Ranchi has not been quiet for weeks as her students take over a stadium. The crowd keeps swelling around a demand that ought to be unremarkable: an exam that cannot be bought. The charge is rigging in the 14th JPSC examination, the JSSC-CGL and other recruitment tests in the state. The protesters want a CBI inquiry and a clean-out of the bodies meant to hire the state’s youth.

There have been arrests but they have barely calmed any one, because nobody in that stadium thinks this is about a single leaked paper. And they are right not to. Competitive exams in Jharkhand have been leaking, getting cancelled and stalling almost since the state was born in 2000, and aspirants can recite the years from memory. Statehood was meant to end this. The demand for a separate Jharkhand was always about self-rule, and it did not begin in 2000. It runs back to Birsa Munda and the Ulgulan, the Great Tumult he raised against the dikus and their seizure of Adivasi land before the British jailed him and he died at twenty-five.

Jharkhand still calls him Dharti Aba, father of the earth, and it is no accident the state was born on 15 November, his birthday. The promise was that the people on this land, the Adivasi communities above all, would finally decide what happened on it. And, at the very least, their children would get an honest shot at a government job instead of watching it sold. It’s tough to disregard the fact that a generation that was given the resource curse is now being given a rigged ladder on top of it. People will steal and resell even your own effort. If you look closely, you can see that none of this is unique and new to Jharkhand, and the students are aware of this.

Since the nation exploded over the NEET paper leak and demanded a reckoning in Delhi, their nerves have escalated. Exam rigging is a widespread scam, but it’s particularly deadly here because there isn’t much else. A sarkari naukri in Jharkhand is not one door among many. It is often the only way out of a district the mines already emptied. So even though the scam is national, the desperation is local. Hold that desperation in mind while looking at the other thing happening to Jharkhand right now, the one that arrives dressed as a compliment. On Instagram the state is being........

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