A personal reflection by Pritesh Khare

As I write this, Mr. Sonam Wangchuk is completing his 17th day of an indefinite hunger strike at Jantar Mantar in Delhi. For anyone who doesn’t know him, he’s the Ladakh-based engineer and education reformer who founded SECMOL, who built the artificial-glacier “Ice Stupa” to store water for his people, who has spent most of his life quietly solving problems most of us never think about. He has fasted before — for Ladakh, for the Sixth Schedule, for statehood. But this time it’s different, because this time the reason he’s sitting there without food is something that could have touched any of our homes: the NEET-UG paper leak.

I keep going back and forth on how to even explain what happened, because the more I read about it, the angrier and more confused I get. Over 2.2 million students sat for the exam on May 3 this year, chasing barely 1.3 lakh medical seats. Nine days later, the whole thing was cancelled — a leaked guess paper had matched the real one, word for word. Professors, a school headmistress, coaching centre owners — arrested one after another, admitting they’d memorised or photographed or printed questions and passed them on for money. And then, like it’s the most normal administrative decision in the world, millions of students who had already given years of their lives to this one exam were told: prepare again, in a few weeks, for a re-test in June. I don’t think I can fully describe what that does to a teenager. I only know that in the weeks after, more than a dozen of them didn’t survive it. Delhi, Rajasthan, UP, Bihar, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu — the names keep adding up, and each one was somebody’s whole world. And the worst part, the part that makes me feel genuinely lost, is that this isn’t even new. The same exam, the same kind of leak, happened in 2024 too. We are watching a repeat telecast of a tragedy and calling it a system.

The protest itself wasn’t started by Wangchuk. It started with a group of young people who call themselves the Cockroach Janta Party — a name they took, almost defiantly, after the Chief Justice of India compared exam cheats to cockroaches. Instead of feeling insulted, they turned it into an identity, and started demanding the resignation of the Union Education Minister over how the leak was handled. The more I read about the man behind it, the more this stopped feeling like just another viral internet moment to me. Abhijeet Dipke, the founder, is only 30. He grew up in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (Aurangabad), Maharashtra, studied journalism in Pune, and then did what a lot of ambitious young Indians his age do — he left. He went to Boston University in the US, finished a master’s degree in public relations, and had every reasonable, comfortable, well-paying reason to just stay there, the way so many of our brightest peers do. And instead, he came back. He came back to a country where, by his own admission, he was called a “lazy, unemployed, chronically online” cockroach by the system’s own custodian of the Constitution — and he turned that insult into a platform, launched it on May 16, and within days had built something the establishment couldn’t ignore. I won’t pretend I know his politics or agree with everything the movement says. But there is something I deeply respect in a young man choosing to fly back into the mess, into the noise, into a fight that offers him nothing personally, at a time when everyone I know his age is trying to book a one-way ticket out. Hats off to him for that alone.

Wangchuk says he only joined once he was sure there was no personal ambition hiding inside the movement — that it was simply young people asking to be heard. “Because of my problems, if millions of children are happy, then this is a cheap deal,” he said, even as doctors were recording his falling blood pressure and blood sugar. I read that line and I don’t know whether to feel inspired or heartbroken. Maybe both, at the same time, which is exactly the state I’ve been in since I started writing this.

And if I zoom out even further, this stops feeling like one exam scandal and starts feeling like something much older and much heavier — the kind of period that history eventually places next to 1975, next to 1984, one of those chapters we’ll have to explain to our children someday and struggle to find the right words for.

Here’s the part I find hardest to sit with. I grew up in a Hindu family, in a home and a school and a society that never stopped teaching us who to be. Lord Rama, Lord Krishna, Baba Saheb Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi, verses from the Gita — different voices, but always circling back to the same handful of things: peace, honesty, loyalty, charity. “अच्छे से पढ़ाई करो.” “अच्छे इंसान बनो.” “परोपकार, दूसरों की मदद करो.” “सभी लोगों के लिए इंसानियत रखो.” “कभी कोई गलत काम मत करो.” “जो भी काम मिले उसे ईमानदारी से करो.” “झूठ बोलना पाप है.” “अच्छा करोगे अच्छा भरोगे.” We stood in school assemblies with our hands on our hearts and said India is my country, all Indians are my brothers and sisters. We grew up in the kind of country where you don’t even call your best friend’s parents by their name — they become Kaka, Kaaki, Uncle, Aunty, because somewhere along the way we were taught to treat everyone like family.

