Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan has resigned. Students across the country are jubilant – as they should be. They have shown extraordinary courage and irreverence that has brought this government to its knees. But this is just the beginning. Already, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has called off the protest at Jantar Mantar after the government accepted its principal demands. Before our screens switch back to GRWM (get ready with me) reels, before protest sites are cleared, we owe each other careful reflection on the events of this past month.For me, this begins with a protest I attended at Bengaluru’s Freedom Park on Sunday, July 19. I carried a poster with two sides, one that read “MODI RESIGN” and the other, “FREE UMAR KHALID,” to this gathering. A young man, tall, muscled and wearing a blue Team India cricket jersey, walked up to me. Can we talk? he said. By bringing up all this – he gestured at my poster – you are diverting attention from the main cause.I asked him a few times to explain what he understood “all this” to be. He deflected, instead cross-questioning me on what this protest was about. I was very clear on that, I maintained. But did he know the history of Umar and India’s student movement, of which the protests against the NEET irregularities are a continuation? He refused to answer. You are diverting attention, he insisted. This is only about the NEET paper leak and education.He wasn’t the only one. Over the next few days, I was approached by many others. Some cautioned me against raising my poster, afraid that onlookers would suspect this movement of having “political” motives when, really, it should be focused on students and education – “apolitical” matters, in their understanding. But they weren’t wrong in worrying that the message would be used against the movement.Then a friend sent me a link to a Reddit post featuring my poster (and my hands); users were debating removing “such protesters” from these public protests. While the Reddit debate seemed genuine, with many users upvoting comments to free Umar Khalid, I have also seen what appear to be less innocent, coordinated Instagram carousel posts, all sharing the same three pictures, two of my poster and another of the crowd, with alarmist captions suggesting that the protests are “funded” and support terrorism. On Thursday, July 23, a police officer grabbed and ripped apart a similar poster that my friend had taken to Freedom Park. Yesterday evening, the “Free Umar Khalid” Instagram account was blocked in India.What about the fence-sitters, some people at Freedom Park asked me. They won’t understand why you’re bringing up Umar Khalid. The history of the contemporary student movement in India is in the public domain, I told them; they could ask their fence-sitting friends to do their homework. But now, seeing something I’ve seen before – legitimate disaffection with the state being rebranded as violence; student expression bent to fit narratives of “links” to outside actors; Adivasi livelihoods and jal, jangal, zameen erased by the rhetoric of “development” – I now feel the need to do my homework. And my assignment is to remember.As I recall the student movement I participated in, I hope to remind today’s students – courageous, delightfully non-serious and angry – why we need to go beyond the resignation of one education minister, why we need to learn from the past, especially when armies of trolls attempt to silence it. The collective act of piecing the truth back together is the only antidote to systematised gaslighting.Consider the Delhi police posting on X (formerly Twitter) that protests are being handled “professionally” and an “injured” Rapid Action Force (RAF) officer denying that the police brutalised students in Delhi – even as the internet is flooded with images of police personnel beating protesters on July 20. The pro-establishment media similarly rewrites events: “Thousands of protesters ran into police barricades, lathis and tear gas,” reads a front-page story on the Times of India. Such language suggests that protesters invited police brutality. It makes us question what we see and hear with our senses, what we believe in our hearts.But the documentation of this violence might work against the state. These images can break our assumptions of those frequently painted as suspect simply for resisting far more ruthless state excesses. Think of the military raining pellets on young Kashmiris in 2016; opening fire on Manipuris earlier this month, resulting in the death of an eight-year-old; and of the police lathi-charging Adivasis peacefully protesting the Ken-Betwa Link Project on July 19.Slow-mo reels of a student throwing tear-gas shells back at the RAF in Delhi receive thousands of likes, but a Kashmiri youth picking up a stone is seen as an act of radicalised terror. While we applaud