it.

"I want to forgive them," he said. "I hope society accepts this sentiment. These youngsters are ours too, and guiding them is our responsibility."

It is worth pausing on how unusual that is. A man who commands the largest electoral mandate in the democratic world, whose government controls the police force that registered the cases, chose to absorb a personal insult to his dead mother and return it as an appeal for guidance rather than punishment. Smaller men in that chair, in this country and others, have used the machinery of the state for far less. He declined to. Whatever one's politics, that is what stature looks like when it is tested rather than asserted.

But a pardon has a shape, and this one has been widely misread — sometimes carelessly, sometimes deliberately. It was extended to children who shouted words they had been handed. It was not extended to criminals. And it was never, at any point, extended to the men who wrote the script.

What Forgiveness Can Cover, and What It Cannot

The immediate response from the Prime Minister's critics was that the gesture is empty theatre, because police cases against protesters remain live. This objection is confident and it is legally illiterate.

Once an FIR is registered in India it becomes the property of the court, not of the executive. There exists no provision by which a government — any government, at any level — cancels one by announcement. Withdrawal from prosecution runs through Section 360 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita: a public prosecutor must move the magistrate, and the court must consent. Before charges are framed the outcome is discharge; after, acquittal. The court may refuse. Complainants may object. Justice Abhay S. Oka, formerly of the Supreme Court, has put it plainly — once an FIR is registered, it cannot simply be cancelled or deregistered, and the Union's control of the Delhi Police changes nothing about that.

So the demand that the Prime Minister "actually forgive them" by decree is a demand that he do something no office in the Republic empowers him to do. What he can do is set the posture of the state: signal that the prosecution will not be pressed, that the machinery will not be turned on teenagers for slogans. That is precisely what the video did.

It is also, quite deliberately, all it did. Forgiveness for words is not amnesty for crime, and the distinction matters more here than anywhere.

The Grievance Was Real. That Is Exactly Why It Was Worth Stealing.

Nothing in what follows should be read as a suggestion that the young people at Jantar Mantar had no cause. They had a very great cause, and it is important to say so bluntly, because the strongest argument against the men who led them is that those men had a genuine tragedy in their hands and did nothing useful with it.

These pages have made that case twice already — on the day the protests were called off (The Students Were Right. The Movement That Spent Them Was Not.), and again as the movement began claiming to speak for an entire generation (Stolen Anger). What follows is not a third telling of it. In the week since, the men who ran that movement have been examined in some detail, their manifesto has been read closely, and the parties who organised alongside them have sat down in a room in Delhi and said out loud whose victory they considered it to be. The picture that has emerged is worse than hijacking. It was never their protest to hijack; it was, from a fortnight in, somebody else's campaign wearing a student's face.

The NEET-UG paper leak of 2026 was not a rumour. The Central Bureau of Investigation established it, named it, and arrested it. P. V. Kulkarni, a chemistry lecturer engaged in the examination process on behalf of the National Testing Agency, had access to the question papers; in the last week of April he assembled students at his residence in Pune and dictated questions, options and correct answers, which those students wrote by hand into notebooks that were later found to tally exactly with the paper sat by the country on 3 May. Manisha Waghmare was arrested on 14 May. Manisha Sanjay Havaldar, a Pune headmistress appointed by the NTA as a subject expert, was arrested on 22 May over the physics paper. Thirteen arrests followed.

And in the forty-six days between the cancellation of the examination and the scheduled re-test, at least eleven aspirants — some counts say thirteen — took their own lives.

That is the real injury. Children who had studied for years were robbed by the very examiners entrusted to test them, and some of them did not survive the wait to find out what would happen next. Any society with a pulse would have been enraged. The rage was earned.

It was also, in cold political terms, the most valuable unclaimed asset in the country: a million furious young people with no organisation and no leadership. Somebody was going to claim it.

Meet the "Youth"

It is worth looking closely at who did, because the movement's entire claim on the national conscience rested on the proposition that this was India's burnt-out youth speaking for itself.

Ashutosh Ranka, spokesperson, holds a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur and worked for McKinsey & Company in London, advising international organisations, before returning to India in 2025. His own LinkedIn description says he is "currently building a public life in India."

