New Delhi: “I feel so guilty.”It is not a phrase one hears too often at a public protest. Yet I have been hearing it with increasing frequency at the Cockroach Janta Party protest at Jantar Mantar. The people saying those words, incidentally, are parents of Gen Z youth who have come to the site to express solidarity with the protestors.Seema, a resident of Gurgaon, and mother of a 24-year-old who has graduated from IIT says: “The news of students dying by suicide after the NEET leaks has been haunting me, and my sense of guilt has been increasing by the day. Finally, I just had to come here and meet these brave students who have been fasting for over two weeks. I tried to fast for just one day and I couldn’t. I can’t imagine how they are doing it under these conditions.”Ekta, an architect from south Delhi also says: “I feel guilty that my own kids attend private schools and have none of the problems the vast majority of kids in this country are facing. Coming here and speaking to these brave students fasting here, I realise that we the privileged one percent. I am surrounded by parents whose primary concern is ‘What are the items on the menu in the school canteen?’ I want to tell them, ‘Please wake up! We will pack our kids off to foreign universities but what happens to the vast majority of kids in India who have the right to a good education, but no access to it’!”Also read: ‘We Are Asking For Tarpaulins, Not a Gaganyaan’: Voices from CJP Protest at Jantar MantarNeha Bora is a PhD scholar from JNU and has been fasting along with her comrades from AISA for the last 18 days. She is too weak to sit up and talk any more. A day before she reached that point, she told me:“There are some issues that this government cares about but education and the future of the country’s youth certainly aren’t among them. We aren’t on a hunger strike to prick the conscience of this government – if it, indeed, has one. We are fasting to awaken the conscience of those who have been trained by this government to see others through the filters of caste, religion and gender instead of simply as fellow human beings with similar joys and sorrows. We are fasting so that those people may find the courage within themselves to once again stand in solidarity with their fellow Indians. “Every day around forty to fifty people visit us and ask for forgiveness. They say, ‘You are sitting on hunger strike because we voted for the BJP.’ The father of a student who died by suicide told me that he was a devoted BJP supporter till it devoured his own son.”Supporters at Jantar Mantar. Photo: Rohit Kumar.Seeing her courage and clarity, it becomes easy to understand why the Modi government has worked so hard to weaken universities like JNU – and, more broadly, to undermine public education itself.Paritosh Kumar from Bihar, a graduate from Delhi University, has been sitting here on continuous protest since June 28. Today he is sitting under a tarpaulin with students from Delhi, Haryana, and Gujarat and a young bank employee from Rajasthan. He says:“The problem with our society is that everyone has become selfish. We don’t feel the pain of our fellow Indians’ problems. Consider the country’s elite class. They were least bothered about the problems of the rest till ethanol started ruining their cars. Now they have suddenly woken up and started criticising the government. We need to start speaking up for each other. That is when we will move forward as a country.”I ask him, “What if the government doesn’t allow your march to Parliament on July 20? You do remember the brutal way the women wrestlers’ protest and march to parliament was brutally stopped in 2023?”Paritosh then gives a brief but powerful lesson in Indian history.“You could say India’s Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience and Quit India movements also failed, couldn’t you? But we ultimately gained in Independence in 1947. Just because something did not succeed yesterday doesn’t mean it won’t succeed tomorrow.”It strikes me once again that a good public education does more than produce graduates, it produces good citizens.The ‘referendum’ sheet. Photo: Rohit Kumar.A short distance away from the stage, the Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS) has set up a referendum booth where they are conducting a single-question referendum: “Should Dharmendra Pradhan continue as education minister?” People are ticking their choice and putting their ballots in a box. KYS has also set up a QR code where people can “vote” online. Mudita, who is in charge of the booth, says, tongue firmly in cheek, “Here at least people can vote without having to worry whether they are on a list or not.” The referendum booth.Amid the sea of faces at Jantar Mantar, I spot one I haven’t seen in five years. It is Jasbir Kaur Natt, a Punjab Kisan Union leader, who managed the farmers’ protest at Delhi’s Tikri in 2020-2021. She has come to support the students.Jasbit Kaur Natt. Photo: Rohit Kumar.I had met her and her family dozens of times during my visits to the Tikri protest site. We greet each other like old friends. As someone who was a leader at one of modern India’s largest mass protests, I ask what she has to say about this particular protest.“This fight is against what I would call “company raj”, because everything has been handed over to private companies, including education and exams. This is not just the students’ fight, it is ours too, and just like lakhs came out in support of the farmers, they need to support this too. Dharmendra Pradhan needs to take moral responsibility for not just the paper leaks but also the deaths of so many students.”Rohit Kumar is an educator and can be reached at letsempathize@gmail.com.