The Protest That Refuses to be Hijacked

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The Protest That Refuses to be Hijacked

Rahul Gandhi sat down for a press conference and, with studied calm, insisted he would not make the story about himself. The security breach, the shoving, the dragging — all of it, he said, was secondary. The focus, he repeated, must remain on the movement for education. But the media, coiled like a spring around the Leader of the Opposition, fired question after question about his safety, the threat to his life, the sheer drama of a politician being manhandled outside Parliament. Rahul Gandhi deflected: “Yes, they dragged me, but while doing so they whispered in my ear — ‘Remove this government. We only wear the uniform, but we are from Rajasthan, from Haryana, remove them.’ That sentiment is real.” Thus, what could have been a narcissistic moral play became, almost accidentally, a window into the crumbling consent beneath the khaki.

And yet, the moment that should have turned the nation’s gaze to the broken classrooms and bleeding futures of its youth was immediately co-opted by the same old circus. When reporters persisted — “Why were you dragged? What if you had been injured?” — and then segued into the convenience of Jitendra Singh’s sudden deployment from the PMO, the tone of the interaction changed. The government, it was said, had panicked. Within minutes of Rahul Gandhi sitting on a dharna, a minister was dispatched. Why? Because this government, which for a decade treated the Opposition with institutional contempt, suddenly sensed that the ground beneath its feet was shifting. The kids were no longer just a hashtag.

The Government’s Panic and the Familiar Playbook

Look at the choreography that followed. The BJP, as if on a centrally issued command, launched countrywide protests outside Congress offices. Bhopal, Vijayawada, Patna — in city after city, the ruling party’s cadre turned the streets into battlefields. The intention was transparent: convert a student agitation into a party-against-party brawl, and in the process, bury the real issue under the noise of partisan clashes. In Patna, the strategy was visible in its rawest form. An enormous crowd of protesters, many of them students demanding Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, marched toward the Raj Bhavan. Police barricades were thrown aside by the sheer weight of anger. And then, as if scripted, the state responded with lathis, water cannons, tear gas. Senior officers stood watching as the young were beaten back. Some fell, some broke through, some reached the Chief Minister’s residence area. The images that flooded social media — rifles pointed toward unarmed teenagers, pellets fired, bones broken — told a story of a government that sees its own future as a law-and-order problem.

How many paper leaks have been reported? Rahul Gandhi’s figure was 152 in the last ten years, and he suspects the real number could be 300 because, as he put it, “many went unnoticed.” In a country where education is the last staircase of hope for the poor, the staircase has been systematically sawed off. The NEET fiasco, the UGC-NET cancellation, the endless cycle of examinations being declared void — these are not glitches. They are the symptoms of a deliberate rigging of the system, a quiet privatization of opportunity where the only door left ajar, the government job, is also rigged through connections. And when the disinherited dare to gather at Jantar Mantar, the answer is not a policy review. The answer is a lathi.

What Students Demand vs What the Government Delivers

Demand of Protesting Students	Response from the Modi Government
Dismissal of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan	The minister is defended and protected; his resignation is not considered.
A public apology from the Prime Minister for the violence and paper leaks	Complete silence from the Prime Minister.
Withdrawal of false FIRs lodged against peaceful student protesters	10 FIRs registered across 5 Delhi police stations after the July 20 incident; no withdrawal.
Accountability for police brutality — lathi charges, pellet guns, tear gas on students	Police actions are justified; no officer is suspended.
A compensation of Rs 1 crore for the families of students who died by suicide	No official acknowledgment, no compensation announced.

The Tragedy of Sonam Wangchuk and the Coming Split

Meanwhile, inside a hospital room at Medanta, a different kind of management was underway. Sonam Wangchuk, the climate activist and engineer, lay on the 25th day of his indefinite fast. Two Union ministers — Jitendra Singh from the PMO and Health Minister JP Nadda — visited him and appealed for the fast to be broken. The optics were gentle, the tone was concerned. But the subtext was unmistakable: the government wanted to separate the movement’s symbolic figure from its political demands. After the meeting, Wangchuk wrote a letter stating he would end his fast only if the government gave a clear assurance that no legal action would be taken against the students who participated in the protests. If the FIRs were withdrawn, he would appeal to the protesters to temporarily suspend the agitation and open a dialogue. A note of softening had crept in.

But the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), led by Abhijeet Dhumketu, did not soften. The CJP, which has become the irreverent and fearless voice of the younger protesters, made its position brutally clear: Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation is non-negotiable. The three other demands — compensation of Rs 1 crore for the families of student suicides, action against police officers responsible for violence, and a government assurance that peaceful protesters will never again face brutality — must be met. Only then will the movement even consider pausing. The government, having already deployed its old trick of sending ministers to hug a fasting activist, is now faced with an unmanageable reality. The movement is splitting into two streams: one that trusts the government’s promise of dialogue, and another that remembers every lathi blow and refuses to let go of the core demand — the removal of a failed minister.

Is the government trying to manage the agitation through Sonam Wangchuk while ignoring the CJP? The answer is written in the photographs of police trying to tear down a giant poster of the BJP in Patna, and in the social media memes that ask: In 2014, the Prime Minister tried to save ‘Dharma’; in 2024, he is trying to save ‘Dharmendra’.

