Teachers in India have no shortage of reasons to protest, and this month many of them have. 

In Haryana, the Haryana Vidyalaya Adhyapak Sangh has reportedly warned of a demonstration outside the education minister’s office. It argues that SIR and census duties, followed by a campaign around the Prime Minister’s birthday, have eaten into the time needed to finish the syllabus before exams. The state’s university and college teachers have taken a “Save Higher Education – Save Campus” campaign from Kurukshetra to Hisar against an order abolishing long-vacant posts. At Delhi University’s Motilal Nehru College, faculty protested this week after a DUSU election campaigner allegedly assaulted a teacher. In Shimla, primary teachers have been on a relay hunger strike since late July against a School Complex System that, their federation says, places 15 to 20 schools under a single principal.

These grievances are legitimate, and the mobilisations are real. But they also reveal a pattern. Teachers’ organisations move quickly when the issue is workload, posts, pay or the safety of their members. They move far more hesitantly when the question is students’ rights or the integrity of the education system as a whole. This summer’s protests over examination failures exposed that gap.

A crisis that belonged to teachers too

The agitation at Jantar Mantar began with the Cockroach Janta Party. Abhijeet Dipke started the satirical youth outfit in May after Chief Justice Surya Kant compared unemployed young people to cockroaches. Left student organisations joined it, and together they demanded the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Educator Sonam Wangchuk joined on June 28 and began an indefinite fast. In mid-July, plain-clothes police moved him to hospital, which organisers said was against his will. On July 20, police met a march towards Parliament with batons and tear gas. Pradhan resigned on July 25.

A paper leak is not only a student’s misfortune. Leaks at this frequency and scale undermine the credibility of teaching and evaluation themselves. Teachers set papers, invigilate, evaluate and certify. If the system cannot guarantee a fair examination, the legitimacy of their work is also in question. It was reasonable to expect educators to be among the first to speak. Most were not.

From JP to CJP: Where are the academics?

The silence stands out because Indian teachers have, at decisive moments, done more than offer sympathy. Gujarat’s Navnirman Andolan of 1974 is remembered as a student uprising. Jones and Jones called it a “scholars’ rebellion” and argued that teachers, not students, orchestrated it. The Gujarat University Area Teachers’ Association represented about three-quarters of the state’s roughly 8,000 college teachers, and it gave the agitation its direction. Its members wrote regularly in local newspapers and staged satire against Chief Minister Chimanbhai Patel. They also appeared before the High Court and turned scattered grievances into a single demand for his removal. Patel resigned in February 1974.

In Bihar, teachers were a part of Jayaprakash Narayan’s movement. Committees of senior professors took up corruption and rising prices and demanded the removal of Chief Minister Abdul Ghafoor. Teachers addressed meetings, called bandhs and went to jail. Kumar Keshav Mohan Singh, then head of Botany at Magadh University in Gaya, in a piece recalled teachers keeping the agitation going after police firing killed protesters. They later organised against the Emergency and MISA while police raided their homes. They drafted pamphlets, circulated newsletters and gave student demands a constitutional and political vocabulary.

This was not confined to the 1970s. In 2011, more than 700 teachers from colleges affiliated to Lucknow University took mass casual leave to back Anna Hazare’s Lokpal demand. Patna University teachers marched silently alongside students. In 2019–20, the Jamia Teachers’ Association publicly rejected the Citizenship Amendment Act and led a peace march after police entered the campus. At Aligarh Muslim University, teachers and non-teaching staff joined the demonstrations. In each case, teachers acted through their associations, not only as individuals.

Individuals, not institutions

Educators were not absent in 2026. A few coaching-centre teachers spoke about the NEET leak early on, and some school and tuition teachers were regulars at the protest site. Academics such as Nivedita Menon and Manoj Jha supported the students on hunger strike, as they had during the anti-CAA, JNU and farmers’ protests. After the July 20 crackdown, many more academics expressed their anger on social media and television.

What was missing was a collective voice. A post by AISA records that representatives of JNUTA, FEDCUTA, AIFUCTO and the Democratic Teachers’ Initiative addressed protesters on June 23. That appearance matters. However, I could find no sustained campaign by these federations on the examination crisis, and no formal statement from them on the police action. Faculty bodies at most major universities and national institutes said nothing. In faculty WhatsApp groups, members argued, largely along party lines, over whether the students’ demands were legitimate at all.

Institutions, meanwhile, did act to stop the protesters. 

Delhi University, JNU and IIT Roorkee reportedly issued advisories warning students and staff that joining the protest could affect their careers. The JNU Teachers’ Association opposed its university's advisory, and former DUTA president Nandita Narain criticised DU’s. Few other faculty bodies responded. Some parents told me their children’s schools had sent messages discouraging them from attending. In Uttar Pradesh, a college teacher says he was dismissed without notice or inquiry a day after he returned from Jantar Mantar. He has alleged links between the college management and BJP leaders, and says he does not regret going.

Why the silence

Several explanations overlap.

The first is the changed character of academic administration. Critics, including the CPI(M) weekly People’s Democracy, argue that appointments over the past decade of vice-chancellors, directors and heads of regulatory bodies have favoured people sympathetic to the RSS. In their view, this has reshaped syllabi and patronage. In 2017, The Caravan reported on Gyan Sangam, a closed-door gathering at Delhi University addressed by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and attended by hundreds of academics and vice-chancellors. One need not accept every part of this critique to see its effect. When faculty careers depend on administrations that issue warnings, collective dissent becomes costly. 

The second is precarity. Ad hoc, guest and contractual staff, who have little protection, do a large share of university teaching. Private school teachers are more exposed still. They have associations on paper, but low pay, pressure from managements and parents, and the absence of job security make political participation risky. When unaided school teachers in Kerala organised in 2017, they were asking for minimum wages and basic legal protection. That shows how far such teachers are from the security that made 1974 possible.

The third is how teachers’ unions are built. Government school teachers are well organised and do protest: this year, teachers in Punjab and Haryana have objected to census and SIR duties, and teacher bodies elsewhere have taken up TET requirements and the Maharashtra TET leak. But these federations are organised around service conditions, and government employees are bound by conduct rules on political activity. Mobilising for students falls outside the causes they usually take up.

The fourth is division within the profession. Students at Jantar Mantar set aside differences of party, caste, religion and region. Teachers, by and large, seemed to have not.

Reclaiming the public actor’s role

Collective solidarity does not require every teachers’ body to endorse every student demand or call for a minister's resignation. It can be narrower and still matter. It can mean defending the right to peaceful protest and opposing advisories that threaten careers over lawful assembly. It can mean insisting on due process when students or colleagues are detained or dismissed, and seeking an independent inquiry when there are credible allegations of police excess.

Above all, it can mean treating examination integrity as a professional question on which teachers have expertise. The people who set, moderate and evaluate papers are well placed to propose how national examinations should be designed and audited. A joint position from teachers’ federations on the National Testing Agency and on evaluation reform would carry weight that individual posts cannot.

The teachers now protesting in Haryana, Shimla and Delhi show that the capacity to organise has not disappeared, and their demands deserve a hearing. Extending that collective voice to the questions of student rights and educational integrity could give teachers a wider role in shaping the reform, not merely as employees, but also as a bridge between students and the government.

The author is an interdisciplinary researcher and writer based in Gandhinagar. Views expressed are personal.

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