Exam Leaks, Unemployment, Tear Gas

A leaked exam, double-digit youth unemployment and mass detentions explain a generation's anger, and the state's failure to answer it.

It began with one word. On 15 May, during a hearing in the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Surya Kant reportedly compared some unemployed young Indians to cockroaches. He later said he had been misquoted. But the word had already travelled. The next day, a 30-year-old communications strategist named Abhijeet Dipke, who had studied in Boston, asked a simple question on social media: what if all the cockroaches come together?

They did. The Cockroach Janta Party, which began as a joke, gained about two lakh members within a week, by its own count, and, according to one report, more than 21 million Instagram followers. Five months later, it has forced a Union minister out of office, filled the streets of Delhi, been denied the capital's traditional protest ground, and found its leaders detained near barricades on 13 October.

It is easy to treat this as a social media phenomenon, a meme with a crowd. That would be a mistake. A meme does not sustain a movement for five months. What sustains it is something real: an exam system that has been repeatedly compromised, a job market that does not take in educated young people, and a state whose first answer to both has been to explain, delay and restrict.

This article traces how the anger was built, checks the numbers behind it, and asks what a government that wants the trust of a generation should do.

The exam that failed

The immediate cause was the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test for undergraduate medical courses, NEET-UG. On 3 May 2026, more than 22 lakh students sat the pen-and-paper exam across the country. Within a day, that a "guess paper" with over 400 questions had been circulating on WhatsApp and Telegram, and that 120 to 140 of those questions matched the actual paper.

On 12 May, the National Testing Agency cancelled the exam and announced a re-examination. The Central Bureau of Investigation took over the case the same day. A re-exam was set for 21 June. The CBI arrested the owner of a coaching institute in Latur, Maharashtra, on 18 May, and a headmistress of a Pune school on 22 May, who was accused of leaking the physics paper. During a raid, investigators recovered question papers, copies of NTA identity cards and cash. And, of the CBI's findings, the same racket had also compromised the 2025 paper.

That last detail should stop any reader. It means that last year's results, on which careers were built, may have been affected by the same network. A student who worked for two years, and was ranked below someone who bought the paper, has had her chance taken away by a fraud the state failed to prevent.

Parliament's Standing Committee on Education summoned the NTA chairperson and the Higher Education Secretary on 21 May. The youth movement, which had grown fast, demanded something more: that the Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, resign over the repeated failures, which also included technical glitches in the on-screen marking system of the Central Board of Secondary Education.

This is not the first time. Paper leaks in recruitment and entrance exams have been a regular feature of Indian life for years, across states and across parties. Each time, the pattern is the same: a leak, a cancellation, arrests of small figures, a promise of reform, and then, a few months later, another leak. The anger of young people is not about one bad exam. It is about a long record in which the state has not made a fair exam a reliable thing.

The jobs behind the exams

Exams matter so much because jobs are so scarce. A student does not take a medical entrance test, or a government recruitment exam, with such desperation unless the alternatives are poor.

The official numbers show the gap. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey annual report for 2025, released in March 2026, the overall unemployment rate for people aged 15 and above was 3.1% on the usual status measure. That sounds low. But for young people aged 15 to 29, it was 9.9%. In urban areas, youth unemployment was 13.6%, compared with 8.3% in rural areas. Among people with secondary education or above, the rate was 6.5%.

The monthly figures are worse. According to an analysis of the PLFS monthly bulletins, the unemployment rate for young people aged 15 to 29 was 15.2% nationally in September 2026. In cities it was 19%. For young urban women it was 26.6%. Urban youth unemployment has risen through the year, from 17.5% in May to 18.7% in August and 19% in September. These monthly figures use a different method, the current weekly status, and should not be compared directly with the annual numbers. But they point in the same direction.

The most striking number is an older one. The India Employment Report 2024, prepared by the International Labour Organization and the Institute for Human Development, found that the unemployment rate among young graduates was 29.1%, almost nine times the rate among young people who could not read or write.

That statistic describes a country in which education, rather than guaranteeing a job, has become a risk. The more schooling a young person has, the more likely she is to be out of work, because the jobs that match her skills do not exist in sufficient numbers. A generation that was told for years to study hard, pass exams and join the formal economy has found that the formal economy has few places for it.

When a graduate is nine times more likely to be jobless than a young person who cannot read, the problem is not the graduate.

