WEEKS OF STUDENT LED PROTESTS across the country seeking accountability from the Modi government regarding malpractices in conducting the NEET examination, and a host of issues on India’s crumbling education sector, alas culminated some days ago in the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Intrinsic to the flood of images pouring in from the protests in Jantar Mantar and across India’s urban clusters – from Mumbai to Patna – leading up to the Education Minister’s resignation were the invocations of Dr Ambedkar, the Constitution, which he played a key role in the drafting of, and the slogan ‘Jai Bhim’, an adulatory anti-caste call that invokes Ambedkar’s revolutionary ideals.
In Jantar Mantar, young people could be seen waving blue flags, hoisting paper posters and cloth banners with Ambedkar’s photographs plastered. In Mumbai, a young man raised a copy of the Indian Constitution, stretching out his arm. In the days following Sonam Wangchuk's forceful admission at the Safdarjung Hospital and incessant police brutality against peacefully protesting students on July 20, Chandrashekar Azad, the Bhim Army leader, took shelter beneath a statue of Dr Ambedkar inside the Parliament complex, initiating an indefinite hunger strike, condemning the police action and calling for systemic changes in education reform.
These imageries, within an agitation critiquing the National Testing Agency (‘NTA’), were not without Ambedkar’s deep entanglement with issues of education reform and its role in backward classes emancipation.
The present educational regime betrays Ambedkar’s aspirations on higher education reform
These imageries, within an agitation critiquing the National Testing Agency (‘NTA’), were not without Ambedkar’s deep entanglement with issues of education reform and its role in backward classes emancipation. For one, higher education, in his articulation, was a crucial catalyst for this emancipation.
On October 5, 1927, while supporting an amendment to the Bombay University Bill increasing the number of nominated senators from 40 to 50, which would make way for representatives from backward classes in the governing body, Ambedkar argued that a fundamental function of universities was “to provide facilities for bringing the highest education to the doors of the needy and the poor.” Earlier on July 27 that year, he had observed that education was the “greatest material benefit” for which the backward classes could fight for. “We may forego material benefits, we may forego material benefits of civilization, but we cannot forego our right and opportunity to reap the benefit of the highest education to the fullest extent,” he noted, “That is the importance of this question from the point of view of the backward classes who have just realized that without education their existence is not safe.”
This purposive conception of higher education was also closely tied to an informed belief that a severely-examination linked system of higher education structurally excluded students from historically marginalised communities. In the July 27 speech, he noted that the education system in India was the “severest possible”. “This is no doubt justified by certain educationists in India who believe that the raising of the standard of examination is equivalent to the raising of the standard of Education. I beg respectfully to differ from them,” he submitted, “Examination is something quite different from education, but in the name of raising the standard of education, they are making the examinations so impossible and so severe that the backward communities which have hitherto not had the chance of entering the portals of the University are absolutely kept out.”
These assertions – on the cruciality of higher education in the Dalit struggle and a critique of constraining and highly stressful merit based assessment structures – are valuable for several reasons. For one, they lend a tool to deconstruct the inherently discriminatory and undemocratic formulations of exams such as NEET, which became the fulcrum of the student protests. In 2017, a Dalit student S Anitha committed suicide after failing to secure a medical seat, and even petitioning the Madras High Court, and then the Supreme Court, seeking exemption for Tamil Nadu from NEET, arguing it disproportionately disadvantaged students like her.
Belonging to a daily-wage labourer’s family in Ariyalur district, she had scored 1,176 out of 1,200 marks in her Tamil Nadu State Board examinations, only to secure a mere 86 out of 720 in NEET, a shortfall that placed the cut-off, engineered around a syllabus and coaching ecosystem she could never access, entirely out of her reach. She specifically argued that NEET’s syllabus required expensive coaching she couldn’t afford, and she directly questioned the implicit distrust of state board examinations that underlie national gatekeeping exams like NEET, Joint Entrance Exam, and All India Institute of Medical Sciences entrance tests, framed in the language of “standardisation.” Both the Madras High Court and the Supreme Court declined to grant the exemption, and NEET remained in force.