Saurav Das, chief spokesperson, took a degree in journalism and mass communication from Amity University, Noida, and has since built a career as an investigative journalist and RTI activist, writing for The Caravan, The Wire, Article 14, Frontline, Al Jazeera and The Hindu. He is co-founder of an outfit called Climate Action Front. His book, Complicit Silence: The Court's Role in India's Quiet Suffering, argues that the Indian judiciary has been a contributor to what he terms this country's "electoral autocracy."

Hold that phrase for a moment. The chief spokesperson of a movement that presented itself as non-political, concerned only with examination integrity, has written a book whose organising thesis is that India is no longer a functioning democracy. That is not a student's grievance about a leaked chemistry paper. It is a settled political position about the legitimacy of an elected government, and it was carried into Jantar Mantar under a banner that claimed to have no politics at all.

And then there is Abhijeet Dipke, the founder. He holds a postgraduate degree in public relations from Boston University in the United States. Before that, he served as a Communications Fellow in the Office of the Chief Minister of Delhi, and subsequently as Communications Adviser to the Delhi government's Education Department. Earlier still he worked inside the Aam Aadmi Party's social media operation, producing meme-based digital content aimed at young voters during the 2020 Delhi assembly campaign.

Read that again, slowly. The man who arrived at the head of a spontaneous children's uprising against the education establishment had himself been a salaried communications adviser to an education department, and before that a communications hand in a serving Chief Minister's office. His profession — his actual, trained, credentialed profession — is the manufacture of youth sentiment on behalf of a political party. He practised it for the Aam Aadmi Party in 2020. He practised it again in 2026, and this time the client was harder to see.

Not one of these three sat NEET-UG 2026. Not one of them lost a year, a seat, or a child. Their expertise is not medicine, or examinations, or the grinding economics of a coaching town in Rajasthan. Their expertise is communications, consultancy and campaigning — which is to say, their expertise is precisely the thing that was done to those students.

Note also the timing, because it is not subtle. The Chief Justice made his remark about unemployed youth being "cockroaches" on 15 May. The Cockroach Janta Party was founded on 16 May — one day later, four days after the NTA cancelled the examination. That is not grief slowly finding its voice. That is a communications professional recognising a product and moving on it inside twenty-four hours.

The Manifesto Never Mentioned the Exam

If any doubt survives, the movement's own manifesto disposes of it.

The Cockroach Janta Party issued five demands. One: bar retiring Chief Justices from Rajya Sabha seats. Two: criminal liability under the UAPA for any deleted legitimate vote. Three: fifty per cent reservation for women in Parliament and Cabinet. Four: cancellation of the broadcast licences of every media house owned by Ambani and Adani. Five: a twenty-year bar on defectors holding public office.

Not one word about the National Testing Agency. Not one word about question-paper security, examiner vetting, chain of custody, or the integrity of the re-test. Not one syllable addressing the crime that killed eleven children.

Five demands, and not a single one of them would have saved a single one of those students.

What they are instead is a familiar wish-list wearing a school uniform. Demand two is the opposition's vote-theft campaign translated into criminal law. Demand four asks the Indian state to strip two named private business houses of their broadcast licences — expropriation, presented as media reform. These are not the concerns of a teenager in Kota who has lost a year. They are the concerns of a political bloc that has lost elections.

And this is not merely a government supporter's complaint. The National Herald — an outlet no one could accuse of carrying water for this administration — observed the same gap, noting that the CJP never demanded the dismantling of the NTA despite its record of leaks year after year, and that a rival youth outfit's forty-point declaration did demand exactly that, along with Supreme Court monitoring and state board representation. CJP's leadership never raised it. The one structural reform that spoke directly to the dead children was available, articulated, and on the table. They left it there.

What they took to the government instead was a minister's head and a compensation figure. They got the head. The National Testing Agency remains exactly as it was.

The Mask Came Off at Charu Bhawan

Three days after the protests were called off, on 28 July, the Communist Party of India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation met jointly at Charu Bhawan in Delhi. D. Raja, M. A. Baby, Dipankar Bhattacharya and others were in the room.

