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The Silence of the Prime Minister and the Scream of a Nation's Youth

The morning of July 17 began with an image that, in any functioning democracy, ought to have rattled the corridors of power. Pawan Khera, the Congress party's media chief and a Rajya Sabha MP, stood at Jantar Mantar, the symbolic protest site of Delhi, next to Sonam Wangchuk, the climate activist on an indefinite fast. Beside them were the student protesters from the "Cockroach Janata Party", young men and women whose bodies have been withering on hunger strike for over nineteen days—Neha, Danish, Amin, Deepak, Manish, Rishikesh—their health now a matter of grave public concern. Khera’s presence was not just a photo-op. It was the Congress finally stepping in where the government had not: into the vacuum of basic human decency, compelled by the unrelenting pressure of a society that has begun to ask, Why is the state so determined to look away?

The Growing Cry at Jantar Mantar

Sonam Wangchuk’s fast—initially to demand constitutional safeguards for Ladakh under the Sixth Schedule—has now, over weeks, morphed into a touchstone. It has drawn activists, students, and ordinary citizens who see in his frail frame the embodiment of a government’s stonewalling. The Congress’s support, via Khera, came after a long and visible hesitation. That hesitation, as we shall examine, is rooted in the political trauma of the Anna Hazare movement. But the immediate focus is this: the Central government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has maintained a glacial silence. No minister visited. No dialogue was initiated. Even as the health of hunger strikers plummeted, the official machinery seemed to be waiting—perhaps hoping—for the protest to fizzle out, or for a convenient excuse to bulldoze it away.

The memory of 2017 lingers heavily. That year, hundreds of ex-servicemen had gathered at Jantar Mantar, demanding One Rank One Pension. They sat for weeks. On one decisive day, the entire 868-day-old protest was forcibly cleared by the Delhi Police. No negotiation, no acknowledgment. It simply vanished. Rahul Gandhi had attempted to visit them thrice; each time, the police blocked his way. He later met them at the Congress office. Today, the government seems to be banking on a similar erasure. However, the crowds at Jantar Mantar are swelling, not thinning. Voices from student unions, civil society groups, and now multiple opposition parties are converging. The administration can no longer pretend this is a fringe spectacle.

A Government That Prefers to Hide

The question must be asked bluntly: why has the Prime Minister, who can travel to Varanasi for an election rally or to Italy for a G7 summit, not found a moment to address students fasting for their future? Why has the Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, whose resignation is being demanded by nearly every opposition bloc, chosen silence over accountability? The contrast is instructive. In 1984, when Sonam Wangchuk’s father, Sonam Wangyal, went on hunger strike in Ladakh demanding Scheduled Tribe status for Ladakhis, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi flew from Delhi to Ladakh to personally meet him and break his fast. A Prime Minister who listened. Today, we have a Prime Minister who, as the farmer unions sat at Delhi’s borders for over a year, never once visited them, never once called them for talks. The same script plays out now with students. The government’s strategy is not governance; it is suffocation—suffocation of dissent through neglect, legal harassment, and the eventual deployment of bulldozers.

The Paper Leak Epidemic: A Satire That Hurts

Parallel to the Ladakh protest, a larger inferno rages across Indian education: the systematic leakage of competitive examination papers. NEET, UGC-NET, CSIR-UGC NET, state-level exams—the list of breaches is monumental. The Congress recently released a biting two-minute animated video, a satirical advertisement for a fictional "National Paper Leak Centre." In it, a minister gleefully green-lights a paper leak, the paper setter takes a bribe through a sleek "partnership" operation, and the question paper travels via a chain of dealers straight to candidates’ phones. The punchline: “Jab niyat mein hai paper leak, toh student ka future to hoga hi weak” (When the intention itself is a leak, the student’s future will certainly be weak). The video is devastatingly accurate. It exposes how the entire apparatus—from the exam-conducting bodies to the political class—has normalized the theft of youth’s labour.

