India's (Muslim) Education Crisis: Politics Behind NEET Protests Explained

For weeks this July, students had camped in the center of Delhi at Jantaar Mantar. And when their march turned toward parliament on the 20th, the state answered tear gas, baton charges. The internet cut off street by street. The movement has an odd name, the cockroach jenta party. It began as a meme, a jib thrown from a courtroom that the young picked up and wore. What turned a meme into a movement was who joined it. Students, aspirants, the generation that did everything it was told to do. And what they seized on was education. What set them off was a leaked exam paper, the National Medical Entrance need compromised again in 2026. The exam was scrapped and held a second time, throwing an entire year's medical admission into chaos. In the coverage, someone counted the students who had taken their own lives after the last leak. The number was more than 20.

And this week, the protest claimed its biggest scalp. On the 25th of July, the education minister Dhandra Pradhan resigned saying students futures must not become victims of a political battle. A movement that began as a meme had brought down a minister. It is a real victory. But hold that thought because a resignation is a win at the finish line. And there is one question upstream of all of it that no minister's resignation can touch. Their charge was simple. The race is rigged and on the evidence they were right. Right enough that within weeks the education minister himself resigned and the crowds began to thin. But there is one question this movement never asked and it is the most uncomfortable one of all. Here is the question. A race can be rigged in two ways. You can fix it at the finish. A leaked paper, a bot seat, a rigged interview. That is what the protest is about and it matters. Or you can rig it before it begins by declining who is even allowed to reach the starting line. For one of the largest communities in this country, the rigging happens there at the start. Muslims are about 14% of India. They're under 5% of everyone enrolled in higher education, a smaller share than Dalits. And over the last few years, government policy has been quietly walking that starting line further back.

I want to be careful here. This is not a rival grievance competing with the students at Janta Mantra for attention. It is the same fight followed one step upstream to the place where opportunity is actually decided because a movement that wins a fairer exam but never asks who was kept out of the classroom will simply hand a cleaner race to the people who were already at the line. So let's slow down and separate two things we usually blur together. There is competition the exam the cutoff the interview and before it there is access. Whether you ever got the schooling, the coaching, the support to compete at all. Every demand at Jantra Mantr is about competition. Make the exam fair. But competition can only be fair between people who started from the same place. Give two runners an honest referee, but move one of them 10 m back before the gun and the honest referee just certifies an unfair result. To be clear, the point is not that anyone deserves a head start. The point is the opposite. It's that some people are being denied a fair start. And a fair start is the one thing the constitution actually promises.

Now, there's an old explanation for why Muslims sit so low on these numbers. You've heard it. They don't value education. They prefer madrasa. It's a cultural choice. So, we went and looked house by house. In Jamyanagar, a Muslim majority part of Delhi, not too far away from Janta Mantra. We surveyed 2,700 households, nearly 4,000 children. 94% of those children are enrolled in school. More than 97% say they want to go to college. Mothers are only schooling is a small minority. The aspiration is not missing. It is overwhelming. So where does it break? Not at wanting at the system around the child. In Shaheenbag, one of the most densely packed neighborhoods in the city, there is not a single government school, so families pay. 57% of the children are pushed into private schools their parents can barely afford and then into coaching on top because the school itself doesn't finish the job. And here is the quiet tragedy. In class three, fewer than four in 100 children can read at their own grade level. In English, sentence reading is almost non-existent. The child is enrolled. The child is aspiring. The child is even paying. And this child is not learning. That is not a culture that rejects education. That is a system failing a community that is straining every muscle to get in.

Step back and the scale becomes clear. In 2006, the Sachar Committee, the government's own inquiry into Muslim conditions, found Muslims at the bottom of almost every indicator and recommended real affirmative action. Back then, Muslims were about 3 and a half% of students in higher education. In the years since, that number has barely moved to under 5%. 4.9 in the government's most recent survey and one point in a decade and a half. Over the very same period, scheduled casts and schedule tribes who also started low climbed steeply, several times faster. The gap didn't close. For everyone else, it narrowed. For Muslims, it held. And in the most recent official survey, while Dalith, Adivasi, and OBC enrollment all rose, Muslim enrollment actually fell by more than 8% in a single year. They are the only large group whose literacy still sits below the national average. This is not slow progress. In the last few years, it has started to run backward and part of the reason is bricks and motor. The satcher committee found something basic. The state had built fewer schools in Muslim areas to begin with. Our own Jamyaga data shows the same. Now, as tens of thousands of government schools are shut or merged across the country, the neighborhoods that started with the fewest have the least left to lose.

So why now? Why is a gap that was closing everywhere else running backward here? Part of the answer is that the ladders are being pulled up one by one. Start with one scholar's story. She's doing a PhD. Her family earns almost nothing. The one thing that made her degree possible was a fellowship, the Molana Azad National Fellowship. And this wasn't charity. It was affirmative action recommended by the government's own such a committee run through the Ministry of Minority Affairs precisely because the Muslims had fallen so far behind. In December 2022 in Parliament, the government announced it was ending that fellowship. The reason given was overlap. But a scholar can hold only one fellowship at a time on a single national portal. The overlap in practice doesn't exist. And even if there were some irregularity, you fix it. You don't demolish the whole ladder because a rung was loose. Hold on to that logic. Fix it. Don't demolish it. We'll come back to it. And it wasn't only that fellowship. pre-matrix scholarship which used to cover classes 1 to 10 was cut back to just 9 and 10. The scheme that helped minority students afford study abroad discontinued. A whole row of schemes for skilling for girls for school dropouts scrapped or quietly dropped between 2022 and 2025. And in February 2024, the Molana Azad Education Foundation, which had worked for minority education since 1989, was ordered shut 35 years. The order gave no reason at all. You might expect the budget to make up for it. It doesn't. This year, the entire Ministry of Minority Affairs gets about 600ths of the 1% of the union budget for nearly 1 in five Indians. And even that is often announced. revised down midyear and left unspent. This is the additional layer, a second crisis stacked on the one every young Indian faces. Built recently out of the very machinery meant to help.