the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) for demanding accountability from the government, we distance ourselves from Umar Khalid for asking the state rather more out-of-syllabus questions (and, undeniably, for being Muslim). But, as those protestors asked me, why Umar Khalid, and why now? Shouldn’t we be focusing on NEET and education?The origins of the ‘anti-national’ studentUmar was a research scholar at JNU when I enrolled as a master’s student in 2014. Although I didn’t know him personally – we must’ve just about said hello a few times – I remember vividly his distinct, sustained “awaaaaaaaaz do” (raise your voice), a call followed by the response “hum ek hain” (we are one) at protests.In 2015, students were demonstrating against the University Grants Commission (UGC) decision to scrap non-NET (National Eligibility Test) fellowships for research scholars. Umar was on the frontlines, as this news report on the Occupy UGC movement shows. Ironically, the UGC’s move came at a time when students had been demanding an increase in the paltry stipends – “from Rs 5,000 to Rs 8,000 for MPhil scholars and Rs 8,000 to Rs 12,000 for PhD scholars” – and opposing the increasing commercialisation of education. Smriti Irani – former Miss India and Tulsi from Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi – was the education minister at the time.The Occupy UGC protest, November 5, 2015. Photo: Anishaa TavagA few months before Occupy UGC, students from Pune’s Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) had arrived in Delhi en masse to march on Parliament. In one of the longest strikes the FTII has seen, they protested the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as chairman. His biggest claim to fame was his role as Yudhishthira in the TV series Mahabharat. Students were agitating over his lack of credentials and his direct links to the BJP.We – students from across universities in Delhi – marched with them to Jantar Mantar, where I recall some students cautioning the protesters that the government was slowly dismantling the country’s education system. This became even clearer to me later that year with the UGC’s decision to eliminate non-NET fellowships. But despite my sense of foreboding, I couldn’t have anticipated what would happen next.On a crisp January day, we received the shocking news that one of five students demonstrating at the University of Hyderabad (UoH) had ended his life. Rohith Vemula, a Dalit research scholar, was at the receiving end of institutional ire over an alleged clash with members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the BJP. The university then barred five students of the Ambedkar Students’ Association, including Rohith, from accessing hostels and common areas on campus. Although he did not blame anyone for his death, his heartbreaking, poignant suicide note is, among other things, an indictment of entrenched caste hierarchies and institutional cruelty repeatedly denied by officials, including Smriti Irani.As you can imagine, Rohith’s death only deepened student anger. Occupy UGC gained momentum, and we faced the Delhi Police’s pet water cannons and lathis, now familiar to many after the July 20 protest. That day in 2016, I was lucky not to get struck during the police charge. My friends and I eventually left the protest site, but many others were detained.#wearemorethanfive became a rallying cry in response to the UoH’s targeting of Rohith and four other scholars, and to Rohith’s death. (Anishaa Tavag)On February 9, 2016, a group of JNU students held a public meeting on “The Country without a Post Office” at Sabarmati Dhaba on campus. It was the anniversary of the execution of Afzal Guru, the prime accused in the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament. In a move that has been internationally condemned, on February 9, 2013, Guru was hanged in “secret” – a word used by the European Parliament as well as by writer Arundhati Roy.Had the discussion proceeded as originally planned, there might have been room for participants to examine principles of justice, including the global turn away from the death penalty. In a fruitful debate, assumptions can be subject to rigour, and everyone (hopefully) leaves having learnt something. But two things derailed the organisers’ plans. First, ABVP students appealed to the administration to withdraw permission for the event, as it related to Afzal Guru. The administration complied, but the event happened anyway.Next, Zee News arrived at the event on a tip-off from an ABVP student and aired videos purporting that students chanted “anti-India” slogans, like “Pakistan zindabad” (long live Pakistan). These videos, though unverified, set off what is now famously known as the JNU sedition row. And thus the “anti-national” student was born.Three students – Umar, Anirban Bhattacharya and then JNU Students Union president Kanhaiya Kumar – were arrested on charges of sedition, a colonial-era law in the erstwhile Indian Penal Code intended to curb expressions of “disaffection” with the British state. (Although the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita no longer uses the word “sedition,” it criminalises “acts endangering the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India.”)Unfortunately, many Indians lapped up this narrative of the “anti-national” “tukde-tukde gang” – students pegged as enemies of national integrity. This was despite the resignation of Vishwa Deepak, a former producer at Zee News, over what he called the network’s “biased coverage” of the events at JNU, according to an Indian Express report. The report quotes him as below:“We heard inaudible slogans from the grainy video. Editors at Zee News felt this sounded like ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ and that’s the caption we went with,” he said.But some people chose curiosity over hostility. I remember one auto driver saying to me, “Bahas ho rahi thi, bas. Lekin vishwavidyalay mein charcha toh honi chahiye.” (There was a debate – that’s it. But a university should have discussions). I agreed. My annual tuition fee was two hundred and sixty-three rupees, I told him. “That’s great,” he said. “Then anyone can study here.”There must have been over 15,000 people marching that day—students, teachers, activists, and artists—all calling for the release of Umar, Kanhaiya, and Anirban. Photo: Rebecca John.Education as liberationThe reality of affordable, high-quality public education is, as the FTII students warned, dwindling fast. But our public education has never been “adequate”. Close to a hundred years ago, India’s first law minister Dr B.R. Ambedkar urged the government to increase its spending on education.This year, the Merit-cum-Means scholarship for engineering, management and medical education was reduced, “from Rs 7.34 crore in the 2025–26 Budget to just Rs 6 lakh in 2026–27, a reduction of more than 99%,” according to the Hindu. Who makes these decisions? Cabinet ministers like Smriti Irani, whose failure to complete a college degree is public information, and Dharmendra Pradhan, who earned his degree with a side of student politics – protesting exam paper leaks.Alongside limiting employment opportunities, inaccessible education prevents the formation of something Ambedkar identified as crucial for a value-based society: fraternity. Unlike private universities, which draw people from similar class demographics, public universities create the possibility of deep friendships across the lines of religion, language, caste, class and gender. JNU is where I was first confronted with my elite caste and “general merit” privilege. I witnessed the failure of an education system that rewards privilege and does nothing to alter the conditions that uphold it.I remember a young woman in my hostel who I first thought complained a lot. It took a few conversations for me to learn that she was terrified of losing her place as a research scholar. She had been educated in Hindi and was now struggling (the language of instruction in JNU, as in all higher education institutes in India, is English).Her family didn’t support her education, so she relied entirely on her stipend. She said if she lost her seat at JNU, she would be forcibly married off. So whenever I meet someone who dismisses India’s need for affirmative action – an attitude typical of those with caste, class, linguistic and geographical privilege – I wish they could hear the pained resignation in her voice. (I once caught a glimpse of her room. A portrait of B.R. Ambedkar hung over her bed.)I wasn’t the only one whose mind broadened in a public university.On March 18, about a fortnight after Kanhaiya’s return to JNU from Tihar Jail, Umar and Anirban also received interim bail. Umar’s pre-teen sister Sarah a said as she welcomed her brother and Anirban back to campus, “Umar and Baan’s return is not the end of our struggle.”“Until every individual in this country receives justice, our struggle does not end,” she added, to deafening cheers from the crowd. The night swelled with hope.In his historic speech at the JNU administrative block – rechristened Freedom Square by the agitating students – Umar mentioned the criticism often levelled at those studying at India’s central universities: that we only know the four walls of the university, that the reality outside is “very different.