Zara Hatke, Zara Bachke, Yeh Hai NTA, Meri Jaan: The Fight Isn’t Over

The National Democratic Alliance in December 2021 repealed three farm laws it had spent months insisting were necessary and non-negotiable. Coincidentally, they were timed to precede state elections that the government could not afford to lose, while nothing in the underlying shape of agricultural markets was rebuilt in their place. It cost the government nothing other than the appearance of having lost. Perhaps mathematics works differently in politics, for this was the cheaper loss to take. Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation on 25 July 2026 is quite similar to the above. He did not fall, rather, he was released, and with impeccable timing. 

For roughly ten weeks, a satirical political party calling itself the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) had occupied Jantar Mantar demanding the isteefa, resignation letter, of the Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, over a NEET-UG paper leak and a wave of student suicides tied to the same. The name of this party traces back to an unlikely origin, from a Supreme Court hearing on 15 May 2026, in which the Chief Justice Of India, Mr. Surya Kant, adjudicating a case about fraudulent law degrees and senior-advocate designations, described a category of aggrieved young activists and litigants as vermin, notably “cockroaches”, and “parasites of society.” Kant later said the remark had been wrenched out of context. Even if we assume this as true, it did not stop Abhijeet Dipke, a Boston University graduate, from converting the insult into a satirical party banner within a day. Whether that reclamation is righteous or merely clever is a matter of taste. Either way, a joke told by the country’s top judge became the recruiting poster for its most inconvenient protest movement in years. Proof, if any were needed, that irony is the one branch of government nobody can prorogue.

Over the ten weeks between the movement’s arrival at Jantar Mantar and Pradhan’s resignation, the state’s response escalated along a fairly legible track. Protest permits at the designated site were contested and revoked at points. Sonam Wangchuk, a Ladakhi engineer-activist whose hunger strike gave the movement its sympathetic face, was forcibly removed from the protest site by plainclothed police on 18 July and taken to hospital under a Delhi High Court order citing his deteriorating health. On 20 July, as Dipke led the Sansad March, police met tens of thousands of demonstrators with baton charges and tear gas, and the site itself was reportedly dismantled with stage and tents cleared in a second sweep. Only after the crowd had proven too large to disperse did Health Minister J.P. Nadda grant CJP spokespeople a ten-minute meeting, and only after that did Pradhan’s resignation follow.

Some deployment of force at a protest of this size is unremarkable in any democracy. But the question to ask is whether the force is fixed to a specific, articulable public-safety problem, or aimed at the protest’s persistence as such. Clearing a stage and tents from a legally designated protest ground, revoking permits at a site with no history of violence, and forcibly extracting a hunger striker under a “commotion” pretext are measures aimed at the protest continuing to exist. Language did its own share of the work in this protest. Pradhan, in the one moment he broke from the register of ministerial patience, told NDTV that the protesters were a “B-team of terror groups” trying to divide the country.

Of course, this is a claim substantiated by nothing at all, and outlived his tenure. At this moment, it is available, unattached to a name the public has learned to boo, to whoever succeeds him. Telangana’s BJP president, who in early June alleged the CJP was being propped up by “urban Naxals” and foreign financiers, working through the Aam Aadmi Party to mislead India’s youth. The above term has been the BJP’s preferred label for inconvenient dissent for journalists, lawyers, students alike for the better part of a decade. Its function has always been the same, i.e., converting a protester with a grievance into a conspirator with a handler. It is a tidy piece of political jujitsu. Accuse the cockroaches of secretly reporting to a shadowy insurgency, and suddenly the infestation metaphor writes its own sequel. 

None of this is to say the government’s account is without its own defensible logic. It would argue, not unreasonably, that it held its position while investigating, offered talks through Nadda once the movement proved durable, agreed to fast-track courts for the paper-leak cases, and ultimately let a minister go when the evidence and the public mood both turned against him. The troubling version of the same timeline is that each concession arrived only after the previous one failed to disperse the crowd, that fast-track courts address prosecution rather than the National Testing Agency’s design, and that a sequence of holding firm, offering talks, conceding a person, and leaving the system untouched is repeatable because it has the shape of accountability without requiring the underlying incentives to change at all. What should not survive scrutiny on either reading is the idea that dismantling a legally sited protest camp, hospitalising a hunger striker under police escort, and calling the marchers a terrorist front are simply the ordinary furniture of public order. They are choices made by particular officials, and they are the part of this story most worth holding the state to account for. 

Every state government watching this, wherever the next paper leaks or the next hunger strike gathers a crowd too large to disperse, now has a case study in how a ten-week standoff was resolved without a change in law or agency oversight, and a ready-made vocabulary for the next round. It is about time we learn to be wary of a resolution that has the shape of accountability without its substance, and wary too of a rhetorical toolkit built to make dissent easier to delegitimize than to answer. Governments and protest movements alike have an incentive to insist on only one reading of events, and observers should be careful about adopting either version wholesale. The Cockroach Janata Party understands this better than most of its coverage does. Leaders of any movement have only ever been intermediaries for a demand that belongs to the crowd itself, and does not end because one of its intermediaries has been satisfied. A leaderless demand is much harder to negotiate with but also much harder to suppress, since there is no single resignation left to extract that will make it stop, and, it turns out, no amount of insecticide-grade name-calling that quite does the job either.

Pradhan is gone. The National Testing Agency is not, and neither is the underlying question the protest was always about: whether India’s examination system can be trusted, and by whom that trust gets restored. Neither is the clause in Pradhan’s own resignation letter distinguishing the movement’s legitimate aspirations from its supposed capture by “anti-national forces”. Which of those two futures actually arrives is not yet decided. It is worth watching for, regardless of which side of this argument one started on. Don’t be distracted from asking the right questions. The times are on our side.