The tear gas hung low over the approach to India's parliament on Monday. More than 10,000 people, many of them young, pressed forward under banners of the Cockroach Janta Party. They wanted the education minister gone and a system that no longer treated their futures as disposable.
Police answered with batons and canisters. The crack of charges mixed with the shouts of those who had travelled from across the country. It was the opening day of the monsoon session. Security had been tight even before the march began. Permission for the protest had never been granted.
The anger did not appear from nowhere. It started in May when a Supreme Court judge likened unemployed youth to cockroaches. Abhijeet Dipke turned the insult into satire and then into something sharper. What began online became a movement that now fills the streets.
That same month the NEET medical entrance exam was cancelled after a paper leak. Nearly 2.2 million students had to sit it again under heavy guard. The chaos exposed cracks that had been widening for years. More than a dozen student suicides have been linked to the stress that followed. Families spoke of children who saw no path left.
The protests at Jantar Mantar began on 6 June and never really stopped. Tents and placards turned the old observatory into a permanent camp. On 28 June the activist Sonam Wangchuk joined them with an indefinite hunger strike. He was taken to hospital by force on 18 July. Dipke himself began his own fast the same day and ended it on Monday.
Representatives of the party met Health Minister J. P. Nadda that afternoon. They handed over a memorandum calling for Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation and deeper changes to the examination system. Nadda said he would take the concerns inside government. It was a small opening, the kind offered when pressure becomes impossible to ignore.