After the Barricades

For weeks, the road outside the Prime Minister's residence in Delhi was not supposed to be a protest site. Then it became one. Thousands of students — many of them NEET aspirants furious over an alleged paper leak, many more simply furious, full stop — walked into police barricades, absorbed baton charges, and kept coming back the next day. It ended, eventually, the way these things often end in India: with a single ministerial resignation, a declared "victory," and a great deal of unanswered questions about what, precisely, had actually changed.

This article is drawn from an in-depth Nous conversation between commentator Raju Parulekar and host Bushra Khanum Fahad — please go through the full video for more context and detail than a single article can capture.

Talking at Nous in the aftermath of the protest — organized, at least in name, under the banner that came to be known by its initials, CJP (Cockroach Janta Party) — veteran commentator Raju Parulekar offered a reading that was equal parts vindication and warning. Vindication, because he believes the uprising exposed something durable about Indian public sentiment that twelve years of relentless propaganda had failed to kill. Warning, because he believes the very people who claimed to lead the movement quietly negotiated it away — trading a nationwide reckoning for a single resignation that changed almost nothing for the students who bled for it.

Whose Movement Was It, Really?

Parulekar's first and most pointed argument is about authorship. The CJP camp, he said, is being credited today for a movement it did not, in his account, actually start.

"This movement wasn't CJP's to begin with. It was the Congress party — like it or not, and I've criticized the Congress as much as anyone — but it was the Indian Youth Congress and NSUI that got this rolling in city after city, in the form of a genuine student outcry. The anger you saw wasn't manufactured. It was the sound of a nation that had run out of patience."

He located the tipping point precisely: not the NEET paper leak alone, but what came just before it — a controversy involving alleged financial irregularities around the Ram Mandir construction, which he says shook even people who had never previously doubted the project's custodians.

"The people who were supposed to be its guardians turned out to be its thieves. That's when people's patience finally snapped — when they realized this was never about Ram, or Sita, or Rahim, or keeping Abdul in line. It was about filling pockets and holding on to power."

An Old Playbook, Replayed

Much of Parulekar's skepticism toward CJP rests on a structural argument he has made before, in a different decade, about a different movement. He draws a direct line between CJP and the 2011–13 India Against Corruption campaign that eventually produced the Aam Aadmi Party — a comparison he does not intend as flattering.

"There are exactly three organizations that have played havoc with this country's politics this way — the RSS, India Against Corruption, and now CJP. None of the three were ever registered. None of the three have ever had to account for where their money came from, or where it went."

Pressed on why crowdfunded protest money should require the same accounting as a registered trust, Parulekar didn't budge.

"The moment money changes hands — for tents, for food, for medical supplies — that's an entry. And an entry is like a birth: you can't put it back where it came from. If this was truly collective money, raised in the public's name, the public has a right to see where it went. That's not a radical demand. That's the bare minimum."

He was careful to note this wasn't a demand invented for CJP alone — he holds the RSS and its own century of undisclosed financing to an identical standard.

The Deal Behind Closed Doors

The sharpest edge of Parulekar's critique concerns how the protest actually ended. According to his account, CJP representatives — he named Saurabh Das and a colleague he referred to as Ranka — held a closed-door negotiation with Union Ministers Jitendra Singh and JP Nadda, without any of the wider coalition of student groups or stakeholders present, and unilaterally agreed to call off the movement.

"Who authorized these two individuals to negotiate on behalf of everyone who'd been on that road? In any real negotiation — a union talking to management, say — the workers' representatives are in the room, and whatever is agreed is announced back to them on the spot, for their consent. None of that happened here. Two people went behind closed doors and came out having simply decided the outcome for everyone else."

The outcome, in his telling, was Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation — a result Parulekar dismisses as a carefully chosen sacrifice rather than genuine accountability.

"What did the country actually gain from Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation? Nothing changed. And watch what happens next — Nitin Gadkari will be the next name offered up, dressed up as an unrelated controversy over ethanol-blended fuel. Someone else from the same ideological family will simply take his chair. The entire point of the exercise is to keep moving the goalposts far enough away that they never actually reach Amit Shah or Narendra Modi."

Kejriwal, the Recurring Spoiler

Parulekar extended this argument into a broader, more provocative claim about Arvind Kejriwal's role — not just in this protest, but across several recent flashpoints in opposition politics. He accused Kejriwal of intervening at three separate junctures — the resignation of former Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar, opposition to Nitish Kumar's proposed role as INDIA alliance convenor, and now the NEET protest — in ways that, in each case, ultimately protected the ruling establishment.

"Style over substance is Kejriwal's method — he introduces something like a virus into the system, and communication, narrative, and history all start running corrupted versions of events. This time, the virus is called E20. Through it, what will actually be demanded? Nitin Gadkari's resignation. Someone else from the RSS family — maybe Devendra Fadnavis, maybe someone already sitting in the ministry — will simply be slotted in."