A Rigged System: 152 Leaks and a Nation’s Broken Dreams

Rahul Gandhi’s press conference was not just a counter to the security narrative. He presented, in his own way, a diagnosis of India’s education decay. “Our education system was once great, respected across the world. Now it is a rigged system,” he said. It is so rigid, so corrupt, that 152 paper leaks in a decade is only the surface. The system has been hollowed out, and the only exit it offers to the young is a government job — but that too is reserved for those with the right connections. The poor spend their entire earnings on coaching centers and private tuitions, while the quality of education in towns and villages is so appalling that years pass without a child becoming truly employable. And all this destruction is being presented in the name of culture, of religion, of nationalism.

Education is supposed to be the conduit of hope. Instead, it has become the factory of despair. Student suicides are mounting, but the Education Minister’s response is a spectacular silence broken only by his appearance at BJP rallies. Dharmendra Pradhan, who has failed as an education minister, is now a symbol of a government that has lost even the pretense of caring about the young. And the Prime Minister, who speaks to the nation through ‘Mann Ki Baat’ with clockwork regularity, has not found a single minute to address the ‘Mann Ki Baat’ of millions of students. His voice, so eloquent on wars and yoga, becomes mute when the question is: Why are our examinations a lottery, and why are our children being beaten on the streets?

The Apology They Owe But Won’t Give

Rahul Gandhi offered the Prime Minister a way out. “Apologize to the students,” he said. “You have apologized to farmers. Why not apologize now?” The parallel is haunting. In 2020-2021, more than 700 farmers died during the year-long agitation against the three farm laws. On the 333rd day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi went on national television, folded his hands, and said, “Maybe our penance was lacking. I apologize to the countrymen with a pure heart.” The laws were repealed. The apology, though late, came.

Now, the question hangs in the air: Is the government waiting for the students to match the farmers’ record of 333 days? Will an apology come only after more young people are trampled, more FIRs are filed, more blood spills on Jantar Mantar? Or is the plan to manage the agitation, crush its spine, and ensure that no such apology is ever needed? The deafening silence from 7, Lok Kalyan Marg suggests the latter. The same Prime Minister who could bend before the collective power of the farmers stands rigid before the weeping eyes of students. The difference, perhaps, is that the farmers were a unified, relentless force that could not be managed. The students, so far, are being managed — with lathis in Patna, with ministerial visits in Gurugram, and with a media that prefers to discuss a security lapse rather than a systemic catastrophe.

The Judiciary’s Quiet Notice and the Executive’s Loud Batons

While the streets burned, the courts stirred. Supreme Court Chief Justice, when asked to watch videos of the police violence from March, had reportedly remarked, “Do not waste our time.” That statement caused outrage until a clarifying tweet from journalist Utkarsh Anand of Hindustan Times added the missing context: the Chief Justice had actually said the court does not have time to watch videos, and that a proper petition should be filed, after which a hearing would take place. It was a reasonable judicial position. Yet the initial reporting had created the impression that the highest court had turned its back on the victims. The damage was done, and the government’s narrative of a controlled judiciary received an unintended boost.

In a more concrete development, the Delhi High Court issued notices to the central government and Delhi Police on two petitions seeking relief against police violence on protesting students. The court is asking questions. The executive, however, is not answering. While the legal machinery moves at its own pace, the police continue to register FIRs against the very students who were assaulted. The contradiction is glaring: the state inflicts violence, and then charges the bleeding for obstructing the road.

Criticisms

• The Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, is criticized for presiding over an unprecedented crisis of paper leaks, student suicides, and a broken examination system without offering a single credible reform.
• The Modi government is faulted for consistently treating a mass youth movement as a law-and-order problem, deploying excessive police force instead of engaging with policy failures.
• The Prime Minister is condemned for his prolonged public silence on the NEET scandal, the UGC-NET cancellation, and the brutal lathi charges on students, while finding time for international photo-ops and election rallies.
• The BJP’s tactic of organizing nationwide counter-protests outside Congress offices is seen as a deliberate attempt to communalize and derail a non-partisan student agitation.
• The hypocrisy of the government is highlighted by its eventual apology to farmers after 700 deaths and 333 days of protest, contrasted with its refusal to apologize to students even as lathis fall on their shoulders.
• Mainstream news channels are criticized for relentlessly focusing on Rahul Gandhi’s security incident and the political drama around it, while marginalizing the core demands of the protesting students.
• The police forces in Patna and Delhi are accused of using disproportionate violence — lathis, water cannons, pellet guns — against unarmed, peaceful protesters, an action many call state-sanctioned brutality.
• The central government is indicted for sending PMO minister Jitendra Singh and Health Minister JP Nadda to manage Sonam Wangchuk’s fast at a hospital, as a means to bypass the hardline CJP and fracture the protest movement.
• The entire education policy under this regime is described as a “rigged system” where opportunity is systematically siphoned to the connected, leaving millions of ordinary students in a spiral of debt, despair, and, in tragic cases, suicide.