India’s examination crisis is real. But the politics around Jantar Mantar and Ranchi risks obscuring the harder questions about education. Soon after Jantar Mantar finally heaved a sigh of relief after weeks of agitation and sloganeering, its sequel began unfolding in Ranchi. The two episodes together they raise an uncomfortable question: are the real issues getting lost somewhere between the politics of protest and the politics of counter-protest? Much has been said about what the government could have done better over the NEET paper-leak controversy and its handling of the agitation at Jantar Mantar. Videos, photographs, narratives and counter-narratives have filled the media for weeks. One point, however, should not be difficult to concede. The government, the ruling party and its student wing failed to gauge the extent of frustration and anxiety among students over repeated examination irregularities. Opposition parties and their student organisations were hardly more perceptive. They too spent much of the agitation playing catch-up, trying to remain politically relevant. Warning Sign The genuine concerns of students, and the insensitive handling of those concerns, resonated with ordinary people across political affiliations. That should be a warning to governments of every ideological hue. Good governance and responsiveness to public sentiment are not luxuries to be deployed when convenient. They are the basic minimum expected of a government. But there are harder questions, involving not merely the government’s failures but also the hypocrisy of sections of the political and intellectual establishment and the gullibility of a generation that these same people claim to represent. Demanding the resignation of ministers, compensation for families of students who died by suicide, or withdrawal of FIRs against agitators may make for compelling political slogans. They do not, by themselves, amount to educational reform. The country already recognises that competitive examinations require fundamental changes. A national task force of technology experts has been constituted for precisely this purpose. Printing lakhs of question papers, transporting them to thousands of centres across hundreds of cities and securing them at every stage is a logistical exercise almost designed to invite human failure and, potentially, criminal intervention. Technology-enabled and secure examination systems are therefore an obvious part of the way forward. This is where the politics becomes particularly revealing. Parties that strongly backed the Jantar Mantar agitation have, in other forums, demanded that elections should abandon technology-led voting and return instead to something resembling the paper age: billions of printed ballot papers transported to roughly a million polling stations. Thus, technology is celebrated as the solution when it suits a particular argument and condemned as a threat when it does not. Double Standards Hypocrisy, however, is not confined to technology. What happened in Ranchi makes the double standard still harder to ignore. Political parties and organisations that were highly visible at Jantar Mantar, championing the student cause and, in some cases, appearing willing to condone targeted attacks on the police and foul language directed at them, have been conspicuously less visible when similar questions of accountability have arisen elsewhere. Accountability cannot be a principle that changes with the political colour of the government involved. The Education Minister was not accused by the Jantar Mantar protesters of personally leaking an examination paper. Yet his resignation was demanded as a means of establishing political accountability. That is a legitimate political argument, provided it is applied consistently. But those demanding accountability for the government’s failures were far less willing to apply the same standard to failures occurring in the midst of an agitation they had helped assemble. In Ranchi, even an independent investigation by the CBI has apparently been contested, let alone calls for ministerial resignations. Credible agitators and their supporters must have the courage of conviction to demand accountability wherever it is due. Otherwise, accountability becomes little more than a weapon for political convenience. The same double standard appeared in television studios, where an agitation involving a few thousand people at Jantar Mantar was routinely presented as the authentic voice of India’s entire “Gen-Z student community”. That proposition deserves the same scrutiny that politicians routinely apply to other claims of representation. The BJP may have contested and won elections in the name of Hindutva, but even its critics correctly argue that it cannot claim to represent every Hindu in India. By the same logic, a gathering of a few thousand students cannot, by any stretch, claim to speak for an entire generation of students. The overwhelming majority who did not join the agitation have a voice too. Their silence should not be mistaken for consent any more than protest should automatically be mistaken for universal opinion. Then there were the more curious arguments. The educational background of the Prime Minister was dragged into the debate, as though a leader who does not possess the desired academic credentials cannot understand higher education or govern it effectively. This is a remarkably narrow understanding of leadership. By that logic, a leader who has never experienced poverty could never understand poverty or formulate policies to alleviate it. Leadership is not a competitive examination in which personal experience is the only qualifying criterion. The use of the Indian Air Force to transport question papers during the examination crisis also generated some remarkably shallow commentary, including suggestions that China should have been emulated in the use of military power. Such arguments conveniently ignore the rather different way China manages public protest. One cannot selectively borrow an authoritarian state’s logistical efficiency while overlooking the methods by which it maintains order. Debate Needed The deeper problem lies well beyond the question-paper leak. India needs a serious debate about the role of the state and the private sector in education and, indeed, in healthcare. The retreat of the state and the resulting expansion of commercialisation, from schools to highly sought-after professional courses, has created incentives that are increasingly difficult to defend. How many doctors, engineers and other professionals does the economy actually require? In which disciplines and in what numbers? How should professional shortages in rural areas be addressed? Why should affordability so often outweigh merit? These are not questions that markets can simply be expected to settle. Parents and students are increasingly treated as customers to be persuaded to chase a handful of expensive and prestigious courses at almost any cost. The inevitable disappointment comes either at the entrance examination itself or later, when the coveted degree does not produce the expected career. The result is a peculiar imbalance. India can have an extraordinary concentration of ambition around examinations such as NEET and JEE while simultaneously producing large numbers of highly educated but unemployed or underemployed young people. That contradiction cannot be solved by fixing the examination system alone. Nor can democracy function indefinitely on the assumption that every protest is legitimate simply because its grievance is genuine. India needs a clearer distinction between freedom of expression, the right to protest and mobocracy. Every political party, including the BJP when it was in opposition, has at times flirted with agitation that came perilously close to the last of these. But a party that has spent the greatest number of years in power cannot forever use the conduct of its predecessors as an excuse. The Congress, in particular, has an opportunity - and an obligation - to demonstrate what a responsible opposition looks like, both in Parliament and on the streets. Changing one’s position on a fundamental issue according to who occupies the government merely produces an endless cycle of whataboutery. There is also a difficult balance for the government and law-enforcement agencies. The morale of the police must be protected when they confront anti-social elements and violence. But democratic protest cannot become a licence for excessive force. Political parties owe citizens a common understanding on where that line lies. The silent majority of Gen-Z will be watching. It was not necessarily present at Jantar Mantar, nor will it necessarily be visible in Ranchi. But it is paying attention. It will judge political parties not merely by the slogans they shout but by the safety, fairness and opportunities they can offer its future. (The writer has worked in the Information Technology sector. Views personal.)
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