https://thewire.in/politics/cjp-cockroach-student-youth-movement-politics-left-caste-ambedkar-bjp
Looking back after the resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, much has been written about the scale of the protests and the coalition that emerged around them. The students achieved in seven weeks what a decade of organised opposition has not. They forced a Union minister out and gathered tens of thousands of people on the road to Parliament in the face of a hostile police force. They took apart, in public and with laughter and great courage, an image that had been built and maintained with enormous care for 12 years. They broke the spell that had made the regime appear too formidable to challenge.
That legacy is evident in how the CJP framed itself. It chose accountability over ideology. The charge it framed was one of administrative failure, of a leak and a ministry that had failed at its job. It was not a critique of the education system or of the National Education Policy. Corruption and incompetence are accusations in Indian public life that do not require the accusers to share a position on anything else. This was the grammar of 2011 that created the AAP.
As the days passed, the social composition of the protest continued to widen.
The vast majority were students, many of them first-time protesters. There were Buddhist monks from Nagpur, academics visiting from universities abroad, anxious parents and unemployed graduates driving auto-rickshaws. There was space for Dhamu Pal from Allahabad, head of the Shepherd Tiger Force, which works on atrocities against the Pal, Gadariya and Dhangar communities, and for Haji Nesar Ahmad, convenor of the All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz.
The protest was broad enough to absorb resentment from inside the ecosystem it appeared to be opposing. It did the one piece of demolition that a decade of argument had not managed. What was taken apart at Jantar Mantar was not a policy; it was an aura, an image built with great effort. Whether this is the beginning of the end of Modi’s rule, or whether it will cost the BJP anything at all, is a premature question.
by Radhika Bordia
30/07/2026