“But it is within these four walls… that we hear the representatives of the various people’s movements around this country,” he said. He credited his higher education for revealing to him many realities of contemporary India, including the struggles of Adivasis, Dalits, and workers. It’s no surprise that both Umar and I – and countless others, I am certain – found ourselves growing more aware, more tolerant, and more reasonable through the course of our higher education. Ambedkar said it decades ago: education is the bedrock of an egalitarian society.Beyond one movementThis is, of course, not the whole story. In 2017, Umar was among the handful of students fined for protesting against the JNU administration’s inaction on the disappearance of Najeeb Ahmad, a student who had been assaulted by ABVP members. The ABVP volunteers faced no punitive action. In 2018, Umar was set to attend the “Freedom from Fear” event at the Constitution Club in the capital when a man armed with a pistol attacked him. Umar had said that speaking against the government meant “anything can happen to you.”In 2019, nationwide protests erupted over the Citizenship Amendment Act and plans for a National Register of Citizens (CAA–NRC). Muslim women leading the Shaheen Bagh protest in Delhi sat resolute for over a hundred days, inspiring similar protests across the country, including Bilal Bagh in Bengaluru, where I remember drawing anti-CAA postcards with some children. In December, the police stormed into Jamia Millia Islamia University and attacked hundreds of students, including those studying in the library.The following month, a mob entered JNU and injured close to forty people. No arrests were made, but ABVP students and members of the “Hindu Raksha Dal” – the outfit that threatened to attack protesters at Jantar Mantar – later took responsibility for the violence.In January 2020, as Delhi prepared for assembly elections, BJP MP Anurag Thakur hurled vitriol against the protesters at Shaheen Bagh, calling for the “traitors” to be “shot” (in Hindi, Desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maaro saalon ko). Other BJP leaders made similar remarks. Tensions rose and violence erupted in northeast Delhi, killing 53 people, most of them Muslims.Umar – who was in Amravati, a thousand miles away from Delhi when the violence broke out – was framed as the “mastermind” and slapped with several charges, including the widely criticised Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967. Another JNU scholar, Sharjeel Imam, was also booked under this law.The icing on the cake is that in his Amravati speech, Umar is reported to have spoken about responding to hate with love.The BJP lost that election, and the Aam Aadmi Party returned to power in Delhi.Meanwhile, the Supreme Court saw “no cognisable offence” for hate speech made out and agreed with an earlier Delhi high court judgment that the BJP leaders’ speeches did not target a particular community or “incite violence or public disorder.” One of these leaders, Parvesh Verma, is the Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi.Umar is now in his sixth year in Tihar Jail, still waiting for the trial to begin.Clearly, we don’t need to tell each other not to raise certain slogans or to lower certain posters. We can leave the policing to the police–state nexus. The attacks on Jamia and JNU show us that police collusion with mobs is not out of the realm of possibility. What we owe each other – because we are all we have – is a commitment to seeking and upholding the truth.Talking about Umar Khalid instead of running from the sound of his name can, of course, clear misconceptions about him. But dialogue about political prisoners is also necessary to build a social and political consciousness.Without such a consciousness, we will remain myopic and enact “single-issue” politics, picking at the symptoms – a paper leak here, the remarks of a Chief Justice there – rather than the root causes. Consider that Smriti Irani did not remain education minister or even Cabinet minister. Formidable though she was, ultimately, she proved dispensable to the Modi government when she failed to keep her Lok Sabha seat.Similarly, the promise of an equitable education system will not be fulfilled just because Dharmendra Pradhan has resigned. It’s not the swapping of one lackey for another but the overhaul of an authoritarian regime that can begin to help us rebuild our society and transform it into one based on the principles of justice, equality and fraternity.Umar Khalid is villainised for his Muslim identity. The 2020 farmers’ movement was branded “Khalistani”. As we watch, the Jantar Mantar movement is being narrativised as foreign-funded and anti-national. Detentions are rife and arrests – god forbid – may be imminent. If you are a student at the NEET protests, ten years from now, a young person at another protest might beseech you: Please don’t bring up NEET 2026 here. This isn’t political.I hope you will remember then that the attempt to hold dialogue with a state – one that has held students and scholars for over five years without trial, that defends negligent education ministers and an examination system that has cost precious lives – is always political.Anishaa Tavag is a dancer, Alexander Technique teacher, writer and editor based in Bengaluru.