On June 27, one of Delhi’s hottest summer days, the Cockroach Janta Party student agitation at Jantar Mantar seemed to have reached a lull.A few determined students sat painting posters. Looking at the placards, it was immediately obvious who was still holding the ground. The insignia of the Left’s student organisations was everywhere. I remember remarking that AISA (All India Students’ Association) seemed to be carrying the protest.The movement was still small enough for another demonstration to share the space. Pallavi Patel of Apna Dal (K), Uttar Pradesh, had called a protest demanding an OBC quota within the Women’s Reservation Bill, and a small crowd from Uttar Pradesh had gathered around her.Less than a month later, Jantar Mantar itself had become too small.Protesters spilled onto Sansad Marg, Tolstoy Marg and Connaught Place. By July 20, the march to Parliament had turned the heart of Delhi into a protest site. Drone photographs revealed a sea of people. Neha Bora, president of AISA, later admitted that even the organisers had underestimated what was coming. “We knew July 20 would be big. We didn’t expect it to be this big.”Neha Bora, President of AISA. The Left’s student organisations provided much of the protest’s organisational backbone.Looking back after the resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, much has been written about the scale of the protests and the coalition that emerged around them. The students achieved in seven weeks what a decade of organised opposition has not. They forced a Union minister out and gathered tens of thousands of people on the road to Parliament in the face of a hostile police force. They took apart, in public and with laughter and great courage, an image that had been built and maintained with enormous care for 12 years. They broke the spell that had made the regime appear too formidable to challenge.The protest generated an entire parallel universe of political satire. Slogans, posters and imagery from the ground drew on many of the defining episodes of the Modi years. Alongside demands for education and employment were references to banging thalis during the Covid pandemic, Mann Ki Baat, and the viral “Melody” moment.“Modiji has put his picture on posters everywhere. Why should he have a problem with us doing the same?” Avinash, a law student, said with deadpan irony.But the victory raises a harder political question. Can a movement whose strength lay in bringing together such different constituencies become the basis of a political realignment?The hint of an answer lies in the composition of the crowd, the very thing that made all of this possible. If its diversity was its strength, it was also an indication of what the protest was not.Author and activist Revati Laul has written of “the organised Left and its quiet power“, which she witnessed during the ‘Chalo Sansad’ march, and it is a point worth repeating. Had there not been organisations willing to endure the initial lull, there may never have been a July 20. Neha Bora, together with AISA activists Manish Kumar and Aameen Amitoj, fasted for 23 days alongside Sonam Wangchuk.Wangchuk’s fast widened the movement’s appeal. Even towards the end, his image remained on posters and T-shirts, and students spoke repeatedly of being moved by him. But it was the organisational work already underway that gave that sympathy somewhere to gather.Sonam Wangchuk remained a constant presence throughout the protest, his image reproduced on T-shirts and posters across Jantar Mantar.What was striking was that a deeply ideological organisation like AISA did not allow any anxiety it may have felt about sharing the stage to surface in public. It reflected the same pragmatism its parent organisation, the CPI(ML), has shown in Bihar by accommodating caste as a factor in ticket distribution. Here, it took the form of holding up something that would not, in the end, be theirs.From this core the movement grew not because one organisation overwhelmed the others but because very different political traditions found room within it. In this image posted on July 21, 2026, Azad Samaj Party supremo and MP Chandrashekhar Ravan stages a protest in support of Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over alleged irregularities in the NEET examination, a day after clash erupted during the Sansad Chalo march, at the Parliament premises, in New Delhi. Photo: X/@BhimArmyChief.On the day of the march to parliament, Ambedkar blue became one of the defining colours of the protest. Chandrashekhar Azad was among the first national leaders to stand with the students. Bhim Army volunteers became a constant presence. Jai Bhim echoed on the route to parliament. Sushil Balashree of the Samata Sainik Dal, an Ambedkarite organisation founded by B.R. Ambedkar in 1927, told me that Dipke being Dalit, Babasaheb’s portrait on the stage and the call to march carrying the Constitution had all drawn organisations like his into the movement.The day after the police crackdown, Samata Sainik Dal volunteers were back identifying students who needed legal or medical help. One activist who had travelled from Maharashtra simply said, “Educate, Agitate, Organise. This is exactly what is happening here.”The CJP remained firmly in charge, but the Aam Aadmi Party maintained a visible presence through both its cadre and senior leadership, while deliberately stopping short of becoming the movement’s public face. That was perhaps unsurprisin two of the four founding figures of the CJP had been shaped in the AAP.Dipke worked with AAP’s social media and campaign operation between 2020 and 2023. During the 2020 Delhi assembly election, he built meme-based content aimed at young voters and later served as a communications adviser to the Delhi government’s education department. Ranka worked at McKinsey before serving as an associate fellow in the Delhi Legislative Assembly under the AAP government from September 2019. That legacy is evident in how the CJP framed itself. It chose accountability over ideology. The charge it framed was one of administrative failure, of a leak and a ministry that had failed at its job. It was not a critique of the education system or of the National Education Policy. Corruption