Three Demands, Three Met: How the NEET Protests Came to an End

(Anish Singh) : For five weeks, Jantar Mantar has looked less like a protest site and more like a small, stubborn city: tarpaulin shelters, hand-painted placards, and a rotating cast of teenagers who arrived in June expecting to stay a few days and ended up staying a month. Today, that city packed up. The Cockroach Janta Party formally called off its agitation, announcing that the government had met all three of its original demands, and appealing to the students still camped out to withdraw and go home.
NEET UG Paper Leak
It is worth remembering how small the spark was. On June 20, allegations surfaced that this year’s NEET-UG paper, the exam that decides who gets to study medicine in India, had been leaked and sold before students ever sat down to write it. What began as a handful of students demanding a time-bound, judge-supervised probe grew, week by week, into something the government could no longer treat as background noise. Farmers’ unions joined. Opposition politicians joined. Climate activist Sonam Wangchuk began a hunger strike that would last 26 days and lend the movement a face recognised well beyond campus circles.
CJP
The name itself has a story worth telling. CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke has said the movement adopted the label after Chief Justice of India Surya Kant reportedly referred to students as cockroaches during a court hearing. Rather than take offence, the students took the insult as a banner. Placards reading variations of “don’t mess with cockroaches” began appearing at the site, and the name stuck harder than any official slogan could have.
The turning point, and the ugliest chapter of the five weeks, came on July 20. A march toward Parliament ended with police using batons to disperse the crowd, and close to 150 people needed hospital treatment that day. Delhi Police said the response was necessary to preserve public order in the capital, and later reported that its facial recognition system had flagged more than 2,500 attendees as having alleged criminal records, a figure CJP spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka rejected outright. A petition alleging excessive surveillance of protesters is still before the Delhi High Court. Several demonstrators were booked, some detained, and for a while it looked as though the crackdown might scatter the movement rather than end it. Instead, the opposite happened. Rahul Gandhi accused the government of insulting its own students, and the images from that day travelled further and did more damage to the Centre’s position than any speech from the protest stage.
What followed was a slow, grinding negotiation. Two rounds of talks with Union Ministers JP Nadda and Jitendra Singh produced assurances but no movement on the one demand that mattered most to protesters: the exit of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. A third round, held under mounting pressure, finally broke the deadlock. Pradhan sent his resignation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Droupadi Murmu accepted it, and Pralhad Joshi, until now Union Minister for Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, was handed additional charge of the Education Ministry. CJP representative Saurav Das confirmed that FIRs filed against protesters across Delhi and BJP-ruled states would be withdrawn, and that families of students who died by suicide amid this year’s exam turmoil would receive compensation. On stage, Dipke called it a moment students would remember: he said, that even a movement with no single leader could out-stubborn the government of the day.

Whichever side one leans toward on how the protest was policed, the arithmetic of the outcome is hard to argue with. A sitting Union minister has left office. A hunger strike has ended. A protest camp that outsiders once assumed would fizzle out within days is dismantling itself only because it got what it came for, not because it ran out of energy. What has not been settled is the harder, less photogenic question underneath all of this: the five-point charter CJP handed the government on reforming exam security more broadly. Ministers have agreed only to examine it. Whether Joshi’s tenure produces the structural fix that this entire episode was actually about, is the story that begins now, once the tents at Jantar Mantar are finally empty.