Now if the state steps back, can the community build its own way in? Barely. Institutions run by Muslims make up just 2.1% of universities and 2.6% of colleges. Most are tiny. Over 60% enroll fewer than 500 students and the building has all but stopped. The rate of new colleges already slow flattened almost completely after 2014. And the spaces that do exist are under pressure. Muhammad Ali Johawar University in Rampur. This very month 38 of its buildings sit under demolition orders. A functioning university dragged through the courts and toward the bulldozer. Now remember what we just said about the fellowship. When something is disputed, you fix it. You don't demolish it. Here the answer to a land dispute is to raise a university. And it isn't one campus. Madrasa surveyed and struck off across UP. An entire state Madrasa board abolished in Uttakhan. Bulldozers arriving at the edges of the community institutions. The supply is squeezed from both ends. too few built and some of what stands under threat and here's the fact that should end one particular argument for good in these Muslimr run colleges most of the students 55% are Hindu the institutions built by communities serve the whole country whatever these closures are they are not the ending of some appeasement there was never any appeasement to begin with.

Now let me put the strongest arguments against everything I have just said because they deserve a real answer. The first that singling out Muslim fractures a united movement that this is really about class and governance and everyone is suffering and that's partly true. The crisis is shared but naming a steeper slope isn't dividing the hill. Saying we all start unequally isn't identity politics, it's just accuracy. A single remedy applied to unequal starting lines doesn't produce equality. It freezes the gap in place. Second, that these schemes were cut for honest reasons. Overlap, waste, poor delivery. Here, I'll concede something real. Some of these schemes were badly run. Money went unspent. And yes, part of the community's own leadership underinvested in its students. Failure is real and it should sting. But be clear about where the duty sits. Under the constitution, educating the weakest is the state's obligation, not a favor it can withdraw because a community fell short of helping itself. A parents failures don't cancel a state's duty. An underspending is a reason to deliver better, not to shut the thing down. You don't close the hospital because the queue was long. Third, the oldest one that this is culture, not system. We already answered that with our own doorstep data. 94% enrolled, 97% aspiring. The wanting is not the problem. I'm not claiming I can read intentions. I can't prove that every one of these decisions was designed to exclude. But you don't need to prove intent to see a pattern. And the pattern, scholarships gone, foundation shut, budget hollowed, a university facing the bulldozer, all falls in one direction on the group already standing furthest from the line.

So let me bring this back to those students. They were fighting over the exam hall who got the leaked paper who took the seat unfairly and they were right to and they should. Graduate unemployment in this country is around 13%, four times the overall rate. A third of our young graduates can't find work. The fight over those few honest seeds is real. But here is the deeper injustice. The protest is about who cheated their way into the hall. The question underneath it is about who never reached the hall at all. Employment doesn't begin at the interview. It begins at the school you could or couldn't reach, the fellowship you did or didn't lose, the college that was or wasn't built. Employment justice is downstream of the access justice. Fix the exam and you've still only fixed the last few meters of a race that was decided at the start.

And here I have to widen the frame because this was never only a Muslim story. The starting line is moved back for almost everyone. The system was built to keep out. Think of Rohit Vula, a Dalith research scholar in Hyderabad whose fellowship 25,000 rupees a month was stopped, who was suspended, pushed out of his hostel and who died by suicide in 2016. His offense was organizing against cast. The same machinery we've been tracing. The scholarship withdrawn, the door quietly closed. Think of Najib Ahmed, a Muslim student at JNU who vanished after a hostile clash in 2016 and was never found. The state searched then closed the file. A young man can disappear and the system simply moves on. A Dalith scholar and a Muslim student, two names, one pattern and around them the same story repeats. The poor, the first in their family to reach a classroom. Adiasi students hundreds of kilometers from any college. Girls put out the moment the money runs short. This is the architecture of unequal system of wealth, of cast, of gender. And Muslims sit at one of its sharpest edges, but never alone.

So when the students at Janta Mantr say the race is rigged, they are more right than they know. It is rigged not only at the exam hall but at the schoolhouse, the hostel, the fellowship office against everyone who was never meant to arrive. And this is where the constitution stops being decoration. Doesn't just promise equality on paper. Article 14. It promises equal opportunity in employment. Article 16. It tells the state in article 46 to actively promote the education of the weakest. And in article 29 and 30, it gives minorities the right to build and run their own institutions. Equal opportunity was never meant to be just a fair finish. It was meant to be a fair start for the Dalith and the Adiasi for the daughter of a daily wage worker and yes for the Muslim child in Jamyanagar who is enrolled, aspiring, paying and still not learning.

So I will end not with a slogan but with a standard. The students at Janta Mantra were right that the system is rigged. They won a resignation. They may still win a fairer exam. But a resignation builds no school, restores no fellowship, reopens no foundation. So I only want to hold their own logic to its full length. This week they won a resignation. Tomorrow they may win a fairer exam, but neither builds the school in Shaheenbach, nor restores the fellowship, nor reopens the foundation.