First things first. Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on Saturday, announcing it himself on X. “I am pained to see the events of the past 10 days,” he wrote. No union education minister has ever resigned over paper leaks before. That this one did – a minister central to the BJP’s political organisation in Odisha, a man with the organisational leverage to dig in had he chosen to – makes it, as CNN put it, a rare defeat for a government that does not, as a rule, bend to street protest. Perhaps he chose to fight and lost. Perhaps he chose not to fight at all. In the end, it did not matter. The resignation went up anyway.

And already, the fictionalising has begun. The simplistic version writes itself: Abhijeet Dipke came, sat, and did what the opposition could not do in twelve years. He shook the government. It is a satisfying story. It is also, I would argue, mostly wrong. We have a national tendency to revise history in real time, to compress messy sequences into clean hero narratives. But as Mark Twain observed, truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction is obliged to make sense. So let us resist the fiction and look at the sequence – date by date, mistake by mistake.

The cause predates the party. The party did not begin with the cause.

The NEET-UG paper leak happened in early May, forcing more than two million candidates to re-sit the most consequential examination of their young lives. The anger over paper leaks is years old; it predates the CJP’s existence entirely.

The CJP itself was born of something else altogether. On May 15, Chief Justice Surya Kant, during a Supreme Court hearing, compared unemployed youngsters to “cockroaches”. The next day, Abhijeet Dipke – a thirty-year-old former Aam Aadmi Party political communications strategist – founded the Cockroach Janta Party as satire. Its founding manifesto ran to a handful of points: cancelling the licences of Ambani- and Adani-owned media houses among them (I wrote about Point 4 at the time, and about why it was the wrong solution to a right problem). Note what was not in that manifesto: paper leaks.

Dharmendra Pradhan’s name appeared nowhere. Only on June 11 – nearly a month after founding, after the original planks had generated followers but no movement – did the CJP release its “exam manifesto” from Pune. The party did not create the cause. The party, searching for traction, adopted a cause that already existed. There is nothing dishonourable in that; political entrepreneurs pivot. But let us at least record it accurately: the demand chose the vehicle, not the other way around.

The protest, for weeks, was a flop. Say it plainly.

The Jantar Mantar sit-in began on June 6. The crowds were modest – by most accounts a few thousand at their peak on announced days, and far fewer who actually stayed. The organisational muscle on the ground came not from the CJP, which had followers but no cadre, but from the student left – AISA, AISF, SFI – organisations that remained largely invisible in the coverage while doing the unglamorous work of keeping a protest site alive.

Dipke, meanwhile, made decisions unilaterally: a protest announced here, a fast announced there, celebrities invited, political parties pointedly barred from the stage. A movement run as a one-man content operation behaves like one. The BJP read the numbers correctly and did what incumbents do with small protests: nothing. No talks, no concessions. They could afford to wait.

Indeed, the waiting was made official policy – and here lies the government’s first error, the strategic one that preceded all the tactical ones. A cabinet reshuffle had been widely reported as imminent before the monsoon session, to be carried out alongside the announcement of the new BJP team, with Pradhan’s future explicitly described as “uncertain” amid the NEET controversy in PTI-sourced reports. The government, in other words, held in its hands the cleanest exit available in parliamentary politics: drop the minister quietly in routine housekeeping, deny the tent at Jantar Mantar any claim of victory, and move on. Instead, the reshuffle was postponed until after the session.

The calculation is not hard to reconstruct: the crowds were thin, the pressure looked ignorable, and reshuffling under the shadow of a protest – however small – might be read as weakness. So the government sealed its own emergency exit. The confidence ran deep enough that Pradhan himself, in an NDTV interview, dismissed the protesters as a “B-team of terrorists” out to divide the country – the kind of remark a minister permits himself only when he believes the crowd across the barricade will stay small.

Then, on June 28, Sonam Wangchuk arrived and began an indefinite hunger strike, alongside six AISA students. And here is the detail the hero narrative must suppress: even a week after Wangchuk joined, the protest remained small. The stated cause still could not fill Jantar Mantar – a venue barred to no one. What changed everything was not the cause. It was the fear that a good man might die for it.

One very human fear, and a compendium of government blunders.

By mid-July, Wangchuk’s condition was visibly deteriorating. The CJP said he had lost more than 18 pounds in 18 days. He is 59. His frail images went viral, and something shifted – people who had no particular investment in the demand did not want to watch Sonam Wangchuk, of all people, die at a barricaded observatory.

