By Haripriya B Harshan Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as Union Education Minister on July 25, ending 36 days of protests led by student organizations after the NEET-UG papers held on May 3 and May 7 were leaked and cancelled. The fallout forced a re-exam on June 21 and a CBI probe. Nearly two million students had sat for the exam, and the opposition has counted over a hundred such leaks in the past decade with almost no senior official ever held accountable. Most media coverage will treat this as a political story, or at best an academic one—a minister’s exit, a broken exam system. What keeps getting left out is the financial trail: who paid, who profited, and who is actually held accountable for the money.
By Ram Puniyani* The formation of the Cockroach Janata Party and the protest demonstration at Jantar Mantar are too well known by now. The torture of youth, the lathi charge by uniformed police and other dubious elements, the use of pellet guns and even AK-47s were totally against the norms of democratic values. The other side of the protest was equally remarkable: youth singing and dancing, making posters collectively, laughing and celebrating, reminding one of Karl Marx’s famous adage that “revolution is the festival of the masses,” though the scale and context of the Jantar Mantar protest and many other protests across the country were entirely different.