The Paper Leaks Are The Government's Failure. The Cockroach Party Isn't The Answer Either.
Let’s start with what shouldn’t be up for debate: a country cannot keep running exams where the paper leaks before the students even sit down. NEET has been hit by leak allegations more than once now. SSC exams have had their own scandals. Every time this happens, lakhs of students who spent years preparing are told, sorry, start again, or worse, sit and wonder if the person next to them already had the answers a day earlier.
This is not bad luck. This is not “a few bad apples in the system.” When the same exams keep leaking year after year, that’s not an accident, that’s a system nobody fixed the first time, or the second. The government runs these exams. The government picks the vendors, the printers, the transport, the storage. When it fails, it isn’t the students’ fault, and it isn’t some vague “systemic issue” floating in the air with no owner. Someone signed off on the printing contract. Someone approved the storage facility. Someone decided not to prosecute the last leak all the way to the end. Accountability means naming that someone, not shuffling files between ministries until people stop asking.
So yes, the anger on the streets is earned. A generation that did everything right, studied on time, paid the coaching fees, showed up at the center at 6 AM, has every reason to be furious that the exam itself was rigged against them before it began. The education minister owes the country a real answer, not a press note. If heads have to roll for this to actually get fixed, they should roll.
Here’s where I part ways with the crowd at Jantar Mantar, though.
The Cockroach Janta Party started as a joke about a judge’s comment, and it caught fire because the joke was funny and the anger underneath it was real. Fair enough. But watch what’s happened since May. A satirical account has turned into a full political operation with spokespeople, press briefings, and a founder who flew in from the US the moment the cameras showed up. That’s not students organizing a protest. That’s a launch.
We’ve seen this movie before. India Against Corruption also began as a moral cause nobody could argue with; who’s against corruption? Anna Hazare fasted, the country watched, and within two years the people standing next to him on stage had turned that movement into a political party and a chief minister’s chair. The cause was real. The people who rode it to power weren’t the ones who paid for it with a hunger strike.
Abhijeet Dipke isn’t Anna Hazare, and he doesn’t need to be. He just needs the same playbook: give a real grievance a catchy name, front it with a face who understands media cycles better than most journalists do, and let the anger do the organizing for you. Ashutosh has spent years building an audience out of anti-government content and knows exactly how a moment like this gets monetized into relevance. Saurav Das speaking for the party on X, calmly laying out “demands,” is a spokesperson doing spokesperson things, which is a strange role for a “leaderless Gen Z movement” to suddenly need.
None of that means the demands are wrong. NEET needs fixing. The exam leaks need real consequences, not a committee. But a movement’s leadership can be self-interested even when its cause is just, and I don’t see why students on the ground should trust that the people holding the microphone this time are any less interested in a political future than the ones from 2011 were. The last time this exact template ran, the “movement” ended up as a chief minister’s office within three years.
Blame the government first. The paper leaks are theirs to answer for, and no protest movement, however catchy its name, changes whose job it was to stop them. But don’t hand your trust to whoever shows up holding the loudest microphone either. Students deserve both: a government that actually fixes the exam system, and a movement that doesn’t quietly turn their anger into somebody else’s career.