By Neha
When I think of how this movement began, I return to May 3, when NEET-UG was held, and May 12, when it was cancelled after the paper leak could no longer be denied. For students, this was not merely an examination gone wrong. It was years of preparation, family savings, borrowed money and postponed lives. Young people died by suicide. Families were shattered. Yet the government was neither apologetic nor accountable.
Our demand for the education minister’s resignation arose from this refusal of responsibility. Not once did the government try to sit with students or understand what repeated leaks, cancellations and uncertainty do to young minds. Its efforts were directed instead at exhausting, frightening and maligning those who asked questions. The insensitivity was visible in the words of those in power. Nirmala Sitharaman suggested that some students had used the delay to improve their performance. What does one say to families who lost their children? That a paper leak was an opportunity? Then Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan described those demanding accountability as the “B-team of dehshatgard” (terrorists). Students whose futures had been gambled away were recast as enemies. The government would not answer the questions, so it tried to make the questioners suspect.
But the issue travelled beyond NEET almost immediately. Students came with stories of UPTET, constable recruitment examinations, REET, RPSC, BPSC, UGC NET sociology, and many others. These were stories around papers leaked, examinations cancelled, results delayed, recruitment processes left hanging. Together, they exposed the same contempt for young people’s time, labour and aspirations. Soon the movement became larger than one examination. It spoke to a generation told to keep studying, keep waiting and blame itself for every institutional failure.
During the movement, we kept reiterating that everything is political, because so many sorrows we are taught to bear privately are produced by public policy. A leaked paper is political. A government school shut or merged in the name of “rationalisation” is political. A fee that forces a student to leave college is political. A vacancy that is never filled is political.
Paper leaks are one eruption from a deeper crisis. The National Education Policy has strengthened centralised testing in the form of NTA, while opening education further to private capital and shifting the burden of access from the state to families. Rising fees, self-financing courses and the language of autonomy turn a public right into a commodity. School closures and mergers, hidden behind the benign term “rationalisation”, burden all, especially the marginalised, including rural children, girls, Dalit and Adivasi students and those unable to travel farther or pay for private schooling.
Many who joined us had never attended a protest. As we sat on a 23-day-long hunger strike, several parents came to us and told us that they felt severely betrayed. They were apologetic about how their political choices had endangered their own children’s future. Their tears overwhelmed me as I became witness to their political awakening. They had believed protesters were troublemakers or anti-national. Now the same machinery of vilification was turned upon them and their own children. They understood that politics happens to us whether or not we call ourselves political.
On July 20, thousands gathered for the Sansad Chalo march. Students were met with lathis, tear gas, water cannons and pellet guns. Students, including young children, were slapped, struck and pushed. We saw pictures of how batons were used against women’s bodies in deliberately humiliating ways. Yet the violence was only one part of the intimidation.
Detentions took place across Delhi, including around Nizamuddin and other areas. At Janpath, students walked past lines of Delhi Police, the Rapid Action Force and the CRPF in protective gear, with batons and shields in hand and tear-gas equipment facing the protest site. Metro stations were shut for days, and mobile internet was blocked. First-time protesters, away from home, could not reassure their families, find one another or use public transport. Perhaps the government believed this landscape of fear would make them turn back.
It, however, did the opposite. Every barricade produced another act of solidarity. People walked long distances, opened their homes, arranged lifts, shared food and water, cared for the injured and returned after being beaten. Through our 23-day hunger strike, it was this care that sustained us. Students brought resilience and hope to the streets, and also wit and humour. They turned insults into slogans and humiliation into collective defiance. They changed the language of protest.
Pradhan’s resignation is a victory won by that courage. But removing one minister does not undo the system that produced the paper leak or the policies dismantling public education. This government has used fear against opposition leaders, activists, campuses and communities through arrests, the ED and CBI, surveillance and vilification. Students looked that fear in the eye and defeated it. They showed that fear can be taught, but it can also be unlearned when people discover they are not alone.
We therefore make a promise: We will remain on the ground and continue to build movements for the revocation of NEP 2020 and against the privatisation and destruction of public education. We will struggle for an equal, socially just, publicly funded and democratic education system; for quality education as a right, not a privilege purchased by those who can afford it.
This resignation is not our destination. It is proof that organised students can win and that we must now fight for much more.
The writer is national president, All India Students Association