Her death in September 2017, months after the Supreme Court dismissed her plea, triggered protests across Tamil Nadu and forced an admission, however reluctant, that the exam’s promise of a level playing field was itself a fiction for students schooled outside the NEET-coaching economy. Her family’s decision to return the Rs 7 lakh compensation cheque offered by the state government stood as its own rebuke, refusing to let a policy failure be converted into a closed file through a payout. Even as Anitha’s struggle and legacy substantiated the exclusionary critique of centralising authorities such as the NTA, one must also revisit Ambedkar in the context of the National Education Policy 2020.
It is worth noting that while the NTA’s establishment preceded the NEP 2020’s formulation by nearly three years, the NEP 2020 expanded the former’s mandate and entrenched it as the central testing infrastructure. A key argument from critics — including bodies like the JNU Teachers’ Association — was that NTA's enforcement of consistent syllabi drawn from national frameworks aligned directly with NEP 2020's vision of uniform, standardized assessments prioritizing “competency” over regional/state-board variation, reducing what it framed as “disparities from state board-specific curricula.”
A bipartisan Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports, chaired by Congress MP Digvijaya Singh, found in its 371st report tabled in December 2025 that of the fourteen competitive examinations conducted by the NTA in 2024 alone, five faced major disruption where UGC-NET, CSIR-NET, and NEET-PG were postponed, NEET-UG saw a paper leak, and CUET’s results were delayed. The Committee recommended that the agency expand pen-and-paper testing, citing leak-resistant precedents such as the Central Board of Secondary Education and Union Public Service Commission examination models, and confine computer-based tests to government-run centres.
A bipartisan Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, in a report tabled in December 2025, had found that of the fourteen competitive examinations conducted by the NTA in 2024 alone, at least five faced major disruptions, one saw a paper leak, and another had its results postponed.
Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan had rejected these recommendations outright in May 2026, stating that he would rely instead on the government’s own Radhakrishnan Expert Committee. Interestingly, a report in the Hindustan Times pointed out that 27 of the 101 suggestions made by the Radhakrishan Committee have been unimplemented so far. He further remarked that the Standing Committee’s findings could not be accepted since MPs of opposition parties were part of the Committee. Standing Committee members are nominated by the Speaker and Rajya Sabha Chairman in proportion to the party strength precisely so that scrutiny of the executive does not become its own pejorative. Pradhan’s objection was to the very institutional check parliamentary oversight requires.
In its formal Action Taken Report presented in June this year, the Higher Education Department pushed back on the Standing Committee Report’s suggestions asserting that the NTA’s core activities are not outsourced. However, when the Committee revisited the matter in June this year, it found this response inadequate. It noted that despite reforms suggested by the Ministry, examination-related irregularities continued to take place and that no nationwide list existed to stop firms blacklisted by one state from simply securing contracts elsewhere. This dismissal of a cross-party legislative body’s findings, rather than any engagement with the substance of its critique, speaks to the same disregard for accountability that Ambedkar had warned.
Over the years, Ambedkarian thinkers have further propounded on structural critiques of the NEP 2020 drawing on Ambedkar’s approaches. A leading critique has been on the policy’s mandate that “the private/philanthropic school sector must also be encouraged and enabled to play a significant and beneficial role.” In his paper in CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion, Yuvraj Singh highlights this contradiction between the philanthrocapitalist modelling of education and Ambedkar’s formulation. Speaking in the Bombay Legislative Council on March 12, 1927, Ambedkar said, “[t]he Education Department is not a department which can be treated on the basis of quid pro quo. Education ought to be cheapened in all possible ways and to the greatest possible extent.” Crucial to also place here is Ambedkar’s role in framing Article 45 of the Constitution which directed the Indian state to provide free and compulsory education to all children until the age of 14 years. “Over the decades, however, India has seen the commercialisation of education that Ambedkar was wary of,” Singh notes. The NTA, itself, as a model is seen to have hugely benefited private entities primarily through lucrative outsourcing contracts, commercialization of test preparation, and infrastructure leasing.
