NEET Protests: India's Exam Crisis and the Politics of Waiting

What kind of citizenship is produced when education, employment, and protest are all administered through waiting?

(Illustration: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

As thousands of supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) attempted to walk from Jantar Mantar towards Parliament on 20 July, Delhi Police used tear gas and batons.

The police later said 118 officers had been injured, while the CJP said 60 protesters were hurt. At least 70 people were reportedly detained. These figures might be contested, but what is clear is that a protest centred on institutional accountability ended with citizens and police accusing one another of violence.

The next day, a smaller group returned to Jantar Mantar under heavy security. CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke said that the movement would continue peacefully but would not attempt another march because the police would hurt young people.

On 20 July, two CJP representatives met Union minister JP Nadda after the clashes and submitted their demands. The government offered consideration—not a public timetable. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan remained in office, and had not provided the political account that the movement was demanding.

The sequence condenses the problem. Weeks of protest inside an authorised enclosure did not produce a structured negotiation.

Leaving that enclosure produced force, detentions, and a brief official audience. The CJP has now returned to the place from which it was first ignored.

The Politics of Waiting

In my first article on the movement, I examined why young Indians turned an insult into a political symbol. In the second essay, my co-author Soumi Banerjee and I argued that the 'cockroach' disrupted the polished image of respectable civil society.

Those arguments explained the CJP’s symbolic force.

Delhi now raises a harder question. What kind of citizenship is produced when education, employment, and protest are all administered through waiting?

My response to the above question is that the examination crisis has become a system for transferring public failure into private cost. The authority controls the date, the paper, the security chain, the contractors, the result, and the remedy. When any part fails, the candidate pays in time, money, and uncertainty. When candidates protest, they are again asked to wait.

This is more than bureaucratic delay. It is a distribution of responsibility in which the State keeps decision-making power while citizens absorb the consequences.

Two questions are being allowed to collapse into one. Criminal culpability asks who obtained or circulated a paper unlawfully. Political responsibility asks why the system was vulnerable, what public authorities knew, how contractors were supervised, why the first remedy was chosen, and who will compensate those harmed.

A minister need not have touched a leaked paper to answer for the institutional order under his authority. By treating the criminal investigation as the whole question, government can postpone the political one until police produce a final file. Evidence is essential for conviction. It cannot become an alibi for indefinite public silence.

Public Failure and Private Time

The scale of NEET makes any institutional failure a mass political event.

On 2 May, the National Testing Agency (NTA) said more than 22.79 lakh candidates had registered for NEET in 2026. It described an elaborate security architecture involving GPS tracking, central CCTV monitoring, biometric authentication, and deployment of more than two lakh personnel. Eight days later, the agency acknowledged an investigation into alleged irregularities. The 3 May examination was cancelled, and the agency issued a notice for a national resit on 21 June. Close to 20 lakh candidates sat the exam again—and the results were declared on 16 July.

A resit is not repair.

It can provide a valid rank, but it cannot restore a month of preparation. It cannot reimburse every train ticket, hotel room, day of unpaid leave, coaching instalment or rearranged care obligation. It cannot recreate the mental state in which a candidate first entered the examination hall. A fee refund returns one payment. It does not return time, and it does not distribute the loss equally.

This is where research on administrative burden becomes politically useful. Donald Moynihan, Pamela Herd, and Hope Harvey identify learning costs, compliance costs, and psychological costs in encounters between citizens and the State.

Their more important claim is that the allocation of these costs is often a political choice. An administration decides how much uncertainty people must navigate and whether the institution or the individual will bear the work of correcting failure. NEET shows this distribution in unusually stark form. The NTA issues a new notice. A candidate reorganises life.

Waiting is not an empty interval between two official acts. It is one of the ways power is experienced. Javier Auyero’s study of people seeking welfare and identification documents describes how uncertainty turns citizens into patients of the State. They learn that their role is to remain available while the institution controls the clock.

Liene Ozoliņa extends this insight by describing waiting as the shadow temporality of contemporary governance. Her ethnography shows how public programmes combine acceleration and delay, then recast endurance as a test of the subject’s responsibility. People are encouraged to use the interval to improve themselves rather than ask who produced the interval.

That moral instruction is familiar to the Indian aspirant. Study harder. Stay calm. Do not be distracted. Trust the investigation. Prepare again.

The language sounds therapeutic, but its politics is severe. Institutional failure is converted into a demand for individual discipline. Sarah Sharma’s work on the unequal politics of time helps identify the asymmetry. Some actors possess the power to set schedules, absorb disruption, and make the time of others available to them. Others perform the temporal labour that keeps the system functioning. Examination candidates perform exactly this labour. They remain ready for a calendar they do not control.

