Silence cannot be an option when the country is held hostage by a violent mob

What began as a protest seeking accountability for a paper leak has, over the last few weeks, turned into a ground for activities that have no relation, direct or distant, to NEET, to exams, or to education. The protest lost its way, lost its path and lost its vision quite a while back. Anyone still lending it support today is doing so out of vested interest, not out of concern for students.

Let us be clear about the facts first, because facts are what this entire agitation was supposedly built on.

NEET-UG 2026 was held on May 3 this year, with over 22 lakh aspirants appearing across the country, out of nearly 22.75 lakh who had registered. Within days, reports emerged that a “guess paper” circulating before the exam had an unusually high overlap with the actual questions. The National Testing Agency cancelled the exam on May 12 and handed the matter to the CBI. The agency arrested a coaching institute owner from Latur in Maharashtra on May 18, and investigators later found that the racket behind this leak had also compromised the NEET-UG 2025 paper. A re-exam was conducted on June 21 for over 22 lakh students. They appeared, they wrote the exam, and results followed. The culprits were caught. They are being tried under the law, as they should be.

This is not where it should have ended, but this is where the anger of genuine students should have found its resolution. And to its credit, the government did not stay silent either. Just this week, the Prime Minister announced that the Centre will set up fast-track courts specifically to ensure swift trial and stringent punishment in paper leak cases, calling it part of a continuing effort to safeguard the interests of the country’s youth. Accountability is being fixed. Responsibility is being assigned. This is precisely how a democratic government is expected to respond to a genuine grievance.

And it is not as if NEET was an isolated case this year. Barely a week ago, Punjab Police busted a cheating racket during the Pharmacy Officer Recruitment Examination conducted by Baba Farid University of Health Sciences, detaining 35 people including seven alleged masterminds, and recovering pen cameras and battery-operated wireless devices that candidates had allegedly paid between three lakh and thirteen lakh rupees to use. University officials have since clarified there is no evidence of an actual paper leak, that the fraud was carried out through concealed electronics during the exam itself. Even so, it is exactly the kind of exam-integrity story that a protest genuinely rooted in education would have seized upon immediately. Instead, there has been near total silence about it at Jantar Mantar. That silence tells its own story. If the movement at the heart of Delhi’s protest site was still about exams, this would have been front and centre. It was not even mentioned. Which raises the obvious question: is this protest about students anymore, or about something else entirely wearing a student’s badge?

Because what has actually been happening at Jantar Mantar since early June has very little to do with any of that.

Article 370 was abrogated by Parliament in 2019, applying the very principle of equality before law that Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar envisaged for every citizen of this country, one Constitution, one set of rights, no separate status carved out for anyone. That was integration. What is being demanded at the protest site today, under different slogans, is a return to appeasement dressed up as grievance.

“Mera Ling Meri Azaadi” has nothing whatsoever to do with a paper leak. No one in this country today stops any adult from living their life or loving whom they choose. It is worth remembering which government actually opposed the decriminalisation of Section 377 in earlier years, a colonial-era provision that criminalised consensual relations between adults and was, for decades, a tool of harassment against the LGBTQ community. It was the Supreme Court, and a government under Narendra Modi that chose not to stand in its way, that finally allowed that decriminalisation to go through in 2018. To invoke this slogan now, at a protest ostensibly about exam fairness, is opportunism, not activism.

Then there is the conduct on the ground itself. On July 20, what was billed as a students’ demonstration against the paper leak descended into stone-pelting and vandalism of police vehicles near Jantar Mantar, leaving more than a hundred police personnel injured over subsequent days, several of them bleeding from head injuries. A protester was caught on camera brandishing a brick and threatening policemen. Videos have surfaced of individuals at the site making remarks so inflammatory they do not deserve repetition here, one clip purportedly shows a participant calling for the assassination of the Prime Minister, another shows a woman mocking Lord Ram and the Ram Mandir with open contempt. Journalists covering the protest, including women reporters, have alleged being heckled and manhandled. None of this belongs anywhere near a protest about exam fairness. All of it belongs to a script written with an entirely different purpose.

Videos have also surfaced of protesters at the site who, when asked, could not answer basic questions about the very exam they claim to be protesting over. Meanwhile, the students who are actually serious about NEET or any other competitive exam are doing exactly what serious students do after a government crackdown and a completed re-examination: they are back in their books, preparing for the next attempt, not camped out at Jantar Mantar in the Delhi heat.

Let there be no confusion about this. Every citizen has the right to protest.

That right is one of the pillars of our democracy, and no column, no government and no commentator should ever wish to see it diminished. But a right to protest is not a licence to pelt stones at policemen, to threaten the life of an elected Prime Minister, to insult the faith of a billion Hindus, to vandalise a rickshaw belonging to some poor driver who had nothing to do with any exam, or to hound journalists doing their job. That is not protest. That is disorder wearing the mask of protest, and the two must never be confused with each other.

The paper leak was real, it was addressed, and the guilty are being punished. What is happening at Jantar Mantar now is a different animal altogether, and the country would do well to see it for exactly what it is.

Varun Singh is a political analyst; Views presented are personal.