Raju Parulekar on the NEET Protests: Who Gets the Credit, and What Actually Changed

A protest, and a disputed acronym

The starting point for this conversation between anchor Bushra Khanum and Mumbai-based political commentator Raju Parulekar is a wave of student protests that followed a leaked NEET medical entrance exam paper — protests that grew, over weeks, into a broader youth movement demanding accountability from India's Home Minister, Amit Shah. By the time of this interview, the sit-in outside the Prime Minister's residence had ended, an unrelated resignation had been extracted from Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, and commentators were arguing over what the whole episode had actually accomplished. Khanum's opening question sets the terms for the rest of the conversation: who deserves credit for the scale of the protest, and did any of it change anything for the students who took the beatings?

Much of the interview turns on a single acronym, CJP, which had become closely associated with the protest camp at Jantar Mantar in the public conversation. Parulekar spends much of the interview trying to dismantle that association. In his account, the protest did not begin with CJP at all — it began with the Indian Youth Congress and the NSUI, the Congress party's student wing, which he says organised the earliest marches in city after city once the NEET leak became public. He credits the scale of what followed to ordinary parents and students rather than to any single organisation, invoking Irfan and Junaid — two names he uses without further identification, apparently understood by his audience as recent victims of communal violence — as examples of people who kept showing up despite knowing exactly what participation could cost a Muslim family specifically.

“A virus,” not a movement

Parulekar's sharpest criticism in the interview is reserved not for the government but for Arvind Kejriwal. He argues that Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party effectively parachuted into a youth-led movement it did not start, through associates he names as Deepak, Saurabh Das and Ranka — figures he says secured permits and access that, in his telling, only a Home Ministry favourite could realistically obtain. He compares Kejriwal's role to a piece of malware: not powerful in the conventional sense, he argues, but corrosive to any system it enters, corrupting “communication, narration and history” from within. Asked directly why the political opposition, with Rahul Gandhi as its most popular face, wasn't able to build and hold a movement of this scale on its own, Parulekar's answer is that it was building one — until Kejriwal's camp moved first.

The specific grievance he lays out is procedural: he says representatives identified only as being aligned with Kejriwal negotiated behind closed doors with the government's own point-people, Jitendra Singh and J.P. Nadda, and announced a call-off of the protest — in exchange, he alleges, for Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation — without the Leader of the Opposition or the wider body of protesting students being consulted or even present. He likens it to a labour negotiation conducted without any of the workers in the room. Whether that account of the negotiation is accurate is not something either speaker in the interview substantiates beyond assertion; it is presented, and should be read, as Parulekar's own reconstruction of events he did not personally witness.

He extends the same skepticism to the protest camp's finances. Pressed by Khanum on whether crowdfunded money raised for the sit-in should be publicly accounted for, Parulekar argues that any collective structure, registered or not, owes the public a ledger of what came in and where it went — drawing a direct parallel to a funding controversy that dogged the India Against Corruption movement of the early 2010s, out of which Kejriwal's party itself was born.

What the resignation actually bought

The interview repeatedly circles back to a blunt question from Khanum: what, concretely, changed because of Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation? Parulekar's answer is that it changed very little for the students who were beaten, arrested or had cases filed against them, and that the resignation itself may have been designed less as accountability than as a diversion — a lower-ranking casualty offered up, in his reading, specifically to keep the demand for Amit Shah's resignation from gaining any further ground. He extends this argument to a separate, unrelated controversy over highway tolling that he says Kejriwal has since latched onto for the same reason: to keep public anger circulating around any minister other than Shah or Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

On the substance of the allegations against Shah himself — that police under his authority used pellet guns and, in Parulekar's telling, live rounds against minors during the crackdown on protesters — Parulekar does not offer documentary evidence in the interview beyond citing an Amnesty International report on the use of force during the protests. He frames the violence as part of a pattern that, in his view, mirrors tactics used by Israel in Gaza, a comparison he returns to more than once. These are presented as his own conclusions and allegations rather than facts independently verified within the conversation.

Five things he says did change

Asked to set aside the organisers entirely and assess the protest's effect on the country, Parulekar offers five outcomes he considers genuine gains. First, he says, India became an “argumentative” country again, with young people newly willing to question authority rather than treat it as sacred. Second, he argues that an attempt to split public sentiment along Hindu-Muslim lines — which he attributes to the RSS working with what he calls Israeli and Zionist backing — collapsed in the face of visibly mixed crowds of young protesters. Third, he says an entire generation now openly expresses contempt for Modi and Shah in ways that leave a public record, pointing to comment sections under the Prime Minister's own social media videos. Fourth, he cites the protest generation's sympathy for Palestinians as continuous with an older Indian foreign-policy tradition of non-alignment with Israel. Fifth, and most sweepingly, he argues the protests proved that ordinary public judgment in India had not been permanently blunted by twelve years of what he calls propaganda — a claim he uses to justify a specific prediction: that Modi's government will not survive in its current form past March or April of 2027.

Whether it actually changed anything for Muslims

Khanum pushes back on the rosier parts of this account with a pointed, narrower question: if a Muslim student or bystander were lynched tomorrow, or their home bulldozed, would any of the young Hindus who marched at Jantar Mantar actually show up for them — or was solidarity confined to the protest camp itself? She cites recent incidents that complicate the picture: a Muslim man beaten during a Kanwar Yatra procession, and young men jeering at women in hijabs to make them visibly uncomfortable.

Parulekar's answer distinguishes between two different things: public sentiment, which he insists has shifted, and violence carried out or tolerated by whichever party currently holds state power, which he says has not. He points to the response when Jamia Millia Islamia's campus was threatened with demolition, and to the volume of calls and messages he personally received from Hindus mourning Junaid and expressing alarm over what happened to Irfan, as evidence that solidarity now runs both ways rather than being confined to Muslims defending Muslims. But he is explicit that the violence itself — the heckling, the lynchings, the bulldozers — continues wherever the BJP, or in Delhi's case what he calls Kejriwal's “B-team of the RSS,” controls the police and administration, and that it will not simply vanish with a change in public mood. He points back to the treatment of the Shaheen Bagh protesters and the 2020 Delhi riots under the AAP government in Delhi as evidence that a change of ruling party alone offers Muslims no guarantee of safety without an accompanying change in who controls law enforcement.

A prediction, offered as a prediction

The interview closes on Parulekar's forecast that the ruling dispensation's exit is now a matter of when rather than if, delivered with the same confidence he says he brought to an earlier, pre-protest episode of the same programme, in which he claims to have predicted that students would eventually take to the streets rather than wait for the 2029 general election. He reaches for the imagery of Indian mythology — tyrants like Ravana and Kansa whose downfall, in the stories, follows directly from their own arrogance — and for twentieth-century history, invoking the fall of authoritarian rulers who lost power without a peaceful transfer, to argue that Modi and Shah are on a similar trajectory. Khanum closes the interview by thanking Parulekar for travelling from Mumbai to join the conversation, telling viewers they can expect their own view of events to have shifted by the end of it — a fair description of an hour built less around settled facts than around one commentator's forcefully argued case for where the country is headed.