Inbuilt Inequalities

The burden is intensified by scarcity. The 2025 Periodic Labour Force Survey placed unemployment among people aged 15 to 29 at 9.9 percent and urban youth unemployment at 13.6 percent. It also estimated that one quarter of people aged 15 to 29 were outside employment, education, and training. These measures do not capture every form of insecure work or the years spent moving between coaching, examinations, and short contracts. They do explain why an examination date can organise the life of an entire household. When secure futures are narrow, control over the gate becomes control over time itself.

Nor does every candidate possess the same capacity to wait. One family can finance another month in a coaching town. Another must borrow for a second journey. A rural candidate may travel hundreds of kilometres. A woman’s preparation may depend on negotiating relief from domestic work. A disabled candidate must arrange access again.

The compulsory resit, therefore, operates like a regressive tax on time. Formally, every candidate receives the same new date. Substantively, the cost rises as a household’s resources fall. The appearance of equal treatment can conceal a deeply unequal remedy.

This is why compensation cannot be limited to an identical fee refund. Equality after institutional failure requires attention to the different burdens that a formally uniform decision creates.

The government’s responsibility cannot be reduced to catching a leak network.

Parliament enacted the Public Examinations Act in 2024. It criminalises unfair means, makes offences cognisable and not eligible for bail or compounding, and provides imprisonment of 5-10 years for organised crime. Yet, it gives candidates no automatic right to compensation, no independent appeal body, and no guaranteed explanation to Parliament. Its organising subject is the offender. The harmed candidate appears mainly as someone whom the criminal law promises to reassure.

That design permits a familiar displacement. Failure is narrated as criminal intrusion from outside the State, even when the examination depends on public officials, private vendors, and chains of delegated authority.

A leak may indeed involve organised crime. But a secure examination is also a public duty. The State cannot outsource performance and retain only the authority to announce that somebody else betrayed it.

Visibility and Erasure

The politics of time in the examination hall reappeared in the geography of protest. Jantar Mantar permits dissent close to national power, but at a controlled distance from it. Harleen Kaur’s history of protest space in New Delhi shows how the capital has repeatedly reorganised the permitted location and visibility of dissent. A designated site can protect the right of assembly. It can also allow government to treat assembly as a completed democratic service. Citizens have been given a place to speak, and authority feels no corresponding obligation to listen.

That is why the march towards Parliament attains significance. It challenged the conversion of protest into stationary display. This does not make every police restriction illegitimate, and it does not excuse stones allegedly thrown at officers. The CJP must insist on non-violence, cooperate with an independent inquiry, and resist the temptation to treat confrontation as proof of courage. A movement created by arbitrary institutional conduct cannot answer arbitrariness with its own.

The greater burden nevertheless lies with the State. Weeks of peaceful presence produced little public engagement. Once protesters moved, the administration displayed an operational capacity that had been missing from its political response. Barricades, closures, detentions, tear gas, and batons arrived with speed.

A reasoned answer to the examination crisis did not. The asymmetry is unmistakable. The State can fail millions without a named official surrendering office, while a citizen crossing a barricade becomes answerable within minutes.

Sonam Wangchuk’s hunger strike exposed an even more troubling version of this asymmetry. After nearly three weeks without food, he was moved to hospital against the wishes expressed by him and his family. The authorities had a duty to protect life. Yet, medical intervention did not resolve the political refusal that had placed his life at risk.

Banu Bargu’s work on the body as an instrument of political struggle explains the terrible logic of such protests. When ordinary channels seem closed, a dissenter uses the last resource that authority cannot fully ignore. The body becomes both claim and evidence.

This is not a democratic success. It is a sign that ordinary answerability has failed.

The CJP should also resist any flattering story in which its fast, its march or its online following becomes the natural centre of Indian dissent. One may recall Irom Sharmila’s fast for 16 years against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in Manipur. She endured force feeding, detention, annual release, and rearrest. Sayantan Saha Roy’s recent ethnographic study of her struggle examines both the force and the limits of hunger striking against modern State power. Sharmila’s cause, location, and confrontation with militarised law were profoundly different from the CJP’s examination campaign. The comparison is not one of moral equivalence.

It is a comparison of public legibility. An examination grievance carried by digitally connected aspirants in the national capital enters mainstream political vision more readily than a struggle against emergency power in the Northeast.

The CJP’s visibility is not merely the reward for organisational brilliance. It is partly produced by metropolitan proximity, a recognisable middle-class aspiration, the cultural authority of competitive examinations, and a media system drawn to spectacle. A movement that mistakes this advantage for universal representation will reproduce the very hierarchy it opposes.

The test for the CJP is, therefore, whether it can turn visibility into solidarity. Its politics must include candidates whose lives do not resemble its most visible speakers. It must connect examination integrity with caste discrimination, language, disability, gender, regional inequality, public education, delayed recruitment and insecure work. Otherwise, the 'cockroach' risks becoming another image through which one segment of youth speaks as though it were the whole.

