Thirty-six days of agitation. At least 13 young people dead by their own hand in the 46 days between the cancellation of the paper and the rescheduled test. A lathi-charge outside Parliament, an internet shutdown in the national capital, metro stations sealed. And at the end of it, one Cabinet minister’s letter to the Prime Minister. Consider the exchange rate for a moment. What the country gave up was enormous.

What it got back was a personnel decision. Ask the only question that matters. Is the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test more secure today than it was on 24 July? The question setting apparatus is unchanged. The vendor and transport chain is unchanged. The architecture of paper and OMR sheets across thousands of centres is unchanged. And the arithmetic that gives the whole thing its terrible weight, roughly 23 lakh candidates competing for fewer than 1.3 lakh medical seats, is precisely what it was. Nothing that caused this crisis has been touched by the thing that ended it.

By the investigating agency’s own account, the compromise originated inside the question setting process. The arrests include academics contracted by the testing agency to set the paper. Guess papers were allegedly sold for between Rs 10 lakh and Rs 25 lakh. Around 140 questions are said to have matched material circulating before the exam. No Education Minister sets a question paper.

No Education Minister can personally superintend the integrity of every academic on a confidential panel, any more than a Home Minister can personally vouch for every constable. To demand a resignation for the breach itself is to demand a ritual, and rituals are what you perform when you have given up on remedies. But this is not an argument that the minister bore no responsibility. It is an argument that he was held to account for the wrong thing. Here is the document nobody at Jantar Mantar was chanting about, and it is the most damning object in this entire affair.

In 2024, after the previous NEET leak, the Education Ministry constituted an expert committee of seven members under K. Radhakrishnan, the former ISRO chairman. It did serious work. It recommended encrypted digital delivery of question papers, a transition to testing on computers, candidate authentication backed by artificial intelligence, and standardised, audited examination centres. Adopted properly, those measures would have made a leaked paper close to worthless.

You cannot sell a question paper when no two candidates sit the same one. Much of it was never put into practice. That is the failure a minister is genuinely answerable for. Not the crime, the shelf. Not the leak, but the two years in which the country already knew what to do and did not do it. It is the difference between being unlucky and being unhurried, and only the second is a resignation offence. The movement demanded the first and never learned to ask for the second. It won a........

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