They called them cockroaches.

It was meant to reduce them—to make millions of young people seem small enough to squish and contemptible enough that no one would mourn their extermination.

But instead of crushing them, the insult only made them multiply.

Every blow from a police lathi—a long, heavy club used by Indian police—brought more bodies into the streets. Every attempt to scatter them revealed how many there were. What authorities dismissed as an infestation became an uprising powerful enough to drive India’s education minister from office and deliver one of the sharpest popular rebukes yet to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule.

When the questions themselves go up for sale, it is not only the examination that is compromised. The promise collapses with it.

At the center of the revolt was a test that promised merit and delivered betrayal.

India’s National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test, or NEET, determines admission to undergraduate medical programs. More than 2 million young people took the examination, often after their families had sacrificed for years to pay for specialized coaching. The test presents itself as an impartial judge: Everyone receives the same questions, the same clock, and the same numerical verdict.

Then the questions were leaked and reportedly sold in advance.

Young people told to outstudy one another discovered that some contestants might simply have purchased the finish line. The test promised an even starting line, but the marketplace had filled some lanes with hurdles and cleared others for the wealthy.

Their fury grew into weeks of mass protest that forced Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign on July 25, 2026.

The movement took its name from a remark by Chief Justice Surya Kant comparing unemployed young people to “cockroaches” and “parasites.” Abhijeet Dipke, a Dalit activist from one of India’s historically oppressed caste communities, seized the slur and sent it crawling back toward those in power. “What if all cockroaches came together?” he asked online.

From that question emerged the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)—a name that mocked Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.

The great Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy celebrated the CJP members as “young roaches riding in on the rain,” as protesters poured into Delhi beneath the monsoon skies. Their numbers were formidable, but so was their irreverence. When police aimed water cannons at them, young people dared the officers to turn them on—then danced in the spray. The state brought water cannons into the streets to produce fear. The protesters transformed the streets into a stage and danced in the spray.

In a Democracy Now! interview, Roy described a movement alive with “mockery and humor,” “dancing,” and “singing”—a rebellion defined by “exuberance.” Protesters joked that fleeing police lathi attacks was helping them maintain their running streaks on Strava, a fitness-tracking app. They turned footage of the chases into video-game parodies and posted mock influencer-style “get ready with me” videos and “fit checks” featuring helmets, goggles, and homemade protective gear. One demonstrator held a placard declaring, “Every joke is a tiny revolution.”

That creative humor—an intelligence no standardized test could measure—was not an escape from struggle, but rather one of the movement’s weapons. They met contempt with laughter, intimidation with choreography, and isolation with an expanding circle of solidarity.

The uprising forced Modi to announce a national task force to overhaul the examination system, while the government proposed stronger penalties for exam fraud. The Cockroach Janta Party also secured commitments to compensate families of students who died by suicide amid the crisis and withdraw criminal cases against protesters.

While no single event explains a suicide, movement leaders linked the deaths to the despair produced by a system that made one examination appear capable of determining an entire life—then revealed that the exam could be bought.

Near the main protest site in New Delhi, students erupted in celebration. Dipke reportedly fell to his knees, raised his fist, and declared, “We have done it.” He called the result “a victory for the people of India” and “a defeat for the dictator.”

But the government did not accept defeat quietly. The movement called off its demonstrations after officials agreed to its central demands, including withdrawing criminal cases against protesters.

Within days, however, the Cockroach Janta Party reported that students and protesters were again being detained and arrested in several states. Movement leaders accused the government of violating the agreement and threatened to return to the streets.

The government subsequently announced that most Delhi protesters would face no further action. But organizers warned that closing proceedings was not the same as formally withdrawing the cases—and that the movement would resume if the government again broke its promises.

The government had retreated—but only far enough to gather itself for another attack. After officials agreed to withdraw cases against protesters and promised that no punitive action would follow, authorities began detaining and arresting students across several states, with Muslim and Dalit participants reportedly among those singled out. At least 100 people were arrested, many on stringent non-bailable charges, as the movement accused the government of backtracking on its agreement. By then, however, the students had done more than expose an examination leak. They had opened a crack in the façade of the system itself.

Why would a compromised examination provoke an uprising powerful enough to force out a cabinet minister—and frighten the government into trying to seal that crack through repression? Because a high-stakes test is never merely a collection of questions. It is a promise about how society works. It tells young people that wealth, caste, language, and power do not matter—that the future belongs to whoever studies hard.

