Good leaders do not treat a crisis as a crisis. They treat it as an opening. Great leaders go one step further – they turn the crisis into territory gained. Prime Minister Narendra Modi may have just managed that at Jantar Mantar, by finally engaging with students who, if you look closely, were asking for accountability far more than they were asking for solutions. Between paper leaks and one education headache after another, the central government had a fair bit to answer for.

Jantar Mantar – which loosely translates to “magical instruments” – ended up handing that reckoning to the government on a platter. What started as anger over exam irregularities did not stay confined to the education ministry for long. It grew into a much bigger question: does this government still have its ear to the ground, or has it stopped noticing the writing on the wall? Education is not a small, sectional issue in India, even though our politics has long treated it as a “middle-class problem” and moved on. But that middle class is practically built on one instruction, repeated in every home: study hard, get into a good school, get a respectable job, don’t dishonour the sacrifice.

That deal was already looking shaky because of a tough job market and the AI-shaped shadow over every career conversation. Then came the paper leak scandal, and on top of it, the now-infamous “parasites” remark aimed at unemployed youth. That combination did not just anger students – it convinced........

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