Their joint statement welcomed "the significant victory achieved by the youth movement through the historic Jantar Mantar protests" and congratulated "student-youth activists of Left student organisations and the CJP" for forcing the resignation of the Union Education Minister. They resolved to hold the government to the settlement, to carry the resistance forward, and to step up cooperation "against the fascistic offensive of the Sangh brigade."

This was not alleged by an opponent. It was published by the CPI(ML) on its own website — a claim of ownership, filed by the owners.

The mechanics were visible throughout, for anyone willing to look. AISA, SFI and AISF supplied what one sympathetic account called the "ballast" of the protest: the cadre, the songs, the poster-painting, the mobilisation that turns a hashtag into a crowd that stays. They did it while carefully leaving their party flags at home, so that the movement could go on describing itself as non-political and unaffiliated.

There is a word for an organisation that presents itself as spontaneous and unaligned while being staffed, supplied and subsequently claimed by established political parties. The word is front. The children at Jantar Mantar were not told they were in one.

The Questions Worth Asking — and the Ones That Aren't

Honesty requires a note here, because a great deal of what has been thrown at the CJP did not survive contact with evidence, and repeating it is a gift to the people it was aimed at.

The claim that forty-nine per cent of the movement's followers were Pakistani was refuted by platform data showing upwards of ninety-four per cent of its audience to be Indian, a figure independent assessments broadly corroborated. The Ministry of External Affairs, asked directly about foreign funding on 25 July, declined to endorse the allegation. Two petitions seeking investigation into "anti-national activities" were dismissed by the courts. Nor is the suspicion one-directional: sceptics have also pointed at social media histories suggesting some CJP figures once leaned the government's way, and at least one prominent allegation runs that its spokesperson has connections not to Delhi's left but to a family close to the establishment itself.

None of it has been substantiated. All of it has been shouted. And the predictable consequence is that the CJP spends its time comfortably rebutting the weakest charge available, on any platform that will have it, and is never once obliged to answer the strongest.

The strongest questions are duller, and they remain entirely unanswered. The Cockroach Janta Party is not registered with the Election Commission. It has no formal structure, no published accounts, no audited statement of any kind. Its own public position is that it is "funded by nothing" and "sponsored by no one" — self-financed by its founding team — even as sites in its name solicit voluntary contributions from the public. When a mainstream outlet put the plain question to it in print, headlined Who is funding the Cockroach Janta Party?, no answer came back.

Yet the movement ran a sustained national campaign across multiple cities for seven weeks: stages, sound systems, transport, legal representation, and a media operation of professional quality that did not miss a single news cycle in forty-nine days. Campaigns of that competence are not accidents, and they are not free. Somebody paid for it, and the amount is knowable to the rupee by the people who spent it.

So: publish the accounts. Name every donor. State what the campaign cost and who met the bill, including the personal contributions the founding team says it made. An outfit whose first demand is that retiring judges be barred from office on grounds of undisclosed interest, whose chief spokesperson made his name filing Right to Information applications against public institutions, and which asked the government to strip named companies of their licences in the name of transparency, is in a uniquely poor position to argue that disclosure is a thing owed only by other people.

Let them answer under the standard they wrote themselves. If the answer is as innocent as they say, it costs them a spreadsheet.

What the Forgiveness Actually Meant

The Prime Minister's pardon was real, and it was correctly aimed. It was extended to a fifteen-year-old who repeated a slogan somebody older had put in her mouth, and who has since filmed an apology out of fear. It was extended to the boy in the third row who shouted what the stage told him to shout because he was seventeen and angry and had watched a friend's year destroyed by a chemistry lecturer in Pune. Those are our children. They were genuinely wronged — first by the men who stole their paper, and then again by the men who stole their protest.

It was never extended to the second group, and they have not asked for it. They do not need forgiveness. They have degrees from Boston and Kanpur and London, careers in public life ahead of them, and a scalp on the wall. What they owe this country is not an apology.

It is an audited statement of accounts, a list of donors, and an explanation of why a movement raised on eleven dead children submitted five demands, and not one of them was about the exam.