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A competitive examination individualises both ambition and failure. Each candidate is told that success depends upon discipline, sacrifice and merit, while the conditions under which people prepare remain profoundly unequal. A protest reverses this logic: it allows people to recognise that what they have experienced as private anxiety may have structural causes.

The examination leak that provoked the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) agitation was more than just an instance of corruption or administrative failure in that it exposed the fragility of the promise around which millions of young lives have been organised.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

The resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan on July 25, following more than a month of agitation, was undoubtedly a victory. The continuing dispute over cases against protesters, and the Supreme Court’s intervention, also show that a resignation does not by itself change the political and administrative culture and practices that contributed to the crisis. But the movement achieved something beyond the concession it extracted.

Young people whom the educational order had trained to encounter one another primarily as competitors recognised that their suffering was shared. They ceased, at least temporarily, to remain isolated candidates and appeared before the government as citizens.

In India, an examination is rarely only an examination. It is expected to provide entry into secure employment, social mobility, family dignity and a recognisable place in society. When millions compete for a painfully limited number of seats and jobs, a few hours in an examination hall begin to bear the weight of an entire imagined future.

With unemployment among Indians aged 15-29 at 9.9% in 2025, rising to 13.6% among urban youth, an examination appears to promise not simply a job but escape from insecurity and admission into an increasingly inaccessible idea of the good life.

A populous country may........

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