and incompetence are accusations in Indian public life that do not require the accusers to share a position on anything else. This was the grammar of 2011 that created the AAP.The ability to escape labels, that marks the AAP, has been inherited by the CJP, but it what allowed other political parties with far clearer ideological positions to enter the frame. The red caps of the Samajwadi Party were visible throughout the protests, as were members of its Ambedkar Vahini carrying blue Ambedkar flags. Akhilesh Yadav repeatedly expressed solidarity, and Dimple Yadav visited injured students. Rajeev Nath Sapera, a Samajwadi Party member and head of the Sapera Samaj in Kannauj, said a large number of party members had arrived from Etawah, Kannauj and even Kanpur, and were working night and day to help the students.Ambedkar blue, one of the defining colours of the protest.As the days passed, the social composition of the protest continued to widen.The vast majority were students, many of them first-time protesters. There were Buddhist monks from Nagpur, academics visiting from universities abroad, anxious parents and unemployed graduates driving auto-rickshaws. There was space for Dhamu Pal from Allahabad, head of the Shepherd Tiger Force, which works on atrocities against the Pal, Gadariya and Dhangar communities, and for Haji Nesar Ahmad, convenor of the All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz.None of these people had come because their own issues had disappeared. They came because education had become one of the few issues capable of accommodating many others.My most unexpected conversation was with two men holding one of the sharpest anti-Modi posters I saw during the protests. It said, “Rutba dekh patandar da, kha gaya chanda mandar da“, which roughly translates as, “Look at the swagger of the fraud, he’s swallowed the offerings meant for the Lord.” They belonged to the Hindu Yuva Vahini.Supporters of Adiyanath, members claiming to be from the Hindu Yuva Vahini target Modi. Photo: Radhika Bordia.When I asked how they had found themselves at this protest, Ajay Rajput from Faridabad laughed. “People assume if we are a Hindu organisation we must support Modi. It doesn’t work like that.”He readily acknowledged the organisation’s origins under Yogi Adityanath and praised his work, before arguing that even Adityanath himself was now being sidelined.The protest was broad enough to absorb resentment from inside the ecosystem it appeared to be opposing. It did the one piece of demolition that a decade of argument had not managed. What was taken apart at Jantar Mantar was not a policy; it was an aura, an image built with great effort. Whether this is the beginning of the end of Modi’s rule, or whether it will cost the BJP anything at all, is a premature question. What is true is that for a large number of people within what should be his natural constituency, his image lies tarnished.The conversation with the Hindu Yuva Vahini members also stayed with me because it seemed to capture the politics – or the lack of it – running through this movement. The students had found an issue capable of bringing together people whose politics remained fundamentally at odds.Its power came from the fact that nobody owned it. The moment any one of them stepped forward to claim it, it would acquire a label, and the label is the one weapon that has reliably worked against mass mobilisation in this country in recent years. But a movement that can only work while no political formation claims it is a movement that cannot, by itself, bid for power.Imagery from the ground drew on many of the defining episodes of the Modi yearsWangchuk was a surprising figure to find at the head of an anti-government mobilisation. In August 2019, as Article 370 was abrogated and Kashmir was under lockdown, he thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for making Ladakh a Union Territory. The BJP featured him in its campaigns, and its governments sought his advice on education. But six years later, after four protesters were shot dead in Leh, he was detained under the National Security Act and flown 1,600 kilometres to Jodhpur Central Jail, accused by the authorities of inciting the unrest.Wangchuk did civic work – schools, water, buildings – without ever taking a position that would have defined him politically. His role was much like Anna Hazare’s – even a family that normally votes for the BJP could stand behind a fasting engineer from Ladakh without feeling it had crossed a line.Which is why, when Wangchuk was picked up by the government and taken to hospital, the ire at the act drew a crowd of a size no one had anticipated. And once that happened, he became peripheral. The crowd, composed of increasingly diverse elements but with students at its centre, grew each day and took on a life of its own, until the government had to give way.There were three non-negotiable demands when Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka sat down with J.P. Nadda and Jitendra Singh on July 24: Pradhan’s resignation, a crore in compensation for the families of students who had died by suicide in the wake of the examination scandals, and the withdrawal of the FIRs against protesters.One of the three was delivered. The other two remain assurances. But for now, what matters is that on July 25, Dharmendra Pradhan resigned.His replacement, Pralhad Joshi, took additional charge of the education ministry on July 25, keeping Consumer Affairs and Food and Public Distribution, and New and Renewable Energy. Joshi is as much rooted in the RSS as his predecessors.This should come as no surprise. The protest was never going to achieve more than it did – that was evident from the first week, when the choice was made to demand a resignation rather than an overhaul of the education system. Everything the protest achieved, and everything it could not achieve, came out of that choice.The students did what needed to be done and did it better than anyone expected. What is naive is to read a resignation as a realignment of our politics. That awaits our opposition, which for over a decade has proved inadequate to the task. The students have given it an opening, it is up to the opposition to deliver on it.