Nandini
Every generation inherits institutions that need repair and India has no shortage of them.
Education, the police and the judiciary all need reform, each having accumulated structural weaknesses over decades. In many respects, India’s policing and judicial architecture still bear the imprint of a colonial state, designed to govern and control rather than serve citizens in a confident democratic republic.
The education system, meanwhile, has struggled to keep pace with the aspirations of a young and ambitious nation. Too often, it rewards rote learning over curiosity, conformity over creativity, and examinations over genuine education. Layered onto these weaknesses is a reservation system that many Indians increasingly regard as inequitable, fuelling resentment and raising difficult questions about how India can balance social justice with merit in the decades ahead.
It is education, however, that now finds itself at the centre of national debate following the NEET paper leak.
Questions over accountability are entirely legitimate, and public anger is understandable. This government, simply by virtue of being in office, bears responsibility not only for addressing the immediate failure but also for repairing systemic deficiencies that have disadvantaged students for decades.
India’s Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on 25 July after 36 days of protests by the Cockroach Janta Party led by 30-year-old Abhijeet Dipke. But the debate extends far beyond one examination or one minister. It raises a more fundamental question: How should a democracy pursue reform?
The challenge is not merely to protest when institutions fail, but to ensure that protest ultimately produces better institutions rather than deeper political divisions.
Peaceful protest is one of democracy’s essential safety valves. Throughout history, it has exposed institutional weakness that governments were reluctant or slow to address.
The greater concern, however, is that many now believe peaceful, reasoned engagement is no longer enough. Across political parties, governments too often appear deaf to measured criticism and proposals for reform. The lesson citizens increasingly draw is a troubling one: unless they take to the streets, they simply will not be heard.
That is precisely where the problem begins. Once a protest gathers momentum and starts exerting political pressure, it rarely remains the preserve of those who initiated it.
Political parties, ideological groups, public personalities and professional activists inevitably hitch their wagons to the movement. The success of a protest often attracts new actors whose priority is no longer the original grievance but the political opportunities it presents.
They certainly bring organisational muscle, funding and media attention, amplifying a movement far beyond its original reach. Too often, however, they also bring their foot soldiers, veterans of agitation politics and performative outrage that overwhelms the cause they claim to champion.
The conversation gradually shifts from repairing a failing institution to assigning political blame. Cameras drift away from students and settle on politicians, celebrities and, increasingly, social media influencers. Television studios stop debating reform and begin keeping score of political winners and losers.
Soon, citizens are left wondering what the protest is actually about. Is it examination reform, ministerial accountability, institutional credibility or simply another opportunity to weaken a political opponent? Once those questions eclipse the original grievance, the movement has begun to lose its way.
There were other signs that the conversation had travelled well beyond NEET. Alongside demands for examination reform, some slogans carried overt religious overtones, including remarks that many viewed as deliberately provocative towards the country’s majority community and its revered deities.
Whatever the intent behind those slogans, they had little to do with the integrity of a national examination. Their presence suggested that, for some participants, the protest had become a vehicle for airing far broader ideological and cultural grievances.
And once substance gives way to spectacle, the quality of public debate also declines with it. What also disturbed many citizens during the recent demonstrations was not merely the anger but the coarsening of public discourse. Political disagreement gave way to crude abuse, sexualised insults and the dehumanisation of opponents. Regardless of one’s political persuasion, that represented a lowering of democratic standards rather than an elevation of democratic debate. It also left many wondering whether those who dominated the headlines genuinely represented the students whose future was at stake.
Some of those who attracted the greatest attention appeared more intent on creating the next viral sensation, using language calculated to shock, than on explaining what had disillusioned them or why they had taken to the streets in the first place. Whether that reflected youthful exuberance, the incentives of online platforms or political coaching is open to debate.
A Prime Minister who has repeatedly been returned to office by the electorate became the central character in a debate that ought to have remained focused on students, examinations and structural reform.
Encouragingly, the conversation now appears to be moving back towards where it always belonged. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has chosen to communicate directly with young Indians, acknowledging both their anxieties and the need to restore confidence in the examination system. More significantly, the constitution of a high-powered committee to recommend systemic changes signals an acceptance that the answer lies not merely in fixing responsibility for one paper leak, but in fixing the system itself.
