The Cockroach Janata Party’s (CJP) thirty-six-day protest at the historic Jantar Mantar in Delhi has exposed the murky corners of the Indian education system. While the protest ended on July 25, following the resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, that did not end the outrage that Indian youth have been feeling.Initially, the Gen Z protest started as a satirical response to the Chief Justice of India’s remark describing unemployed youth as “cockroaches” during court proceedings. Unlike earlier student protests, it was unique in terms of its communication style as well as its social composition. Another unique aspect, rarely seen in India, was that the youth of the country came together for this protest. Maybe it was the first time after independence that youth joined hands in this way, cutting across class, caste, gender, religion and region.The fact that a paper leak provided the occasion for the Gen Z protest does not change the fact that it was against grievances accumulated over a long period of time, from crony capitalism and corruption to unemployment, the weakening of constitutional bodies and institutions, and the Hindutvisation of the education system. In a nutshell, it is against the dehumanization of Indian society over the last decade or so.§I have personally witnessed the transformation of Indian education – for the worse – since 1978, when I enrolled as a student at a time when the lower strata of Indian society as beginning to enter schools. I was the youngest of five siblings and the first to go to school from my Lambada family, and had just four classmates from our Thanda (hamlet).The Indian government did not focus on education until the late 1970s, partly because it was a state subject as per the constitutional scheme and partly because of a severe funds crunch. After education was included in the Concurrent List in 1976 through the 42nd constitutional amendment, the literacy and enrolment rates began to pick up.In 1981, the literacy rate was around 43%, and just 21% and 16% respectively among the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. As a Masters student of history at the University of Hyderabad (UoH) in 1993-95, around 70% of my classmates were from the open category, mostly from metropolitan cities.This composition has been changing since the 2000s as the marginalised communities (Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes) entered higher education institutions marginalised communities. I now teach at UoH and the proportions have reversed – around 70% of the students in my class are from marginalised communities. And the remaining students are also primarily from rural low-income families in north India, particularly Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha.South Indian upper caste families have long stopped sending their children to social sciences classes, or even to basic science courses. On the whole, students from marginalised communities are enrolling in encouraging numbers in higher education across the country. However, in terms of school education, about 70% of students enrolled in public schools are from marginalised castes – this figure is 90% for southern states.Also read: Youth Upsurge Sweeping Modi’s ‘Amrit Kaal’: ABVP ‘Deployed’ to Counter DissentSo, precisely when public schooling needs to be strengthened to accommodate the participation of marginalised castes, it is being weakened, thus threatening to permanently close the doors of higher education to these castes. This is largely a consequence of the present political regime’s lack of commitment and responsibility towards public education. The main problem with it is that it wants to transform public education to stand on the foundation of its own ideological agenda.The earlier political regimes, despite their own ideological and political limitations, broadly operated within the framework of the liberal and modern secular nationalism enshrined in the constitution. This regime, however, is grounded in a conception of cultural nationalism that draws substantially upon its ideological framework of RSS-backed Hindutva.This ideological shift has significant implications for the exercise of political power and the construction of citizenship. Instead of limiting its interventions to the institutional and administrative domains of governance, the present regime has sought to reshape citizens’ social attitudes, cultural practices, food habits and political consciousness in accordance with its ideological project. And at the heart of this project is an attempt to establish Hindutva as a normative framework that hates the other religious communities.Public education and educational institutions have been chosen to spread this ideological agenda. The New Education Policy (NEP) 2020, One Nation One Entrance Exam and the recent Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan (VBSA) Bill, 2025, are all part of this agenda.However, because of the CJP-led youth protest, in which Gen Alpha – whose members are still in school – that agenda appears to have backfired.While the institutionalisation of RSS ideology in statecraft and educational institutions began in 1977 with the Janata Party government that included the Jana Sangh, today’s BJP’s predecessor, the process became far more aggressive from 2014. This was a result of the BJP grabbing power at the Union with a comfortable majority and subsequently forming governments in a majority of states.The BJP and RSS have a serious problem with the Indian education system. For them, the existing education system represents colonial education “introduced by Macaulay“, and therefore they see it as lacking the atma or spirit of ‘Bharat’. They want to fundamentally restructure and reorient education in accordance with the values of Bharat, rooted in Vedic and Sanskrit knowledge.The protests at Jantar Mantar inspired Gen Alpha to hit the streets too. Photos: Public domain.To this end, the BJP governments have completely compromised on merit to appoint people who believe in the RSS’s ideology to all higher education institutions and universities. Sensing an opportunity, many not from the RSS initially also profess its ideology now. There are allegations of corruption in these appointments. If you listen to students, they find the new appointees inefficient and clueless about both education and universities.These appointments have done a major disservice to India’s education system.The Congress regime used to appoint progressive, serious academicians to head and build educational institutions. Because of this, these institutions had some institutional integrity and honesty. But now, everything has changed. The world rankings of Indian universities have dropped. There are reports of university and college accreditations being bought and sold. National and state entrance exam papers are being leaked and sold in the market, with paper setters and moderators standing accused in this process.These were virtually unheard of in the past, and they are the result of the education ‘reforms’ initiated by the BJP regime.The Indian education system undoubtedly needs reform, but not in the manner in which the present regime has initiated it. Indian education has long suffered from understaffing, inadequate funding and excessive centralisation. The core features of the new reforms introduced by the BJP regime are centralisation, privatisation, and communalisation. Each of these undermine inclusive public education and deny the marginalised communities access to quality education.Also read: Treating Education Like a Law and Order or Tech Problem Won’t Fix AnythingUnder this system, the state is withdrawing from its responsibility for public education while simultaneously exercising greater authoritarian control over it. The centralisation and outsourcing of education is taking place simultaneously. The outsourcing of educational services, including examinations, has created serious vulnerabilities that contribute to incidents such as the NEET paper leaks.At the same time, through the NEP 2020, education is increasingly being subjected to a communalised agenda. To illustrate the scale of the decline, the share of education in the Union government’s budget reportedly fell from 8.6% to around 2.5% between 2000 and 2026. During the BJP regime in particular, it has remained around 2–3%. The principal losers from these reforms are the marginalised communities.The consequences are increasingly class based. Children of the superrich go to foreign universities, while many upper middle class students enrol in private universities and colleges. Ironically, such institutions enjoy considerable autonomy even now, including their own curricula and pedagogical practices. Public educational institutions, on the other hand, are made to bear the burden of the BJP’s communal agenda.Here, under the rubric of a so-called Indian knowledge system, courses on “palmistry” and the Bhagavad Gita are being introduced. The emerging order risks creating a deeply unequal system in which liberal, rational and analytical education will be available only to the rich and upper middle classes. Students from middle and lower middle class backgrounds, particularly from marginalised communities, will increasingly be exposed to an ideologically driven curriculum presented as the Indian knowledge system.The crucial question is how to overcome this crisis, which has left education deeply damaged and demoralised. We cannot conduct every examination under the protection of the Air Force or the Army. Nor can the problem be reduced to the actions of a few individuals. But will the so-called reforms introduced by the present regime that nurtured this crisis be rolled back? Will the recent institutional appointments be reviewed and reversed?The crisis created by the present regime is far deeper than it seems. Embedded in the large Hindutva ecosystem, it cannot be dismissed as merely the failure of a few individuals or institutions. The political ecosystem that has produced and sustained this crisis needs to be confronted.