Rahul Gandhi has been speaking about this for over a decade. It is fashionable among his detractors to call him inconsistent, yet on this issue, his record is stubbornly consistent. In March 2018, he marched to Delhi’s CGO Complex where SSC exam candidates were protesting paper leaks. In the 2019 elections, his party made youth unemployment and education a central plank—and was rejected. Yet he did not abandon the cause. In 2023, he went to Mukherjee Nagar, the coaching hub, and spoke with aspirants in a conversation that racked up 4.1 million views on his YouTube channel. During the Bharat Jodo Yatra, he repeatedly hammered the point: a poor child studies the entire syllabus for two years, while the rich child gets a leaked paper on his phone five days in advance. The poor child is eliminated even before the exam. And now, in 2024, he has held massive student rallies in Kota and Dehradun, linking paper leaks to the broader crisis of privatized, profit-driven education.

Why the Congress Hesitated: The Shadow of Anna

To understand the Congress’s initial delay in supporting Sonam Wangchuk, one must revisit 2011. The Anna Hazare anti-corruption movement drew massive crowds and was strategically projected as a people’s uprising against a corrupt Congress-led UPA. Later, it became evident that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and other right-wing elements had actively shaped the movement. The experience left a deep scar: the Congress fears being seen as co-opting a movement that might later be revealed to have ancillary agendas. This is not paranoia; it is political memory. When the “Cockroach Janata Party” protest began on June 20, its spokespersons—Abhijeet Deepak and Vijeta Dahiya—had a record of criticising Rahul Gandhi, calling him a non-credible alternative to Modi. Moreover, the protest’s founders had historically positioned themselves as non-political, even anti-political, raising questions about their long-term objectives.

Yet, as the hunger strike stretched, and as Sonam Wangchuk’s life hung in the balance, the moral imperative outweighed political calculation. Criticism mounted: “Where is the Congress?” People asked why the opposition was not standing with the man whose health was failing. Rahul Gandhi finally sent Pawan Khera. The party’s UP president Rajendra Pal Gautam also visited. The Cockroach Janata Party’s leaders, to their credit, thanked them publicly. This is a maturing of all sides: the movement is learning to stop being reflexively anti-Congress, and the Congress is learning to support a cause without insisting on ownership. The BJP, meanwhile, remains the one elephantine absence.

The Opposition’s Unlikely Unity

Beyond the Congress, a phalanx of opposition parties has extended solidarity. Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress sent senior leaders. The Aam Aadmi Party’s Sanjay Singh went, despite earlier controversy over AAP’s own ambivalence about the protest’s antecedents. Chandra Shekhar Azad’s Azad Samaj Party not only visited but also sat on hunger strike. Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party dispatched Dimple Yadav and Dharmendra Yadav to the stage; SP MP Priya Saroj met Wangchuk separately. The Left, the DMK, and other regional forces have voiced support. In Parliament, Aditya Thackeray of Shiv Sena (UBT) posed a sharp question: nearly every political party except the BJP has backed the demand for Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation. Does that not prove the BJP does not care about millions of students? The silence of the ruling party is not neutrality; it is complicity.

A tabular representation of who stood where illuminates the political landscape:

Party/Entity	Action Taken
Congress	Sent Pawan Khera and state leaders; extended moral support after initial hesitation.
Trinamool Congress	Senior leaders visited Jantar Mantar and expressed solidarity.
Aam Aadmi Party	Sanjay Singh attended; party issued statements in support.
Samajwadi Party	Dimple and Dharmendra Yadav joined; Akhilesh Yadav spoke to Wangchuk.
Azad Samaj Party	Chandra Shekhar Azad sat on fast alongside protestors.
Left Parties	Leaders and student wings participated actively.
Shiv Sena (UBT)	Aditya Thackeray attacked BJP’s silence; demanded resignation of Education Minister.
BJP	No senior leader visited; no dialogue initiated; Education Minister has neither resigned nor addressed protestors.

The Government’s Education Wasteland

The student unrest is not a flash in the pan; it is the logical outcome of a deliberate, ideological project. Since 2014, the BJP-led government has steadily underfunded public education while facilitating the takeover of the sector by corporate entities. The Prime Minister, in 2017, announced an ambitious plan to make ten private and ten public Indian universities among the world’s top institutions. Yet, seven years later, none have broken into the top 100 of global rankings. Instead, what we have is a proliferation of low-quality private colleges, rampant fee hikes, and a faculty crisis. Prime Minister Modi, who famously urges citizens to be “vocal for local,” has himself ensured that his ministers’ children study in gleaming foreign universities—a fact that Ravish Kumar, in his signature style, has sarcastically celebrated: the only “smart city” these leaders have built is the one for their own offspring.