The government’s obligation is larger still. The unequal visibility of suffering is not created by movements alone. It is created when public institutions answer those who can reach Delhi, fill a camera frame or make their bodies medically urgent, while expecting distant and less legible citizens to endure. The answer is not to give the CJP less attention. It is to build institutions that do not require spectacle before injury becomes audible.

Accountability Begins Where Punishment Ends

The CJP’s Examination Reform Charter, released on 15 July, contains several serious proposals. It seeks an independent examinations ombudsman, public audits of examination bodies and vendors, automatic refunds and compensation, protection of age limits and attempts, a fixed calendar, a welfare fund and continuing parliamentary scrutiny. Its most important move is conceptual. It treats candidates as citizens with enforceable claims, not as customers who may receive another notice when an agency fails.

The charter is strongest when it changes who bears risk. Automatic compensation would make failure costly to the institution rather than only to the individual. Protection of age limits and attempts would recognise that eligibility itself can be consumed by delay. Public vendor contracts and security audits would make outsourcing visible. A statutory appeal route would prevent the agency accused of failure from becoming the final judge of its own remedy. These are not acts of generosity. They are elementary devices of public accountability.

But the CJP’s document also needs the precision it demands from government. The charter says that the minimum sentence for organised paper leak networks should rise from three years to 10. The existing law already prescribes a minimum of five years and a maximum of 10 for organised crime. Three years applies to general offences. This is important to note. A movement asking Parliament to replace a statute must first describe it accurately.

Its punitive emphasis also deserves scepticism. India does not lack severe criminal language. The current law already makes every offence under it cognisable and not eligible for bail or compounding. Raising a minimum sentence cannot correct opaque procurement, weak supervision, fragmented authority or the absence of candidate remedies. A longer prison term imposed after the event does not prevent public agencies from repeating the conditions that made the event possible. The CJP should consider providing greater weight to its ombudsman, audit, compensation and parliamentary proposals than to the familiar promise of harsher punishment.

Beyond the Immediate Salve

Other demands require public reasoning rather than applause. Dissolving the NTA may be justified, but a new commission can inherit the same contracts and habits under a different name.

Allowing states to leave NEET for some seats raises genuine questions about federalism, mobility, and standards. Requiring a retired Supreme Court judge to lead every inquiry may turn judicial prestige into an administrative substitute. The CJP should publish legal notes, invite criticism and revise its charter with candidates, state governments, teachers, disability groups, organisations working against caste discrimination, mental health professionals and examination administrators.

It must also submit itself to the accountability it invokes. Who can amend its programme? How are representatives chosen? How is money raised and spent? How can members challenge Dipke or other public figures? What prevents a large online audience from becoming rule by the most visible account?

Francesca Polletta’s study of participatory movements shows how informality can generate democratic energy while concealing exclusion. The CJP does not need to imitate an established party. It does need published accounts, conflict rules, transparent decisions and leadership that extends beyond an English-speaking metropolitan public.

Such scepticism towards the CJP does not divide responsibility equally between a young movement and the Union government. It clarifies the asymmetry. The CJP has existed for months.

The government has possessed legislative power, budgets, agencies, police and parliamentary time for years. A drafting error in a protest charter should be corrected. A mass examination failure under public authority demands political responsibility.

That responsibility begins with disclosure. The Union government should publish a verified chronology of the breach, every relevant vendor contract, the chain of official decisions and the reasons for cancelling the first examination. An investigation cannot remain an indefinite promise. Its findings, evidence and disciplinary consequences must enter the public record within a fixed period.

It also requires repair. Compensation should cover more than the examination fee. A statutory formula can recognise travel, accommodation and lost wages, while age and attempt protections should operate automatically. Candidates need an appeal body independent of the NTA, and Parliament needs a mandatory ministerial statement after any failure affecting a defined number of candidates. Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation would not by itself reform the system. Yet ministerial responsibility must not be ignored because institutions do not become accountable when every failure dissolves into a contractor, an investigation and a press release.

The meeting with Nadda is inadequate unless it produces a public process. The government should release the CJP’s memorandum, state which demands it accepts or rejects, identify the responsible officials, and publish dates for further response. Asking for time after citizens have already surrendered months is not neutral nor okay. It continues the transfer that caused the protest.

The CJP now faces a difficult transition. It must convert an image into an institution without losing the irreverence that gave it force. It must remain nonviolent without becoming governably silent. It must criticise meritocracy without abandoning the demand for fair selection. It must use its visibility to widen the field of injury rather than crown itself the voice of all youth.

The government faces a more basic examination. Can it accept that a valid result does not erase the injury that preceded it? Can it recognise time as a public resource whose theft demands remedy? Can it answer dissent before a fast becomes medically urgent or a march reaches a barricade?

Young Indians have spent years proving that they are ready. The State must now prove that it is answerable. Another request for patience is not a passing answer.

(The writer is Senior Lecturer and Researcher, Department of Cultural Sciences, Linnaeus University, Sweden, and Affiliated researcher, University of Oslo, Norway. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint does not endorse or is responsible for it.)