The protests that have gripped the nation recently have a peculiar character. While protests typically unify a geographically limited constituency around a shared grievance, current events instead represent a rather remarkable story of political aggregation across a string of only loosely related events, building an unlikely coalition who may not all share either a grievance or an objective. This story matters because it obscures a more fundamental question: what are the protests actually about? At the centre of this sprawling movement lies something seemingly mundane – an examination paper was leaked by insiders and subsequently invalidated and rescheduled. In an ideal world, the cancellation of an examination would have only represented a mild to moderate inconvenience, where a test scheduled for one weekend needs to be retaken a couple weeks later. Consternating, to be sure, but not the end of the world. In practice, for a tragic few, it was the end of their world. Hopes were crushed, dreams were shattered and years spent on optimisation were seemingly invalidated by circumstances completely outside one’s control. Frustration, anger and a demand to find those responsible and hold them to account are natural and entirely justified. The resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, then, represents a distillation of collective anger and frustration channeled at a single opponent. Opaque, corrupt and seemingly untouchable, why shouldn’t a politician be asked to step off his ivory tower and face the nation’s wrath?The answer, of course, is that it is not entirely clear what Pradhan himself could have done differently. Per the Central Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry, which was set in motion by the education ministry itself, the leak originated from a single insider who had legitimate access to the questions and succumbed to the allure of financial incentives. At this point, it is not sufficiently established whether the leak was a result of gross negligence, a widespread corruption scandal or a failure of administrative accountability. Rather, it represents an operational failure of not containing an insider threat which, while certainly capable of being mitigated somewhat, is ultimately irreducible insofar as someone must eventually see the questions before they hit the students’ desks.Also read: Sacrificing Pradhan Won’t Save ModiNow, does this mean that Pradhan is blameless or that the leak was inevitable? Certainly not. Just like the captain of a ship is ultimately responsible for everything that goes on under him, a minister ultimately bears democratic accountability for failures that occur within their department. But all forms of accountability are not equal and sometimes the emotionally satisfying demand isn’t always the right one. It is fair to demand that a minister be made to answer for the lapse. The problem is that after resignation, there is not much answering that can be done.An unintentional misdirection of accountabilityMinisters are rather interchangeable in a democracy, with posts filled up just as much for political incentives as professional competence. When a single resignation becomes the organising principle of a protest, it obscures the fundamental question of what next? Can we be certain that the next minister will set about vast institutional change? Or is it just as likely that having met the principal demand, the protests will lose momentum and things will return to normal? The former is uncertain, while the latter is a certain possible. However, democratic accountability can also include productive change, like being forced to answer tough questions in the parliament, regularly publishing reports and audits on the ministry’s progress, meeting positive outcomes within a strict timeline and being pulled up when those demands are not met. Because while a ship’s captain certainly bears responsibility for failure, a captain who is thrown overboard is of no use to anyone. Meanwhile, there is a lot that can be done. Why is the leak of a single paper such a national catastrophe in the first place? Is it worth gambling the lives of India’s youth on hollow assurances that a similar situation will not happen again? Because if the stakes are life-and-death, it follows that people will live and die over them. Bengaluru: Members of the All India Democratic Students’ Organisation (AIDSO) hold placards during a protest demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over alleged irregularities in the NEET examination, in Bengaluru, Karnataka, Saturday, July 25, 2026. Photo: PTI/Shailendra Bhojak.In an educational framework that is so hyper-competitive and scarcity-driven, where a young person’s future is decided in a single Sunday afternoon, the incentives for malpractice become overwhelming. No single individual is capable of controlling the outcomes of such a chaotic system and if the crucial policy window created by this current time in history is squandered on the wrong objective, we risk never dismantling the oppressive conditions that propagate these tragic events in the first place, where something as mundane as the leak of an examination paper ends the lives of so many. The purpose of this essay is not to rehash the same critiques of India’s examination culture. The problems are widespread and well-known and their proposed solutions equally well-argued and discussed. It is to identify a blind spot where the same protests that demand answers from the state, may subconsciously reinforce the centrality of competitive examinations in the zeitgeist. If the central failure around which the protest is organised is that the state failed to protect the sanctity of competitive testing, the examinations themselves remain unquestioned as a legitimate mechanism for allocating opportunity. So why, then, has Pradhan’s resignation become the organising principle of the protests and why are the oppressive conditions created by the competitive examinations themselves not being sufficiently challenged? The reasons may be deeper than they seem. An unlikely coalitionBroadly, the reason the protests do not seem on the brink of bringing about foundational change to India’s testing culture is because they represent an unlikely coalition of political allies with a shared interest broader than testing alone. While NEET may have provided the lightning rod to spark the life, the protests now constitute a constituency far broader than just those devastated by the exam. Everyone from Abhijit Dipke, Sonam Wangchuk and even opposition leaders have thrown their hats into the ring. Without suggesting that anyone is ingenuine, it nevertheless seems likely that the protests, rather than being principally concerned with exam reform, are instead serving as a vehicle for voicing general public anger and dissatisfaction with the current political climate, potentially bringing together almost anyone who has an axe to grind with the current administration, regardless of whether or not their concerns tie back to NEET. This distinction is central to politics, where it is far easier to aggregate people around a common opponent than around a common alternative. Everyone can agree that the current state of affairs is unacceptable without building any sort of consensus on what the way forward should be.To be clear, building a way forward is not the be-all and end-all of protests. Not everything needs to be about policy reform to be valuable and a protest whose principal consequence is the erosion of the government’s legitimacy can be and is still worthwhile in a developing democratic country. And on that account, they have certainly succeeded – one need look no further than the tragic policy brutality against protesting children to find evidence that the social contract between the state and citizen has been significantly damaged.Also read: Modi Had Once Campaigned Against Paper Leaks at Sikar. In 2026, a Sikar Paper Leak Led to His Minister’s ExitBut even regime change doesn’t by itself solve the deep-seated tensions between the state and citizens and the broader social and economic tensions that translate ordinary paper leaks into extraordinary agitation and state violence won’t disappear because someone different is pulling the strings. So, the question becomes: what do we ultimately want? Is it really just the resignation of a single minister or is our grouse with the larger system that continues to produce inequitable and unjust outcomes no matter which way the chips fall? And if it is the latter, will the constituency that was wronged ultimately be able to influence the ways by which it is governed? Or do we settle for political change as an answer to broader social and economic problems and merely accept a necessary outcome in place of a sufficient one? The answer will determine whether this moment of upheaval becomes a genuine inflection point in India’s approach to education and opportunity or whether we return to a familiar pattern of the system offering up a scapegoat to atone for its sins, while the machine churns on as normal after the subjects accept the sacrifice. For in articulating what we stand against without deciding on what we stand for, furthers an ugly truth – without actually being able to influence the unglamorous work of incremental institutional redesign, we are but kept waiting for the next dream to shatter, the next paper to leak and the next generation to take to the streets, asking the same questions all over again. Abhishek Pisharody is a development practitioner, consultant and former Teach For India Fellow.