Why the Chief Justice's remark mattered

It is fair to ask why a remark in a courtroom, reported imperfectly and later disowned, could spark all this. The answer is that it landed on a nerve.

Young Indians know that they are told, again and again, that they should be patient, that jobs will come, that growth is strong. They also know that many of them are doing everything asked of them and still cannot find work. To hear a person of the highest judicial office use a word of contempt, even in a different context, felt to many like a confirmation: that those in power see them as pests, not citizens.

The Chief Justice said he was misquoted. That may be so. But the story of the movement is not about the exact words. It is about how quickly a generation was ready to adopt a word of insult as a badge of pride. That readiness is the evidence.

There is a further irony that the public should not miss. The same Chief Justice now heads the bench that is hearing the petitions about the Election Commission and the protests. A court that is asked to protect the right of young people to protest has a head who is, in the eyes of many of them, the origin of the insult. That does not make the Court's decisions wrong. But it raises the stakes of the Court's fairness. It must be seen to be fair.

The summer of protest

The events of the summer unfolded in steps, each of which raised the cost for the government.

In May, the movement was mostly online. By late May, protests had spread to several cities, and a central demand had emerged: that the Education Minister resign. In July, the movement moved to the streets of Delhi. The activist Sonam Wangchuk joined with a hunger strike that lasted 26 days. On 20 July, protesters marched towards Parliament. They were met with tear gas. On 23 July, Mr Wangchuk ended his fast. And on 25 July, Mr Pradhan resigned.

In his resignation letter, he said he was stepping down because he did not want students' anger to be exploited by "anti-national forces".

It was a rare event in Indian politics: a minister forced out by a protest that had no party structure behind it. But look at what the letter said. It did not admit failure. It did not take responsibility for the leaked exam in plain words. It described the protesters, young people whose complaint was about their own exams, as a possible tool of "anti-national forces". That language, aimed at citizens whose exams had been leaked, is the clearest sign of how the government approached the movement.

It was not the only such comment. Some political figures claimed that a large share of the movement's online followers were Pakistani. The movement's supporters pointed to analytics which they said showed more than 94% of followers were Indian. We cannot independently settle that dispute. But the pattern of response, suspicion first and answers later, is plain.

From resignation to restriction

After the resignation, the government might have chosen to treat the episode as a lesson. It could have reformed the NTA, set up an independent exam authority, and met the young leaders. Instead, the events of October show a state moving in a different direction.

From 2 October, the movement called nationwide protests, which ran to 8 October. On 2 October, more than 700 people were detained at Jantar Mantar, including students and activists. Amnesty International called it a blatant attack on the right to assemble. On 10 October, according to Indian media reports, thousands of protesters were detained in Delhi. On 11 October, the Delhi Police signed an order removing Jantar Mantar as a designated protest site. On 13 October, police detained the movement's leaders after protesters breached barricades near Jantar Mantar. And in the Supreme Court on 15 October, Delhi Police defended refusing permission for the Cockroach Janta Party's protest, citing what they called lessons from the July agitation.

The founder himself was arrested and then released at some point in the summer, according to one international commentary. Delhi Police have also had hundreds of social media posts taken down, saying they spread rumours.

Take the sequence seriously. A protest over leaked exams led to a minister's resignation. That was followed by a series of steps that look designed to prevent a repeat: restricting where protests can happen, who can lead them and what can be said online. We have set out the case about Jantar Mantar in more detail elsewhere. Here the point is simpler. A government that responds to a youth movement's success by limiting its space is telling young people that their victory was an accident, not a right.

The movement's weaknesses

A fair article must also look at the movement itself.

First, its origins have been questioned. The founder worked on the social media team of the Aam Aadmi Party and later served as a communications adviser to the Delhi government's education department. Critics say this shows a political hand behind a movement that claims to stand outside politics. The movement says that past work does not define its present purpose. It has said it is exploring electoral politics, including a by-election in Bihar. As it enters party politics, it will need to show where its money comes from and how its decisions are made.

Second, a movement that began as satire has a problem with seriousness. A joke is a good way to gather a crowd. It is a poor way to design policy. The movement's demands have grown from the Education Minister's resignation to an audit of deleted voters, a change in how election commissioners are chosen and, in some quarters, a return to paper ballots. These are different questions, and the movement risks losing its sharpness by taking on everything.

