June 08, 2026

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A REPEATED FAILURE

IN Rajasthan's Sikar town, 22-year-old Pradeep Meghwal had spent three years preparing for NEET-UG (National Eligibility cum Entrance TestUndergraduate) for admissions to medical colleges. He was confident he would make it to a top institute this year. Instead, he died by suicide at his home on May 15, three days after the exam, conducted earlier on May 3, was cancelled following a paper leak. Twenty-one-year-old Ritik Mishra took the same route in Uttar Pradesh's Lakhimpur Kheri, as the cancelled exam put an end to what was his third attempt too. Twenty-year-old Anshika Pandey, who had missed a seat by four marks last time, could not bear the collapse of her third attempt either and ended her life in Delhi's Azadpur. In Goa, a 17-yearold boy could not handle the pressure of preparing for competitive exams while holding on to his love for hockey. He, too, chose death over uncertainty.Four young lives, each representing the human cost of a broken examination system, conducted by the National Test- ing Agency (NTA), India's premier testing body, which was twice told to mend its ways but did not. NEET-UG 2026 was a single-day, pen-and-paper examination for nearly 2.28 mil- lion aspirants across more than 5,400 centres in 565 cities. At stake were 129,805 MBBS seats in 824 medical colleges and 27,695 BDS seats in 330 dental colleges.Within days of the test, a handwritten "guess paper" of about 410 questions started doing the rounds. It had been circulating on WhatsApp and Telegram before the exam. Some students reportedly received it 42 hours in advance, others nearly a month earlier. A whistleblower in Sikar compared it with the official booklet and found a near-perfect overlap, accounting for 600 of the total 720 marks.The NTA's own internal review found the leaked mate- rial to be identical in the case of the Chemistry paper and matching substantial portions of the Biology questionnaire too. Around 120 questions from the "guess paper" had ap- peared in the actual test. On May 12, the NTA cancelled the exam across the country, for the first time in its history. The re-examination will now be held on June 21.

THE COCKROACH PHENOMENON

Aspectre is haunting India. The spectre of…er, revolution? No, just a revolting insect. Not even the real thing. The figurative version, etched in countless online posts, arriving at the gates of the republic in an insurrection of laughter. Irreverent, satirical, youthful laughter. What is it exactly? Well, it has a parodic name: the Cockroach Janta Party, which brought on the quasi-formal short form, CJP. A political party, then? No, not in the formal sense. Going by the latest updates, it remains more a party of the other sort, where you rave and rant. A chamber version could have been called an online laughter club. But this one metastasised dangerously, going so viral as to deliver a full-fledged pandemic of mirth before you could blink it.Something of volcanic proportions had clearly been building up among India's youth, and circumstances had uncorked it. Just as well that the lava was made up of levity, nothing more serious. Or is it? Depends on whether you see it as a harmless test of India's funny bone, or read it within the tangled web of politics, society and law where it was born. This is what happened. A lawyer, miffed at not getting Senior Advocate status in the Delhi High Court, questioned the process before the Supreme Court. It wasn't the first time he was litigating his personal gripe, and the judges—to cut them some slack—had reason to be annoyed. Dismissing it as a frivolous case, a waste of time, the bench gave full vent to its petulance. “The entire world should become a Senior (Advocate) but not you. If the high court grants you a senior designation, we will set it aside,” thundered Chief Justice Surya Kant. “You have no other litigation to pursue?” asked Justice Joymalya Bagchi.Then, the obiter dicta got a bit free-flowing. “There are already parasites of society who attack the system and you want to join hands with them?” asked the CJI. “There are youngsters like cockroaches, theydon't get any employment, they don't have any place in profession. Some of them become media, some become social media, some become RTI activists, some become other activists, and they start attacking everyone…” In digital parlance, that blew up. The text, headlined all across, became a founding manifesto for what was to follow. The youth weren't alone in feeling it was the system that was parasitic on India's hapless, dreamless young—for whom the future seems less neon-lit and star-spangled than in official brochures. But instead of indignation, they accepted the slur and wore it as an emblem. The CJI, pained, penitent, said his words were misconstrued: he only meant those with fake degrees. By then, Abhijeet Dipke, a young, bearded, Boston-based PR pro who had once been a digital war room infantryman for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), had made his move.“Launching a new platform for all the 'cockroaches' out there,” Dipke wrote on X. “If you wish to join, hit the link below,” directing users to a Google registration form. It had the name 'Cockroach Janta Party', and said anyone “unemployed, lazy, chronically online, and possessing the ability to rant professionally” was eligible to join. That gained the sort of traction political parties would pay billions for. On Instagram, the CJP exploded. In four days, it had 11 million followers with just 56 posts, surpassing the handle of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which sat at 8.7 mn with 18.4K posts logged after years of diligent activity. Then it overtook the Congress's 13 mn. One week: 22 mn. A creative commons bloomed alongside, a tsunami of cheers, jeers, parodic memes and anti-establishment reels. The #MainBhiCockroach hashtag spread like a superbug. Election-style posters appeared, as did a fivepoint manifesto that called for banning defecting politicians for 20 years, preventing retired chief justices from accepting Rajya Sabha seats, investigating the bank accounts of “Godi media” anchors, and 50 per cent reservation for women in Parliament.They came from everywhere. “After I learnt what the CJI had said, I followed the CJP,” says Sayan Sen, a 37-year-old tech worker in Kolkata. “All their issues resonate with the youth of India. I feel the crisis is real,” says Rajan Joshi, a naturalist in Amreli, Gujarat, who, at 29, is a veteran exam-taker. “The youth don't get to participate in political discourse anywhere.