Everything that happened in July started on a pavement in June, and the pavement started with a word.
In May, hearing a matter on unemployment, Chief Justice Surya Kant used the words cockroaches and parasites about young people out of work. On 16 May a digital strategist named Abhijeet Dipke registered a party called the Cockroach Janta Party. It was a joke, in the way that the best organising is often a joke first: you cannot be insulted by a name you have already put on your own letterhead.
By then the exam had already gone wrong. NEET-UG was sat on 3 May by 2.27 million candidates. Within three days a guess paper that had been circulating on WhatsApp around the coaching town of Sikar turned out to share about 120 of its 180 questions with the real thing. The National Testing Agency cancelled the paper on 12 May and announced a retest for 21 June, and the arrests began — a chemistry professor in Pune with access through translation work, a biology professor, a headmistress, a coaching-centre owner in Latur, a paediatrician. The retest was eventually flown around the country by the Air Force.
The CJP held its first day at Jantar Mantar on 6 June, with police permission until five in the afternoon. Hundreds came: students, parents, doctors, lawyers. On 20 June it came back, and when five o'clock arrived Dipke declined to leave. The sit-in dates from that refusal.
On 28 June Sonam Wangchuk sat down on the same pavement and stopped eating. Six members of the All India Students' Association went with him, including their national president Neha Bora. He is from Ladakh and had spent years fasting over other things, and he was careful to say what this one was not: the movement, he said, had no political colour, and what was being asked for was accountability and reform in how public examinations are run.
It went on for three weeks in the Delhi summer and then the Delhi monsoon. On 18 July, at day twenty-one, the police took him off the site and admitted him to Safdarjung Hospital. They said they had acted on medical advice. The organisers said he had been removed by force and without notice, and Dipke and others began fasting over the removal itself. On 21 July the Delhi High Court ordered him moved to Medanta in Gurugram, which was the hospital he had asked for.
Between those two dates was the twentieth.
Tens of thousands assembled at Jantar Mantar on Monday 20 July and set off for Parliament in the rain. They met barricades, then water cannon, then tear gas and lathis. Delhi Police put their own injured at 118. Hospital and police sources counted about sixty protesters hurt; Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital alone had logged sixty-five medico-legal cases by seven that evening, and the CJP said around a hundred and fifty of its people had been taken to hospital and about seventy detained. One of them left with a broken leg. People ran into Gurdwara Bangla Sahib and were let in. An Additional DCP, Sandeep Lamba, was filmed slapping a woman.
The photograph above is the same afternoon, from the other end of it: an ambulance parked on a wet road, and the crowd making room.
Pradhan called the protesters a B-team of terrorists. Dipke answered in public, and it is the line from that week most worth keeping:
"Sir, we are not terrorists. We do not need a certificate of patriotism from people like you, who are responsible for the deaths of innocent students."
He meant the twelve or more NEET aspirants who had died by suicide.
Wangchuk ended his fast on 23 July, on day twenty-six, in a hospital room in Gurugram with the Union health minister J. P. Nadda sitting there and written assurances in hand: cases against protesters to be withdrawn, compensation for the families at the maximum the rules allow. Two days later Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, in a letter to his "young friends", and Prahlad Joshi took the ministry. The CJP called the agitation off the same day.
The retest results had come out on 16 July, in the middle of all of it, and almost nobody discussed them. A hundred and ten thousand candidates qualified, more than fifty-eight per cent of them women. Over two hundred and seventy thousand had not turned up to sit it again.