Observe the tell: opposition leaders were urging him to end the fast. Akhilesh Yadav called his life “invaluable” while asking him to stop. That is not the behaviour of politicians invested in the demand. That is the behaviour of politicians invested in the man. Dipke, unable to fill the venue on his own credibility, made his U-turn: political parties, previously barred, were now welcome. The supply side sorted itself; the politicians arrived, cameras in tow.

Then the government began committing errors – not one, not two, but a full compendium, each compounding the last.

Error one: the abduction of a dying man. On July 18, plainclothes policemen entered the protest site and dragged Wangchuk into an ambulance – “kidnapped by the police like criminals and goons,” in Dipke’s telling, covered in sheets. Whatever the medical justification, the optics were catastrophic. Forcibly hospitalising a fasting Magsaysay awardee converts a health precaution into a morality play. The cause, already morphing, now completed its transformation: from “resign, Pradhan” to democracy versus dictatorship, the bending of an insensitive regime’s ego.

That is far better content. And the influencer economy, forever hunting the first-mover advantage, banked on it – after which everyone else covered it because everyone else was covering it. A self-reinforcing cascade. The apolitical were shamed into position-taking. A social fad crystallised.

Error two: lathis, gas, and – if the medical reports are to be believed – pellets. On July 20, the opening day of the monsoon session, the CJP’s Chalo Sansad march – some 20,000 strong, one of the largest anti-government gatherings in years – met barricades, lathicharge and tear gas. Around 180 people were injured by the police’s own count; the CJP said 150 protesters were hospitalised.

Then came the denial that aged worse than the force itself: Delhi Police called the pellet-gun allegations “completely false and misleading”, insisting the force does not even possess such weapons – while The Hindu reported a 19-year-old whose eye surgeons removed multiple metallic pellets, with a one per cent chance of his vision returning, and the CRPF, whose Rapid Action Force stood alongside Delhi Police that day, maintained a studied silence. If pellets were indeed fired, it would be the first known instance in the national capital – a Kashmir-tested instrument arriving at Jantar Mantar. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty condemned the force and the suspension of mobile internet at the site.

Error three: the siege economics of momos. When strangers from Mumbai and from abroad began sending food to the protesters through Swiggy and Zomato – delivery boys arriving in the rain with anonymous orders marked “student service” – the police responded with an advisory regulating app deliveries around the site, promptly sparking rumours of a ban that then required its own clarification. Consider the imagery the state chose for itself: a government visibly anxious about momos reaching teenagers. Nothing communicates panic quite like a supply blockade against snacks.

Error four: the courts closed their eyes. On July 21, the Delhi High Court declined urgent hearing of pleas on the police action – including one challenging Wangchuk’s forcible removal. The next day the Supreme Court went further.

The movement was born, in May, from this very Chief Justice Surya Kant comparing unemployed youth to cockroaches. In July, when those youths were lathicharged, media reports claimed the same Chief Justice refused to look into videos linked to the violence. However, two days later, stung by such coverage, he called the reporting “reckless”, clarifying that no formal writ petition had been filed.

Error five: the universities as deterrence arms. The same week, IIT Roorkee’s registrar circulated an internal advisory against joining the protests, followed by similar notices from Delhi University, IIT Madras and the Association of Indian Universities, with JNU’s teachers’ association preparing to oppose the advisory. Think about what this admits: the state’s answer to students alleging a broken examination system was to have examination-conducting institutions warn students against saying so. Every such advisory functioned as an advertisement for the thing it prohibited.

Run these five together and notice the pattern. The entire deterrence apparatus of the Indian state – police, paramilitary, courts, universities, internet switches, even the food supply – fired simultaneously. And every single measure raised the temperature instead of lowering it. Repression at this scale, performed on camera against sympathetic victims, is not deterrence. It is recruitment.

From the evening of the 20th, the movement no longer needed its founder. It assumed a decentralised, leaderless life of its own – local protests sprouting across the country, the anonymous food orders multiplying, the crackdown visuals doing the mobilising that no manifesto had managed.

Note what the principals were doing while the country caught fire. The CJP called off its next march, citing safety. The opposition, sensing the moment, moved to harvest it: on July 21, Rahul Gandhi, Kharge and Priyanka marched towards the Prime Minister’s residence demanding resignations – bypassing Jantar Mantar altogether, treating the CJP as what economists would call a substitute good for their own political product –and Rahul was dragged away and detained, an image that made the front page of the Financial Times’ international edition of July 22, under the headline “Gandhi arrest: Police detain Modi critics.” Akhilesh Yadav, meanwhile, was working the moment with sufficient industry that India Today ran an analysis of how he was operating three separate stages in Delhi for one political gain. Everyone at the top was monetising; the believers below supplied the footage.