He reached for a mythological frame to make the point sharper still — invoking Kalnemi, the demon of Hindu legend who disguised himself as a sage to sabotage Hanuman's mission to save Lakshmana.

"Our own mythology is full of this figure — the villain who arrives disguised as a saint. That is exactly the role I see CJP playing in this movement. I don't consider them the authors of this uprising, and I'm not willing to hand them power of attorney to speak for the country's youth."

He added a smaller, more personal detail as evidence of what he sees as misplaced priorities: CJP leaders returning home for their mothers' blessings within days of the deal being struck, while the students who'd actually taken the batons remained under continued police scrutiny.

What the Crackdown Actually Looked Like

Parulekar's account of the state's response to the protest is stark, and it's worth stating plainly that these are his characterizations, offered with strong conviction but without independent verification in this conversation. He alleged that pellet guns and, in some instances, live ammunition were used against protesting students; that facial recognition technology — he specifically mentioned Meta's smart glasses — was deployed to identify participants after the fact; that minors, including girls as young as fifteen, were made to record apology videos; and that Muslim students in particular were singled out for follow-up harassment, including police visits to their homes.

"This is not something you deploy carelessly. This is not what happened in Gaza — this is what a Home Minister has done to children in his own country. And when senior officers refused direct orders to escalate further, that refusal — not compassion from above — is the first reason we're not talking about something far worse."

Whatever one makes of the specific allegations, Parulekar's broader point was that the intensity of the state response, and the subsequent quiet return to normalcy once a single resignation was secured, deserves far more scrutiny than it has received.

Five Things the Movement Won Anyway

For all his frustration with how the protest concluded, Parulekar was unambiguous that it produced real, durable shifts in public consciousness — five, by his count, regardless of what CJP negotiated away.

First, he argued, India rediscovered its own argumentative instincts.

"The first good thing that happened is that India, which has always been an argumentative country at heart, came back to itself. People are questioning again. Nobody is treating anyone as a god anymore."

Second, he claimed the years-long project of communal polarization — which he described as pursued with backing from Zionist networks aligned with Israel — visibly backfired among the generation that led this protest.

"Hindu and Muslim may be different faiths, but in the soil of this country, they are one. That truth reasserted itself. I've seen the videos — young women showing an awareness of this that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. For the RSS's ideologues, that generational shift is a death knell."

Third, he pointed to what he sees as newly undeniable evidence of public hostility toward the Prime Minister and Home Minister — visible, he said, simply by reading the comment sections beneath their own social media posts.

"There's no road back from that kind of exposure. The clock doesn't run backward."

Fourth, he argued the movement reaffirmed a historic Indian foreign-policy instinct — solidarity with Palestine, and a discomfort with unconditional alignment with Israel — that he traced back to Gandhi, and which he believes today's youth still carry, in tension with the current government's posture.

Fifth, and what he called most important of all, he said the protest vindicated something he has believed for years against considerable doubt: that ordinary public judgment in India had not been permanently corroded by propaganda.

"For twelve years, people doubted whether the public's own wisdom and conscience could ever cut through it. I never stopped believing it could. This proved it was never gone — just waiting."

Is the End Near?

Asked directly whether he believed Modi and Shah's time in power was genuinely running out, Parulekar didn't hedge — though he was candid about the obstacle standing in the way of any straightforward electoral test of that belief.

"I'm not speaking hypothetically about some rebellion to come — the rebellion has already happened. Rebellion isn't something external; it happens inside people first, in whether they still believe in you or not."

He pointed to what he described as capture of India's election machinery — naming Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar directly, and citing the contested Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in states like West Bengal — as the central obstacle to translating public anger into a change of government through the ballot box.

"Right now it isn't voters choosing their government — it's the machinery choosing who gets to vote. Anger only converts into political gain or loss when elections are genuinely free and fair, at a level playing field. We don't have that yet. So this anger isn't going anywhere. It's a pressure cooker sitting on a flame that hasn't been turned off."

He closed with a mythological register once more, comparing the annual ritual burning of Ravana's effigy — a reminder, in his framing, of what unchecked arrogance eventually costs any ruler — to what he sees as the current government's blindness to its own approaching reckoning. He reached, too, for a Marathi folk couplet about a cat that drinks stolen milk with its eyes closed, imagining that closing its own eyes hides it from view — a private jab, unmistakably, at a Prime Minister he believes is narrating his own version of events on social media while the public, wide awake, watches and quietly keeps score.

What emerges from this conversation is a portrait of a movement in two acts: a first act of genuine, broad-based, multi-generational public fury that forced an admission of institutional failure — and a second act, murkier and far more contested, in which the question of who actually got to declare victory, on whose terms, and at what cost to the students still facing the consequences, remains open. Parulekar's answer to that question is unambiguous. Whether history agrees with him is, by his own admission, a matter that free and fair elections — whenever they arrive — will ultimately have to settle.