One minute, Indian students at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, were dodging police batons, and the next, they were turning that exact rage into viral memes, tracks, and jokes!
School kids, college students, test-prep grinders, and parents all showed up to protest under the banner of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). They hit the streets demanding the resignations of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Prime Minister Narendra Modi after the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak and concerns surrounding the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) on-screen marking (OSM) system used for the evaluation and re-evaluation of Class 12 board examination answer sheets.
If you talk to the protesters who were actually there, you will realize this is NOT only about one leaked test. It is a massive breaking point for a generation sick of an ailing, unfair education system that was never built for them in the first place.
The Big Lie: You’re Being Trained, Not Educated
Your school measures how well you can memorize stuff and follow rules rather than how smart you actually are, isn’t it? Has education always meant to be like that? No, that is by design!
Back in 1835, British official Thomas Macaulay revamped India’s school system with one super clear goal: train a massive class of obedient clerks to run the British Empire’s paperwork.
In his words, the objective was to “form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”
- They did not want thinkers, leaders, or innovators who would question authority.
- They wanted compliant workers who would sit down, shut up, and memorize facts.
Fast-forward nearly 80 years post-independence of India, and we are still treading the same path:
- Rote memorization over curiosity.
- Obedience over creativity.
- High-stakes exams that act like ruthless boss fights meant to weed you out, rather than tools to help you grow.
The paper leaks and grading disasters are not a case of a few rotten apples, it is about the barrel being fundamentally contaminated! They are the result of a system built purely for sorting people, not helping them thrive.
A Different Way of Learning
It doesn’t have to be like this. Historically, other traditions looked at learning through a completely different lens. Take the example of Islamic educational tradition. The very first word revealed in the Qur’an was Iqra “Read,” not “memorize” or “comply.”
During the golden ages of learning in places like Baghdad, Cordoba, and Timbuktu, knowledge (ilm) was treated like a superpower tied to personal growth, character, and helping your community.
- Questioning was encouraged: A student was expected to question, to seek understanding, and to develop moral responsibility alongside intellectual capability.
- Character mattered: Education was meant to build moral leaders who could fix real-world problems and who could reason and reform their communities, not just passive rule-followers.
It talks volumes about how peaceful student protesters are being beaten, with tear gas and water cannons being used to crush their voices for questioning the authorities. They are enduring police excesses for standing up for their right to a fair education.
The Bottom Line
The Cockroach Janta protests are not simply about demanding clean, leak-free exams. They are about an entire generation finally confronting the system: “Stop treating us like robots waiting to be sorted, and start respecting us as human beings who can think.”
What do you think? If you had the opportunity to delete this education system and replace it with something better, what would it be? Do some research this week on how the current education is marring your creativity and limiting your personality to fit into the system.