It rained all day, and nobody left.
On 20 July students gathered at Jantar Mantar, the old observatory ground in Delhi, before marching on Parliament over the leaked NEET-UG paper. They had come from across the country — by train, by shared taxi, and on the long-distance buses that carry exam aspirants between coaching towns. The sit-in had been running on that ground since 20 June. Before that there had been a single day of it, on 6 June, which the Delhi Police permitted until five in the evening as a one-time exception, putting five thousand personnel across the district to watch a few hundred people in cockroach masks. By the third week of July nobody was calling it an exception.
The plan on the 20th was to walk from Mandi House towards Parliament while the monsoon session sat. The city had been arranged against it: five Metro stations closed — Seva Teerth, Central Secretariat, Patel Chowk, Janpath and Rajiv Chowk — barricades across the approaches, and internet service suspended around Parliament.
The pictures here are a working record of that day, made by Sumita Roy Dutta and shared openly for anyone to use. They show the ordinary business of organising: banners strung between trees and re-strung when the rain pulled them down, placards wrapped in polythene, umbrellas held over camera equipment, chai passed hand to hand.
The student organisations turned out in numbers — the All India Students' Federation, the Students' Federation of India, the All India Students' Association — but the instruction from the organisers was to leave party flags at home. What people carried instead was the tricolour, copies of the Constitution, and photographs of Ambedkar, Gandhi and Bhagat Singh. Sonam Wangchuk had been on the ground since 28 June, on an indefinite hunger strike alongside six AISA members including their national president, Neha Bora.
The banner above promises that the heat of young blood will melt the valley of ice. Under it the crowd is wet and patient. Most of a protest looks like this — hours of standing about in bad weather, waiting for something to begin.
By afternoon the municipal water tanker parked at the edge of the ground had become a stage, and the union banners overhead had stopped being polite: Dharmendra Pradhan ko tatkaal barkhast karo — dismiss the education minister, immediately. Above them people carried the tricolour, which turns up in almost every photograph in this archive.
At the barricades it went badly. There was a lathi charge, and tear gas. The Delhi Police said 118 of their own personnel were hurt and between fifteen and twenty government vehicles damaged. Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital alone counted around sixty injured protesters and sixty-five medico-legal cases by seven that evening. The Cockroach Janta Party said roughly seventy people had been detained and about a hundred and fifty hospitalised, one of its own members with a broken leg; the police said no protester had been detained at all. People getting away from the barricades were taken in at Gurdwara Bangla Sahib, which is what that gurdwara has always done.
One piece of footage did more than any of the numbers. CCTV showed an Additional Deputy Commissioner, Sandeep Lamba, slapping a woman protester. It went everywhere within hours, a public interest litigation followed in the Delhi High Court, and the former Rajya Sabha MP Saket Gokhale filed a complaint asking for an FIR.
It rained hard again that night; thousands stayed. Two days later the prime minister announced fast-track courts for paper-leak cases, and the Delhi High Court set one up within hours under the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024. Parliament lost four sitting days running to the same deadlock: the opposition wanted the resignation before any debate, the government offered a debate without one. On 23 July Wangchuk ended a twenty-six-day fast at Medanta, where the High Court had had him moved, after assurances that cases against peaceful protesters would be withdrawn and families of the dead compensated.
Five days after these pictures were taken, the education minister resigned. Album 003 picks up there.