Indian police have filed cases against hundreds of student demonstrators and opened separate investigations into two major social media platforms in the weeks since New Delhi promised to drop charges against protesters who forced the resignation of the country’s education minister, prompting Prime Minister Narendra Modi to appeal Friday for the students’ forgiveness rather than continued prosecution.
The Cockroach Janta Party, the youth movement that led the protests, said Monday that authorities had arrested hundreds of students across several states, a figure that could not be independently confirmed and that the group said violated the government’s earlier commitment to withdraw police cases against demonstrators. Delhi Police separately registered a complaint against the social media platform X over posts about Modi during the protests, and Hyderabad Police opened a case against Meta’s India head and several Instagram and Facebook accounts over images and videos of the prime minister circulated at the height of the unrest.
Modi, in a video posted to social media late Friday, said prosecuting the demonstrators would not resolve the underlying anger driving the protests. “These are misled children. Showing them the right path is our duty,” he said, adding that forcing students to appear repeatedly in court or subjecting them to social stigma “will not change the situation.” He said he wanted to forgive them and hoped the broader public would accept that position.
The unrest marked the most significant political crisis of Modi’s third term, which began in 2024. It traces to a leak of papers for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, or NEET, the country’s medical school entrance exam, first reported in May and severe enough to force a retest for roughly 2 million students. The scandal fed broader frustration among young Indians over a scarcity of jobs and university places despite years of government promises of national economic advancement.
The movement took its name after India’s chief justice, addressing unrelated remarks about unemployed youth, described segments of the population as “cockroaches” and “parasites,” a comment protest organizers seized on and inverted into a satirical brand. Abhijeet Dipke, the 30-year-old activist who founded the Cockroach Janta Party, built the movement into a nationwide campaign over 36 days of demonstrations centered on Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, drawing in established student organizations and, at points, a hunger strike lasting more than three weeks by a separate activist.
Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on July 25 after weeks of mounting pressure, telling supporters in a letter posted on X that he was stepping aside so student anger would not be “exploited by anti-national forces,” a phrase he did not elaborate on. He did not apologize for the paper leak. The government subsequently agreed to a broader set of protester demands, including changes to how national exams are administered and the dropping of criminal cases filed against demonstrators during the unrest — the commitment the Cockroach Janta Party now says has not been honored in full.
Parliament has since moved to toughen the law governing public examinations. Both chambers passed legislation this week doubling the maximum prison term for those convicted of leaking exam papers to 10 years and raising the maximum fine to more than $1 million. The bill cleared the lower house Wednesday and won voice-vote approval in the upper chamber a day later, following hours of debate.
Tensions between demonstrators and security forces flared repeatedly during the protests, including in New Delhi, where police used tear gas and baton charges to disperse crowds attempting to march on parliament. Some protesters shouted expletives and abusive slogans directed at Modi personally during the demonstrations, according to authorities, who cited those incidents in filing cases against participants.
The political fallout has continued past Pradhan’s resignation. Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi said this week that Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah bore responsibility for the continued filing of cases against protesters despite the government’s amnesty pledge, and the opposition Congress party said Saturday that Modi had effectively “forgiven the country” even as it continues to await a personal apology from the prime minister over the handling of the exam leak and subsequent crackdown. A Cockroach Janta Party spokesperson said this week that the continued legal action against demonstrators, including a case filed against one protest figure, amounted to “misuse of criminal machinery” that needed to stop immediately.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has governed India since 2014 and has faced few comparable challenges from an organized youth movement during that period. Analysts tracking the protests have said the episode exposed a gap between the government’s economic growth narrative and the lived experience of young Indians competing for a limited number of university seats and government jobs.