When the questions themselves go up for sale, it is not only the examination that is compromised. The promise collapses with it.

Whether in India or across the world in the United States, standardized testing is one of capitalism’s most effective laundering machines. It takes a dirty hierarchy built through unequal access to wealth and education, scrubs away its history, and returns the result stamped with a single word: merit.

Every high-stakes testing system tells young people some version of the same story: Work hard, follow the rules, outstudy everyone else, and a high score will make the future yours.

For the millions of students taking NEET in India, that promise carries enormous weight. The examination is presented as the great objective referee, capable of determining who deserves entry into medical school. It supposedly does not care about a student’s family income, caste, gender, language, region, or access to private coaching. Everyone receives the same questions, the same time limit, and a score that appears to settle who is prepared to advance.

But a society does not become equal merely because it administers the same test to people who have been given profoundly unequal lives.

These scandals expose corruption, but they also reveal a deeper fiction: that a standardized examination can transform unequal access to wealth, schooling, language, and preparation into a neutral ranking of merit.

Some NEET applicants attend well-funded schools and spend years in expensive private coaching programs. Others learn in overcrowded classrooms, study in regional languages, work after school, care for siblings, or worry about whether their families can afford another year of preparation. “Everywhere you look, you can see the desperation of young people in this country,” Shree Kumar Verma, a 19-year-old NEET student studying in Kota—the center of India’s exam-coaching industry—told The Guardian. “Being at Kota is either going to bring you success or totally break you down; it’s all or nothing here.” Some students enter the testing center trained specifically to defeat NEET. Others arrive carrying every burden that caste, poverty, geography, and educational inequality have already placed on their backs.

Standardized tests convert these unequal conditions into a clean numerical hierarchy and then present the result as a neutral measure of individual merit. This is the central function of what I call the testocracy: a social class of elites that uses standardized testing to make inequality appear earned.

The NEET leak laid bare the crudest form of class privilege: Students with enough money or the right connections could allegedly purchase the questions outright. It was corruption in a form no one could mistake.

The scandal has a close parallel in the United States. In 2019, federal prosecutors exposed Operation Varsity Blues, a sprawling college admissions scheme in which wealthy parents paid consultant William “Rick” Singer to fraudulently secure places for their children at selective universities. Some arranged for stand-ins to take the SAT or ACT or paid corrupt proctors to change answers after the exams. Others bribed college coaches to designate their children as recruited athletes, sometimes fabricating athletic résumés and staging photographs of students participating in sports they did not actually play.

The scandal provoked outrage because wealthy families had purchased test scores and admissions outcomes outright. But affluent families routinely buy educational advantages that remain perfectly legal: elite schools, private tutoring, test preparation, admissions consultants, and access to universities that favor donors and children of alumni.

The comparison with NEET is striking. In both scandals, public outrage erupts when wealth abandons even the pretense of fairness and simply buys access to education and opportunity.

These scandals expose corruption, but they also reveal a deeper fiction: that a standardized examination can transform unequal access to wealth, schooling, language, and preparation into a neutral ranking of merit.

Testing as a Tool of Colonialism and White Supremacy

The camouflage of inherited advantage as individual merit is not an accidental flaw. It is rooted in the white supremacist, colonial, and eugenic history of standardized testing—a system designed to translate racial and imperial hierarchies into the seemingly neutral language of scores.

British colonial rule imposed a standardized examination system on India, reorganizing education around centralized curricula, externally controlled tests, and official credentials. Historian Jana Tschurenev describes the resulting culture as centered on “memorisation, examination, and technocratic management.” British authorities expanded schooling not to achieve equality, but to prepare most colonized people for subordinate positions while opening a narrow path to government employment and elite credentials.

A decisive turn came with Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education. Macaulay admitted that he knew neither Sanskrit nor Arabic, yet declared that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” His contempt expressed the racist logic of British policy, which treated European knowledge as universal and Indian intellectual traditions as inferior. Whatever opportunities English education later offered some people excluded by India’s caste hierarchies, the colonial policy itself was designed to elevate the language and culture of the rulers. Mastery of that culture became increasingly essential to credentials, employment, and social advancement.

Wood’s Despatch of 1854 further centralized the system. The universities established in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras in 1857 were modeled after the University of London and operated largely as........

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