That is a welcome shift. Committees, however, are only the beginning. The real test will be whether their recommendations translate into a more secure, transparent and resilient examination system.
Yesterday’s (27 July) debate in Parliament exposed the difference between supporting a protest and supporting reform. Several parties that had stood shoulder to shoulder with the protesters chose to oppose the introduction of the Anti-Paper Leak Bill. They are fully entitled to challenge the contents of any legislation. But opposing reform at the very moment it enters Parliament inevitably raises questions.
It is one thing to march with students demanding change. It is another to engage with the legislative process when change is actually placed before the House. Citizens are entitled to ask whether the objective was always examination reform or whether the protest had become another instrument in a larger political contest.
The question, therefore, is why reform in India has become so politically charged?
The immediate controversy may be about NEET. The larger story is about India itself and a political landscape transformed by successive electoral victories for one side and repeated setbacks for the other.
As the Opposition has seen its footprint shrink over successive elections, the incentive to convert public discontent into political momentum has only grown stronger. That reality now forms part of the backdrop against which almost every major national protest unfolds.
Politics alone, however, does not explain the intensity of these contests. The other part of the story is India’s own transformation.
For decades, India was dismissed as being trapped in what economists famously called the Hindu rate of growth. It became shorthand for a country supposedly destined for permanent mediocrity. Slow growth, bureaucratic inertia and a lack of ambition were assumed to be permanent features of the Indian story.
Today, India stands among the world’s fastest-growing major economies. A nation once lectured about its limitations now finds itself being studied for its scale, resilience and growing strategic importance.
Economic transformation has been accompanied by something equally significant – a renewed confidence in its civilisational identity.
Increasing numbers of Hindus today express their faith publicly and unapologetically, much as followers of other major religions have long done.
Whether one welcomes or questions that change, it represents a profound departure from the cultural hesitancy that characterised much of post-Independence India.
A society that for decades often viewed itself through borrowed intellectual frameworks is increasingly seeking to understand itself through its own history, traditions and civilisational memory.
That shift has generated admiration in some quarters and unease in others. The trajectory of a nation of 1.4 billion people inevitably matters beyond its borders, ensuring that India’s internal debates attract growing international attention. For some, they also present opportunities to amplify existing political and social fault lines.
Indeed, a pattern has become discernible over the past decade, one sufficiently consistent that it now merits examination as something more than coincidence. A local grievance erupts; within days, a coordinated ecosystem of activists, commentators and sympathetic platforms mobilises around it; and sections of the global media amplify it as fresh evidence of a democracy supposedly in crisis.
The sequencing repeats itself with a regularity that appears too structured to be organic. What this pattern suggests, on analysis, is that the underlying objective is rarely confined to the original grievance at all — it appears, instead, to extend toward destabilising India and weakening, or ultimately dislodging, a government that has been repeatedly re-elected by its own citizens.
Underpinning this ecosystem, moreover, is what looks increasingly like a layer of foreign funding, channelled through advocacy networks and non-profits — an architecture whose deeper aim seems to be fraying India’s internal cohesion and, in its most extreme expression, nudging the country toward balkanisation. No single grievance proves this by itself; it is the recurrence of the pattern, protest after protest, that makes the analysis compelling. The shape of this phenomenon is now familiar enough that it cannot be dismissed and requires serious investigation.
Given the above, India is likely to see one agitation after another between now and 2029 till the next general elections are held in the country. Some will arise from genuine public grievances. Others will be driven principally by electoral strategy or even more nefarious motives. That is the geo-political reality of the unease caused by India’s rise as a global powerhouse.
The challenge now for India is to ensure that every legitimate public grievance becomes an opportunity to strengthen institutions rather than deepen political divisions and become issues to be hijacked by the enemies of the state.
This generation has inherited a country that requires courage to reform its systems. The next generation will inherit the consequences of whether we succeeded.
Building stronger institutions is rarely dramatic work. There will be setbacks and we know there will be resistance. There will also be days when progress appears painfully slow. Yet that is the nature of nation-building. It is a marathon, not a sprint.
In all of this, it is worth remembering that history rarely remembers who shouted the loudest. It remembers who built what lasted.
Contributor: Nandini Bahri Dhanda is an Interior Architect. She has lived across sixteen states in India and travelled extensively around the world. She is a well-known commentator whose interests span art, culture, history and politics.
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