At Jantar Mantar in Delhi, young India has pitched camp. Students roll up their bedding at dawn. They sing, they argue, they nurse their bruises. They call themselves, with mocking self-deprecation, the ‘Cockroach Janta Party’. A judicial remark had likened the struggling youth to cockroaches. They wore the insult as a badge. Satire became a movement. The movement now unsettles the national capital.

The immediate provocation is NEET, the single examination that decides who may become a doctor. Question papers leaked. Lakhs of students were made to sit the test again. Years of preparation, family savings and young hope dissolved in official incom-petence. The students ask a simple question: if they must play by the rules, why doesn’t the State? They demand accountability from those who set the examination. The State has answered with prohibitory orders, tear gas and the lathi.

Those who govern would do well to read Indian history. Ours has always been a movement polity. The freedom struggle was not won in committee rooms alone. It was won on the streets, in the villages, in the salt pans of Dandi. Every generation since has produced its movement, and every movement has ended in a rebalancing of political........

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