“They are the B-team of disruptive elements,” India’s Education Minister told a national television audience last month, describing the youth who have spent seven weeks camped at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. “Those who were rejected in democracy have returned in disguise… raising slogans for those who want the country broken.” It is a serviceable line for a television studio, and a considerably harder one to defend once you learn who else it swept up.
Among the protesters was a father from Gujarat, holding up his phone to record a message for the man he held responsible. His seventeen-year-old son had died by suicide in Ahmedabad, three days before he was due to retake the exam — the one he had already sat once, before the leak forced the government to void it. “Mera beta sab ke jaisa hi hai,” the father said, his voice breaking — my son was no different from anyone else. “Show them my son.”
That juxtaposition deserves more attention than either side of India’s current argument is giving it. A national examination failed. A family buried a child. And the conversation that followed was less about how the failure happened than about whether the people asking were secretly working against their own country.
From paper leak to proxy war
The facts of the leak itself are not seriously disputed. NEET-UG 2026 was cancelled after investigators found a leaked question bank matching large parts of the actual paper; the CBI has since arrested a professor and a school administrator with alleged access to the paper-setting process. Nearly 23 lakh students had sat for the exam, competing for roughly 1.3 lakh medical seats — almost twenty aspirants for every place, in a country where a medical degree remains one of the last credible promises of mobility a middle-class family can make to its children. Several students died by suicide in the aftermath; reported counts range from thirteen to twenty. The exact figure is contested. The scale of the grief is not.
What happened next is where the story divides. A satirical protest page, born from a Supreme Court remark about “cockroaches” that the Chief Justice later insisted was aimed at degree fraud rather than youth in general, grew into a genuine mass movement. Once it grew large enough to matter, the government’s posture shifted from answering its questions to auditing its loyalties. A Union minister claimed 49% of the movement’s social media following traced back to Pakistan, and only 9% to India — a figure independent estimates, and the movement’s own screen recordings, place closer to 94% Indian. The Education Minister went further, casting the protesters as people who wished to see the country broken. Neither claim addressed the leaked paper. Both addressed the people distressed by it.
A fair hearing for the government’s caution
This impulse does not deserve to be dismissed outright. Coordinated disinformation and the foreign amplification of domestic protest are real, well-documented phenomena, and a minister under sustained pressure to resign is entitled to ask who is organising against him. Verifying the provenance of a movement is a legitimate function of governance, not an inherently sinister one. The trouble lies in the execution. The claim about the movement’s following did not survive contact with the same open-source tools any newsroom could apply, and was published regardless. And a phrase as elastic as “disruptive elements working to break the country” will always be wide enough to catch almost anyone protesting in good faith — including, as it turned out, a father holding up a photograph of his dead son.
A word for the believers
Some of this burden falls on the government. Some falls on the young Indians cheering it on. A share of this country’s youth has watched the last two months and concluded that the protesters must be wrong simply because the government said so — that scrutiny of power is, by definition, disloyalty to the nation that power claims to represent. That is a comfortable position. It is not a serious one.
Supporting a government is not the same as absolving it. A citizen who genuinely wants this country to succeed should want its failures named quickly and fixed quietly, not buried under a counter-argument about who funds its critics. Those quick to brand every protester “anti-national” might ask a harder question of themselves: if their own sibling had earned a medical seat honestly, only to watch it vanish because someone else had bought the paper in advance, would they still call that family’s anger disruptive? Loyalty to a party asks nothing of you. Loyalty to the truth, even when it embarrasses the side you support, is what citizenship actually requires — and seeing that clearly is not betrayal. It is the only patriotism worth the name.
Dissent is not the disease
India does not need to reach far into its past for this pattern. Nearly every generation now credited with building this country’s institutions was, in its own time, accused of working against them — a temptation every government faces once criticism grows inconvenient enough, and one Indian history shows recurring across more than one political banner.
What separates a resilient democracy from a fragile one is not the presence of critics, which every democracy has, but whether the state argues with them on the merits rather than reclassifying them as enemies. A government secure in its record does not need to treat a question about examination integrity as an attack on the nation that administers the examination. Only a government unsure of its answer needs to change the subject that badly.
The silence tax
Institutions catch their own failures early only when the people closest to them feel safe enough to speak before the failure becomes a scandal. The original leak, tellingly, was first flagged by a coaching-centre teacher, not a government auditor — precisely the kind of person a culture of “why are you even asking” teaches to stay quiet the next time. Calling scrutiny disloyal does not make an institution more secure. It only makes it slower to hear the next warning.
What should actually happen next
None of this argues that every protester is right about everything, or that the government’s account should be assumed false simply because it is loud in its own defence. It argues for something narrower: settle the examination-integrity questions on evidence, prosecute the leak network on evidence, and build a standing, independent audit of how papers are set, printed and transported — rather than a committee convened after each scandal and quietly dissolved once the outrage fades. Judge the loyalty of the people asking hard questions by the quality of their arguments, not by a follower count that could not survive a basic fact-check.
Twenty-three lakh students are still waiting to learn whether the system deciding their careers deserves their trust. They are owed a government willing to argue that case on its merits, and a citizenry — including its most loyal young supporters of the government of the day — willing to ask, with open eyes, whether the truth is being served, or merely defended.