Third, the movement has joined forces with opposition parties, including Congress and the Left, in the campaign over the voter-roll revision. That has widened its reach, but it also makes it easier for the government to call it a political tool. If it wants to stay credible, it should be clear about its own demands and let the evidence on each carry the argument.

None of this changes the central facts: the exam leaked, the unemployment numbers are what they are, and the state's response has been to restrict. A movement's flaws do not excuse the government's failures.

What the government owes young people

If the aim is to rebuild trust, the steps are not mysterious. They are mainly about honesty and structure.

On exams, the answer is independence and transparency. The National Testing Agency should be made accountable to an independent board, with outside experts, a public audit of its security systems, and a published report on the 2026 leak, including what the CBI found about 2025. Candidates affected by compromised exams in previous years should be told what is being done for them.

On jobs, the answer is honesty about the numbers and a plan to change them. The government should publish youth unemployment data in a clear form, by education level, state and gender, on a regular schedule. It should explain why graduates face such high unemployment and what it will do to create jobs that match their skills.

On protest, the answer is to protect the space. Jantar Mantar should be reopened. The right to assemble peacefully, which the Supreme Court has upheld, should not depend on whether the protesters are convenient.

On speech, the answer is restraint. Ministers and party leaders should stop calling young protesters foreign agents without evidence. If there is proof of foreign interference, it should be presented in court. If there is not, the accusation should be withdrawn.

A concrete list of demands

Here is what a serious response would include.

1. An independent exam authority. Move national entrance exams to a body with statutory independence, outside experts on its board, and a duty to report each year on security breaches. 2. A public report on the 2026 leak. Release the CBI's findings, in as much detail as the investigation allows, including the evidence on 2025, and say which officials were held responsible. 3. Compensation and remedies. Provide support to students affected by the leak, including those who lost a year, and a clear plan for those affected in 2025. 4. A youth jobs data release. Publish monthly youth and graduate unemployment, with the method explained, and a target to reduce it. 5. A graduate jobs plan. Set out specific measures to create jobs for graduates, with timelines and budgets, and report on progress each quarter. 6. Reopen Jantar Mantar. Restore the site's status as a protest ground, and publish the Home Ministry committee's report that led to its closure. 7. Publish detention data. Release the number of people detained on 2, 10 and 13 October, the grounds, and how many were released without charge. 8. Withdraw unsupported accusations. Ministers and party spokespersons should either present evidence of foreign involvement or stop making the claim. 9. Meet the movement. The government should open a formal channel to young protest leaders, independent of the police.

A state that can find a way to talk to every lobby in the country should be able to find a way to talk to its own children.

What the government would say

The government has answers. It would say that it acted. The NEET exam was cancelled and a re-examination held within seven weeks. The CBI took over, and arrests were made. The minister resigned. It would also say that unemployment, at 3.1% overall on the annual measure, is low, and that the economy is creating jobs.

It would say that peaceful protest is allowed, and that the police have acted only when order was threatened. It would point to its claim that some actors may be trying to take advantage of young people's anger.

These are not empty points. The quick cancellation of the exam was the right step. The arrests show that investigators are at work. And it is true that the overall unemployment rate is low.

But the answers miss the point. A cancelled exam does not remove the cause. Arrests of a few individuals do not change the system that let a paper leak twice. A low overall unemployment rate does not help a young graduate who is jobless. And a government that says it allows peaceful protest while closing the main protest site is not answering the question that was asked.

The deeper issue: trust

At the end of all this, the issue is trust. A young person who sits an exam believes, or wants to believe, that the paper is fair and the rank is honest. She believes that if she studies, she will get a place. She believes that if she is unhappy, she may say so, and be heard.

Each of these beliefs has been damaged. The exam was leaked, and perhaps the year before. The jobs are scarce, especially for graduates. And the place to say so has been closed.

Anger of this kind is not a passing mood. It is a response to broken promises. If the state does not address it, it will not go away. It will find new forms, and new words. A generation that has turned an insult into a name for itself is not going to be silenced by a barricade.

The question for the government is whether it will listen now, when listening is still cheap. The question for the rest of us is what kind of country we want our young people to inherit: one in which the exam is fair, the job exists, and the right to protest is real. They are asking for no more than that.