On 25 July the Union Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, resigned. His letter was addressed to "young friends". "I have sent my resignation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi," it said, "considering the situation that has developed." He accepted moral responsibility for what had happened with NEET, and defended the government's handling of everything around it.
The demand that had been carried on cardboard for weeks was suddenly in the past tense, and people turned up that evening with a different kind of sign.
The painted poster above came from a contributor in Kalyan, with the congratulations addressed to the cockroaches crawling over a red sun. In May the insect had been an insult, handed down from a courtroom; by the end of July it was being painted on to celebrate a minister leaving office. Ten weeks is a short time for a slur to change hands that completely.
"Spectacular. Gimme 14 of them right now!!!"
The ask grew almost at once. One resignation down, a cabinet to go. Nobody at the celebration seemed to be treating it as reform — several placards said so directly.
The party that had led the agitation took the opposite view and stopped. The Cockroach Janta Party called the sit-in off that week at a joint press conference with the health minister, J.P. Nadda, having got undertakings that cases against protesters would be withdrawn in NDA-ruled states and that compensation would be paid at the maximum the rules allow. Its spokesperson, Vaishnavi Gaur, was careful about what the ending meant. "We're going to be broader in our agenda," she said. "This is not the end of it."
What was left outstanding was the part that mattered most to the people who had lost somebody: about a crore of rupees each for the twenty or so families whose children died by suicide after the leak, no prosecution of protesters or organisers, and a public apology from the Delhi Police and the paramilitary for 20 July. The apology has not come. Criminal cases were still on the books against at least eleven people in West Bengal, six in Assam, and three of the injured in Bihar, assurances or no assurances.
The evening ran from mock magazine covers to a phone screen held up in place of a placard, by a young woman with the flag painted on her cheek. The message had probably been typed on the way over: Proud of you Gen-Z. We won.
Whether that is the right tense is a question the archive keeps running into. A cabinet minister had gone, which almost never happens here, and analysts read it as real damage to a government that had built its reputation on not giving way. Rahul Gandhi wrote that "our students were demanding a fair and accountable education system", which was true and also the safest sentence available to an opposition leader that week. The political scientist Asim Ali pointed at something stranger: "These leaders do not have a political background and are rather from communications." The people who removed a minister were trained in getting attention, not in politics.
You can see that in the photographs. There is almost none of the visual grammar of an Indian political rally here — no cutouts, no party colours, no stage, no garlands. What there is instead is design lifted straight off the internet: a magazine cover, a rubber stamp reading RESIGNED across a portrait, a screenshot enlarged and laminated against the rain. It is the look of a group chat, printed out and carried into the street.
The archive keeps collecting. If you were in the streets that evening, or any evening of this movement, send your photographs.