Analysis by Anugrah Kumar
Weeks of student protests in India have forced the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to accept the resignation of a federal cabinet minister. The government climbdown has laid bare a crack in the image of political invincibility Modi had held through 12 years in power. What remains open is whether institutions that have allegedly enforced discrimination against religious minorities, including Christians, under Hindu nationalist rule will now begin to hedge against a leadership no longer seen as untouchable.
Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on 25 July, after the Modi government had spent over a month resisting mounting anger over a compromised medical school admission exam, the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, known as NEET-UG, taken every year by more than two million students.
The Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, the Hindu nationalist party Modi has led in government since 2014, had backed Pradhan after it came to light that the exam paper had been leaked, allowing some candidates to buy access to the questions before the test. Students said the leak proved that money and connections, not merit, decided who became a doctor in the country.
Perceived lack of government accountability
Behind the demand for Pradhan’s resignation lay a conviction, widely shared among the young protesters, that accountability had stopped functioning under the current government, and that courts, police and regulators had come to serve the ruling party rather than the citizens they were meant to protect.
A 2025 report by the International Commission of Jurists said judicial independence in India had come under “heavy strain” during the previous decade, citing executive influence over judicial appointments and transfers, irregular allocation of cases and political interference. The finding described pressure on the judiciary as an institution, not necessarily the political loyalties of individual judges.
Christian and other religious minority communities in India have voiced similar complaints for years, saying police register cases against pastors and congregations on flimsy accusations while courts and investigators decline to hold officials accountable for the raids and mob violence that follow.
However, the Modi government has long placed minorities in a category apart from ordinary citizens, telling the country in effect that only they, along with a handful of civil society groups, have a problem with the government. That framing has denied their grievances a wider hearing.
‘Cockroaches’ arrive
A satirical political party called the Cockroach Janta Party, or CJP, which started as a social media account, organised the first in-person protest against the leak in June, at Jantar Mantar, a site in New Delhi long used for demonstrations. Its founder, Abhijeet Dipke, had just completed a master’s degree in public relations at Boston University in the United States and returned to New Delhi for the protests.
The party’s name came from a remark attributed to India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant, who was reported to have compared unemployed young jobseekers and activists to cockroaches. The chief justice later said his comment had been misquoted and aimed only at people using fake degrees. But young people who felt dismissed by the country’s powerful institutions had already claimed the word for themselves, using it as a badge rather than an insult.
Fewer than 2,000 people attended that first protest, a turnout the government appeared to treat as proof the anger would not spread.
But within weeks the party’s videos were reaching hundreds of millions of viewers on Instagram, where the CJP gathered more than 25 million followers. More than 800,000 people signed an online petition calling for Pradhan’s removal, a distribution network the government’s television allies could not match.
Protests widen
Sonam Wangchuk, a popular activist and education reformer, joined the protest and began an indefinite hunger strike. His presence gave the movement a credibility beyond student politics, and on 18 July, two days before the CJP’s planned march to parliament, police removed him from the protest site and admitted him to a hospital against his wishes.
The activist’s removal, rather than calming the protest, angered a public that had watched Wangchuk fast for three weeks, and the crowds preparing for the march to parliament grew much larger on 20 July.
As the protests grew, many of the new arrivals had no link to the CJP. Instead, they came to voice anger over the government’s handling of dissent and years of joblessness among the young, many of whom had failed to find secure work despite visits to coaching centres and recruitment drives.
Their slogans and placards began naming Modi rather than Pradhan, treating the exam leak as one entry in a longer record that included cancelled recruitment exams, delayed government hiring and repeated allegations of corruption.
A crackdown is defied
Delhi police had refused permission for the march and had raised barricades around the government district, and the force sought to stop tens of thousands of protesters from reaching parliament.
Accounts from protesters and journalists said Delhi police and the federal paramilitary Rapid Action Force beat demonstrators, attacked women and journalists, detained people arbitrarily, used sticks fitted with nails and stones, and fired pellet guns at protesters. There was no adequate provision made for casualties. Over 100 protesters and journalists were injured and 70 detained that day.
The crackdown, instead of ending the protest, enlarged it. Injured demonstrators returned to Jantar Mantar, families began bringing children to the protest site, opposition parties raised the police response in parliament, and videos of the beatings spread on social media, prompting criticism throughout the country.
Political cost
Five days after the crackdown, Pradhan resigned. The government also agreed to reform the examination process, compensate affected students and withdraw cases filed against protesters.
For years the Indian government’s response to protest had been to attach a familiar label, Muslim, Christian, communist or separatist, and to tell the rest of the country the grievance belonged to someone else. The CJP protests denied it that option. Most of the protesters were Hindu, including young women whom BJP leaders would ordinarily expect to support the party.
The Modi administration’s inability to dismiss the protests as the work of isolated groups, rather than ordinary citizens and Hindus, may cost it more than the concession it has already made. Judges, civil servants and police officers in India have generally calculated that resisting the government carries more risk than complying with it. The events of July give them reason to reconsider this calculation.
India’s Supreme Court has already responded to some of the concerns over the 20 July police crackdown. It has ordered the release of detained minors and barred coercive action against protesting students with no prior criminal record.
The court has also directed the preservation of closed-circuit television footage and other evidence from the crackdown and considered an independent investigation into the alleged police excesses, saying officers found to have committed abuses must be held to account.
Caution among officials who enforce anti-conversion laws, prosecute pastors or approve raids on churches and mosques may only become visible gradually. But the protests have, at least, removed the certainty on which such enforcement has depended.