These critiques drawn from Ambedkarian scholarship lend an important lens to better conceive Ambedkar’s position and memorialising in the student protests against repeating paper leaks and the NTA and in better understanding the stakes involved in these demands for education reform for millions of marginalised students in the country, indefinitely stuck in the rut of centralised competitive exams. As a manifestation of long-developing distrust over exclusionary decisions on education policy, the protests leading to Pradhan’s resignation were also the culmination of layering frustrations against the creep of philanthrocapitalism in the sector, issues Ambedkar had foreseen and attempted to resist a century ago.
‘Educate, Agitate, Organise’: Invoking Ambedkar’s call for public reason in the time of crackdown on dissent
“My final words of advice to you is educate, agitate and organize; have faith in yourself,” Ambedkar said on July 9, 1942, at the All India Depressed Classes Conference held at Mohan Park in Nagpur, before a crowd of about 70,000 people, “With justice on our side, I do not see how we can lose our battle... It is a battle for the reclamation of human personality.”
In the images emerging from the student protests, the slogan “Educate, Agitate, Organise” became a principled cry for organising. Then there were events unfolding alongside that reminded the significance of these principles within tumultuous times. In an interview while in office, Pradhan remarked that the peacefully protesting students demanding accountability for several suicides following the paper leaks were the “B-team of dehshatgard” – which loosely translates to terrorists. It was, in several ways, a re-articulation of Prime Minister Modi’s earlier characterisation of protestors as “andolan jeevis”. “There is a new community in India now, called ‘andolan jivi’. This community will be spotted at any agitation, be it an agitation by lawyers, students, or labourers – explicitly or implicitly, this community will reach there. They cannot live without andolan and constantly look for reasons to protest,” he had said.
In their book An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, professors Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen deconstructed the Ambedkarian slogan in the context of contemporary India. “B.R. Ambedkar, the champion of the socially and economically discriminated (who did not shy away from challenging the Indian nationalist leaders for their absence of engagement with ‘economic and social democracy’), insisted that we have reason to pursue, rather than lose faith in, the power to ‘educate, agitate and organise’,” they wrote.
Dreze and Sen also highlighted that in Ambedkar’s invitation to ‘educate, agitate and organise’, the placing of ‘education’ as a precondition for subsequent assertion was crucial. “We are much inspired by Ambedkar’s vision of informed and reasoned public engagement. The important task is not so much to find a ‘new India’, but to contribute to making one,” they wrote.
Pradhan’s vilification of the protestors ridiculed not only the integrity and genuineness of the student agitations but was a significant attack on Ambedkar’s leading vision of democratic dissent.
Pradhan’s vilification of the protestors ridiculed not only the integrity and genuineness of the student agitations but was a significant attack on Ambedkar’s leading vision of democratic dissent. It is a vision that even Indian universities under the Modi government have increasingly faltered from. In the days following the police crackdown on July 20 as crowds continued swelling in Jantar Mantar, three of Delhi’s leading public varsities – Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jamia Millia Islamia – institutes which have historically been at the forefront of mass mobilisations against authoritarian regimes, issued advisories asking students to “refrain from participating” in gatherings in and around Jantar Mantar, adding that violations may invite legal consequences as well as disciplinary action. This was an insult both to the visions of the purpose of higher education as Ambedkar conceived, and his understanding of education’s role in informing public reason and democratic dissent.
Ambedkar’s iconisation during the student protests leading to the first resignation under the NDA government were not incidental. Rather one could see them as being informed by a deeper political philosophy on emancipation, and education’s role in it. In very important ways, the movement was a continuation of S. Anitha’s agitations nearly a decade ago which continue to highlight the complicity of NEET in harming the ambitions of emancipatory education, and were built on ideals that interlinked education and agitation. Among the thousands that gathered, from Delhi and Mumbai to London, Ambedkar’s images, his colours, and his values were palpable.