Something about the crowds these past few days feels different. India has seen bigger protests, louder ones, more sharply political ones. But this one radiated out from Jantar Mantar to cities and towns across India as if on an expressway of emotions, beliefs and words. Perhaps because there was something here that connected the abstract apparatus of the State, in a chain of accountability, to the smallest units of society. Three quarters of a billion young individuals, in this case. It was universal.
The government’s retreat, on Saturday, seemed a surprise only because it’s a rare action for the Narendra Modi dispensation. Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation as education minister is the first such event in 12 years. It’s also only the third time it has chosen to walk back—after the Land Acquisition Bill in 2015 and the farm laws in 2021. But it was the wisest course. It had begun with leaked question papers. But somewhere along the way, it had turned into something bigger—a referendum on whether the system can be trusted at all.
The nationalisation of exams means the trauma too is nationalised when papers leak. For years, lakhs of aspirants have also clambered atop trains to keep an appointment with a recruitment system that couldn’t run a fair test if its life depended on it. The opposition tried to break in to ventriloquise the angst. But the images that stick aren’t of politicians. They came from the streets, and on reels. The young spoke eloquently on their own.
A girl in Delhi, crying after a lathicharge, saying she’d never sit the civil services exam now. Not if this is what the system produces: police thrashing up students asking for a future.
A young woman in Mumbai standing in front of a police van and simply not moving. Neither looked like a professional activist. They look like somebody’s daughter.
It was also a very integrative anger. From Tamil Nadu came Hindi sloganeering. The mother of Anitha, the first victim of NEET, was at Jantar Mantar. So were the parents of Sana Sheikh, a 2026 victim. Young girls from small towns slept on Delhi’s pavements, safe with boys they didn’t know. Young women reported feeling safe like never before. Gurdwaras and mosques opened their doors. Itanagar and Indore heard the same words. Admiring messages from Pakistani Gen Z became a sub-genre of their own. It had begun with education reforms. It revealed glimpses of a spirit that could reform community, gender and international relations too!
Calls for Pradhan to resign were clearly a political shorthand for a deeper, more holistic disenchantment. On its edges, it was also becoming hostage to the threat of a more violent confrontation. There was real excess—police wading into crowds of kids barely out of college—and it confirmed for a lot of people that the authorities had no idea of the mood they’re dealing with. Force would not win faith. But Delhi saw only lathis and allegedly pellets, a theme Rahul Gandhi took up. In far-flung Bihar, the script looked capable of going out of hand, with police-student clashes looking rather more bristlingly aggressive.
Across India, a son or daughter is prepping for some entrance exam or another—years of discipline, of coaching classes, of parents dipping into savings, rearranging their whole lives around exam calendars. It’s left a generation with the sense that they’re expected to play fair in a casino game where the house doesn’t. In more hard-bitten landscapes, bitterness at being betrayed by the system could take any form. A leaderless movement has its qualities, but one so sprawling is also not without risk. The government has done right in not courting it.
Till the agitation was ended with a soft bat, it tried old ‘protest management’ techniques. Barricades, shut metro stations, suspended internet, water cannons. But that playbook turned out to be a couple of decades out of date. Today’s protesters grew up online. If the internet is shut, they switch on Bluetooth-based mesh-messaging—if a road’s blocked, someone’s phone already has another route. Every baton charge gets filmed and shared before the officer swinging it has even walked away.
What pulled in everyone was that these protests weren’t just angry. There was music, humour and a kind of irreverence a lot of older people don’t quite know what to do with. Kids dancing under water cannons. Memes mocking official releases. Reels parodying ministers, police, media. Call it social media theatre if you want. I’d call it the language this generation actually speaks.
That’s why it travelled. Look who else showed up: engineers, consultants, designers, flight attendants on a day’s leave, retired physics teachers. Uber drivers drove away without taking any money. Swiggy boys delivered love from far away. A small motor repair businessman from Gadchiroli spent his month’s savings to travel to Mumbai, holding his infant daughter, in tears—for the country’s children. The Gulabi Gang in UP took to the streets. All people with nothing personal at stake. A perfect system can only exist in a textbook. But everyone could recognise the demand for an honest one.
Political crises pass. Parliament gets back to business. Ministers rotate in and out. What needs to be kept alive like a flame in a storm is the unwritten contract between the Indian state and its people. The crowds at Jantar Mantar were really only asking one question. Is that deal still good? The answer will outlast the slogans, long after the streets have gone quiet again.
Read all columns by Santwana Bhattacharya
Santwana Bhattacharya
Editor, The New Indian Express