I am 34 years old right now, and I genuinely cannot remember the last time I saw any of that being practised the way it was preached to me. What I hear instead, all around me, all the time, is a completely different language — “झूठ बोलो.” “जुमले बोलो.” “अपना मतलब देखो.” “अपना काम निकालो.” “अपनी तरक्की देखो.” Somewhere in the middle of all this, “ईमानदारी” quietly became “बेईमानी,” and nobody even bothers to hide it anymore — people say it out loud, proudly, and call it being smart. Every few years we vote, hoping this time it’ll be different, hoping for the transparency we were promised, and every few years we find out we’ve been scammed in some new, more creative way. I don’t say this bitterly. I say it because I genuinely don’t know what to do with the gap between what I was taught and what I keep witnessing. If any of this feels familiar to you too, I would really like to know — tell me in the comments, because I think I need to hear that I’m not the only one confused by all this.

So who is Mr. Sonam Wangchuk fasting for? I think he’s fasting for us. For whatever is left of the idea of this country. Because NEET is just the one scandal that happened to catch the nation’s attention this year — underneath it, there are scams everywhere, in education, in real estate, in the food we eat, in the clothes we wear, in petroleum, in automobiles, in agriculture, and now, disturbingly, even in our temples. You can tap almost any industry in this country and a long queue of victims will appear. What never seems to appear, with the same consistency, is anyone willing to own it. Anyone who says, yes, this happened because of me, and I am accountable.

When I try to look at this through my own life, all I find are victims. Not one person in my family, in my friends’ families, among the hundreds of people I know, has ever been the “culprit” in any of this. If you’re honest with yourself, I think you’ll find the same thing in your own circle. So if I am not the one doing this, and you are not, and we are not, and they are not — then who is? I keep asking myself this and I don’t have an answer, and that not-knowing is honestly one of the more unsettling feelings I carry through my days.

And when we do ask, out loud, the system doesn’t answer — it gaslights us instead. “जाने दो, इतना बड़ा इश्यू नहीं है.” “पेपर लीक हुआ था, कोई बात नहीं दोबारा करा देते हैं.” I’ve been the victim of scams myself, more than once, and every single time, before I say anything, some voice in my head asks first: “क्या ये इतनी बड़ी बात है?” Who decides that? Who gets to tell the rest of us “कितनी बड़ी बात पर हमें अपनी आवाज़ उठानी चाहिए या कंप्लेंट करनी चाहिए” — and by what right does anyone get to decide how loud our anger is allowed to be before it counts as worth acting on?

Maybe that’s why it doesn’t surprise me anymore to see where we stand on the world stage. In the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, India dropped to 157th out of 180 countries — six places lower than last year, sitting below Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Bangladesh. On the 2026 Global Passport Index, we’re ranked 125th out of 200. Numbers like these used to shock me. Now they mostly just confirm something I already feel in my gut every day. And somewhere along the way, “success” quietly started meaning: get a job outside India, get a degree outside India, build your business outside India. I don’t fully know when that shift happened, or how we let it happen so quietly.

Is this the India we stood up and pledged ourselves to, hand on heart, as children? Is this what our ancestors dreamed of and fought for and handed down to us, hoping we’d carry it forward, not just carry it away?

And if, after everything I’ve just said, your honest answer is still yes — that this is fine, this is simply how things are now — then I have only one question left for you, the same one I keep asking myself at two in the morning when I can’t sleep: who, then, is Mr. Sonam Wangchuk fasting for?

I don’t have all the answers here — honestly, I have more questions than clarity most days. If any part of this found you, or if you see it differently, I’d genuinely like to know. Tell me in the comments below.