Rahul Gandhi has begun connecting the dots between paper leaks and privatization. In his Kota rally, he asked: why did we let the public education system die? Why are private coaching hubs like Kota, where students suffer mental breakdowns and suicides, the only path to a decent job? The protests at Jantar Mantar are thus not merely about exam conduct; they are a cry against a system that has commodified aspiration and sold it back to the young at unbearable cost. When the government refuses to listen, it tells the nation that the suffering of these students is not even worth a conversation.

The Danger of a Fearful Democracy

There is a deeper pathology at work. The Indian state today has perfected a toolkit of suppression: first, ignore the protest; then, label it a foreign conspiracy or an “urban Naxal” plot through obedient media channels; if that fails, register FIRs against protestors; finally, unleash bulldozers. The psychological impact is devastating. It conditions citizens to believe that any association with a movement, any linkage to the opposition, will bring personal ruin. Even the Cockroach Janata Party initially went to great lengths to insist they were non-political, afraid of being branded. The women wrestlers who sat at Jantar Mantar for weeks, accusing a BJP MP of sexual harassment, were similarly adamant that their movement was not political—until the police batons taught them otherwise. The democracy is being hollowed out from within, not by overt dictatorship, but by a thousand daily intimidations that make opposition a high-risk activity.

And yet, the current protests signal that the dam may be cracking. The support from such a wide spectrum of opposition parties, the revival of Rahul Gandhi’s youth engagement, and the sheer stubbornness of Sonam Wangchuk and the fasting students have created a nerve centre that the government cannot easily dismantle. The more the BJP isolates itself, the more it confirms its image as a party disconnected from the masses, cocooned in a bubble of power and propaganda.

What the Nation Awaits

After the Congress’s gesture, the ball is now squarely in the court of the Modi government. Will the Prime Minister finally break his silence? Will he, or any senior minister, walk to Jantar Mantar and talk? Or will the government double down on its default position: that every protest is a foreign-funded conspiracy, that the students are misguided, that the problem will vanish if you just don’t look at it? The 868 days of the ex-servicemen’s protest ended in a police swoop, not a policy victory. The year-long farmers’ agitation ended with the repeal of laws only after a massive groundswell that the government fought tooth and nail. History suggests that this regime learns nothing from dialogue; it yields only to brute force of public pressure or electoral setback. Until then, it will stonewall.

But something is shifting. The Congress, by sending Khera, has indirectly nudged the conversation from “who is behind the protest” to “why is the government not talking.” It has exposed the BJP’s isolation. The students, through their sacrifice, have forced the opposition to overcome its fragmentation. The question remains: how many more days of hunger, how many more bodies wasted, before the man in the high chair deigns to notice?

Criticisms

The following criticisms are presented in passive voice, as a direct and necessary indictment:

• No acknowledgement of the deteriorating health of Sonam Wangchuk and the six student protestors is made by the Prime Minister or the Education Minister.
• A complete silence is maintained by the Modi government on the systemic paper leak crisis that has affected millions of aspirants.
• The legitimate demands for a constitutional safeguard for Ladakh are disregarded through bureaucratic indifference and political malice.
• Repeated requests for dialogue from civil society, students, and opposition parties are ignored by the central administration.
• The Education Minister is not held accountable for the failure of examination bodies, nor is his resignation offered.
• Bulldozer justice and false FIRs are routinely employed against peaceful protesters as a tool of intimidation.
• Public education is starved of funds while private coaching cartels are allowed to flourish under a policy vacuum created deliberately by the state.
• Young women wrestlers’ allegations of sexual harassment are trivialized, and their protest is crushed by police force on orders from above.
• The media, especially channels aligned with the ruling party, spread unfounded conspiracy theories about the protest being a “foreign-funded plot” to discredit genuine student anguish.
• The stark contrast between Indira Gandhi’s personal visit to a fasting Ladakhi activist in 1984 and Narendra Modi’s recalcitrant absence in 2024 is allowed to stand as a monument to the decay of democratic empathy.
• The BJP’s own internal contradictions—sending their children to foreign universities while lecturing the nation on “local” aspirations—are not owned up to, and the hypocrisy is buried under jingoistic rhetoric.