(Guru Prakash)
Before a single word of politics, a word of conscience. For a young Indian, a competitive examination is not a single morning in one year. It is the compression of a childhood’s savings, a family’s faith, and a small town’s hope into three hours and an answer sheet. When a leak compromises that sheet, something more than a test is broken; trust is broken. I’ve spent enough time in the classroom to know the look of a student when the promises she built her hopes on suddenly vanish.
And yet a mature democracy must be honest enough to draw one line: Between those who grieve and those who have learnt to feed on grief.
Let no one mistake the Bharatiya Janata Party for a party that fears dissent. We are, in our very origins, a child of dissent. The Jana Sangh and the movement around it were forged in protest, in Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s sacrifice for the full integration of the nation, in the jails of the Emergency where Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Lal Krishna Advani and Nanaji Deshmukh sat in defence of the Constitution. The Ram Janmabhoomi movement was a mass mobilisation on a scale independent India had rarely seen. Dissent expands the democratic space of a nation, provided it is not weaponised to manufacture a permanent “us versus them”.
But experience also teaches caution, because I have watched what becomes of movements. The JP movement began as a moral revolt against authoritarianism and ended, rightly, as a vehicle of democratic change. The Anna Hazare andolan I witnessed more closely. It began in 2011 as a genuine call against the rampant corruption of the UPA-II government. And then, slowly, the idea was captured. Political entrepreneurs sensed the opportunity.
The ideals did not survive the personal ambitions of those leaders.
I recall this history not to disparage today’s students, but to protect them from it. Because on the streets right now, three very different actors are being deliberately blurred into one.
The first are the students, and their grievance is entirely legitimate. They want fair examinations, honest accountability, and transparency. They are owed all three, without qualification.
The second is the government, and its conduct is a matter of record. The compromised paper was cancelled. The CBI traced the leak toward a source within the testing agency itself; a retired teacher and an insider are among those arrested, and the government has said that the strictest actions will be taken. A fresh NEET-UG was conducted within weeks. The Education Minister did not claim the system was perfect; he said that even after the reforms, a breach still occurred and the government would correct it. The Prime Minister posted on X that “we have decided to set up fast-track courts to ensure swift and stringent punishment for those involved in paper leaks”.
The third actor is the one the students should be warned about: The political opportunists. Watch how the demand evolves. It begins with a call to fix the leak. Soon it becomes a demand for the Education Minister’s resignation, then the Prime Minister’s resignation, then for the entire system to be torn down, before culminating in the dangerous suggestion that India, too, must settle its political disputes on the streets rather than through its institutions. A paper leak is an institutional failure that demands correction. Regime instability is a political objective. The two are fundamentally different.
It is here that the Leader of the Opposition owes the country an answer. When Rahul Gandhi chose to stage a dharna outside the Prime Minister’s residence, disregarding security protocol and inconveniencing ordinary citizens, the government, through the Minister of State in the PMO, conveyed within the hour its readiness for a full discussion on NEET on the floor of the House. The intention was never dialogue; it was always to create a politics of spectacle.
The BJP has sought not merely to speak to young Indians, but to entrust them with responsibility. The appointment of 45-year-old Nitin Nabin as the party’s youngest national president reflects a deliberate effort to bring a new generation into positions of leadership. My own appointment, as a Dalit law teacher and the party’s youngest national spokesperson, is another expression of that belief.
Students deserve justice. Parents deserve confidence. The government deserves scrutiny, unsparing and continuous. The Opposition deserves its space, fully and without harassment. But democracy deserves something greater than endless agitation. India’s republic has always been strengthened by dissent; it has never once been strengthened by those who mistake every moment of dissent for an opportunity to inherit power. We owe students answers, reforms, and accountability, and that, not the theatre outside the Parliament, is the work this government intends to finish.
The writer is national spokesperson, BJP