And Dipke? His own “indefinite” hunger strike, announced with fanfare on the 18th after Wangchuk’s removal, concluded on the 20th – less than forty-eight hours in. The official account is that Wangchuk requested he end it, to lead the Sansad march. Perhaps. But note the mechanics of the exit: an indefinite fast requires an off-ramp that preserves the faster’s honour, and a dying man’s request is the most honourable off-ramp ever devised. Dipke accepted it with an alacrity that tells its own story – this from a man who, along with others at the tent, had earlier declined to join Wangchuk’s fast at all, on the refreshingly candid ground that hunger was not tolerable. A movement’s mahatma fasted 26 days; its founder managed two, with the exit pre-arranged by the mahatma himself. The satirists, for once, were out-satirised by events.

Wangchuk, from his hospital bed, negotiated; on July 23 he ended his twenty-six-day fast, citing the risk of violence in the country. A few days earlier, on July 19, his wife Gitanjali Angmo had announced the terms on which he was prepared to end it: political representatives and leaders should meet him, and assure him the issue would be raised in Parliament. That was all. Not the resignation, not the overhaul of the examination system – a meeting and an assurance. Pause on that, because it is the quiet confession of the whole episode: even the man giving his body to the movement was, by the end, asking for less than the movement was demanding in his name. On July 25, Pradhan resigned. The CJP declared victory and withdrew.

Movements are toppled into success, not led into it.

The sociologist Mark Granovetter gave us the threshold model of collective behaviour: each person joins a protest only when enough others already have, and revolutions ignite not when leaders are brilliant but when some trigger lowers everyone’s threshold at once. Timur Kuran called the companion phenomenon preference falsification – millions privately furious, publicly silent, until a focal event makes honesty safe, and the silence collapses all together, taking everyone including the government by surprise.

Run the sequence above through that lens and ask: at which trigger point did Abhijeet Dipke’s leadership feature? The fear of Wangchuk’s death – independent of Dipke. The forcible hospitalisation – a government decision. The lathis and pellets of the 20th – a government decision. The courts’ contempt, the campus advisories, the momos blockade – all authored by the state. The “B-team of terrorists” remark – a minister’s own gift to his opponents. Every threshold-lowering event in this story was produced either by Wangchuk’s failing body or by the government’s failing judgement. Dipke’s distinctive contributions, meanwhile, ran the other way: the weeks of unilateral flop that nearly starved the movement, and the barring of political parties that delayed the coalition until his own U-turn.

So when people ask me whether the protest would have succeeded without Dipke, my answer is: most likely, yes. Because in none of the factors that actually moved the needle did he matter.

What can be said for him is only that he stayed. And even the staying, on the record before us, reads less like conviction than like a man with nowhere else to go. Consider his position: a former political communications strategist whose original manifesto had flopped, whose protest could not retain three hundred people, whose fast lasted two days. For such a man, the tent at Jantar Mantar was not a sacrifice – it was the last asset on the balance sheet. To leave was to be forgotten; to fold the tent was to fold the career; obscurity waited immediately outside the barricades. So he sat, because sitting was the only move that kept him in the story at all. And then the storm arrived, and the man who could not afford to leave was rebranded, overnight, as the man who refused to leave. History is generous that way to whoever happens to be on stage when the lights come on. He got lucky. But let us not confuse the inability to exit with the courage to stay.

A word on what this argument is not.

It is not a defence of the government. The leaks were real; the two million re-examinations were real; the young lives derailed and, in the most tragic cases, ended, were real. A government that presides over serial examination failure, then meets a student protest with plainclothes abductions, internet suspensions, pellet denials and lathis, has earned every consequence it received. Nor is it a dismissal of the protesters. The lakhs of ordinary young people who turned up were sincere – genuine believers always are. It was at the top of the pyramid, among party founders and opposition dynasts jockeying for credit, that realpolitik reigned while believers supplied the footage.

The argument is narrower, and to my mind more important: governments are rarely toppled by the brilliance of their opponents. They are toppled by their own unforced errors, committed in front of cameras, against sympathetic victims. The BJP understood this for six weeks – which is precisely why it ignored the flop protest – and then forgot it comprehensively, five times over, in one week.

Dharmendra Pradhan was not defeated by a cockroach. He was defeated by a government that mistook a dying man’s frailty for weakness, a crowd of students for an enemy column, and a momos for a threat to national security. Movements will come and go; founders will get lucky or not. The blunders, unless something structural changes, will repeat.

As always: every factual claim above carries its source. Verify before you believe, including me.

The writer has a background in analytics from the Delhi School of Economics. This piece was first published on his Substack.