I keep coming back to one line from Saadat Hasan Manto, written decades before any of us were born, decades before Jantar Mantar had a hashtag: "How can I strip the veil off a society that's already naked? I don't even try to clothe it, that's not my job, it's the tailor's."
Manto wrote that in his own defense, after being dragged to court for obscenity. And yesterday this line hit me hard and here I am writing this blog. He wasn't creating the ugliness people accused him of writing, he was just refusing to look away from it. I didn't expect to think about a mid-century Urdu writer while reading updates about a protest outside Parliament in 2026 in Delhi. But that's exactly where my head went this week, watching the CJP protest unfold at Jantar Mantar and Dadar.
"I am an Artist Bro" statement done by Diljit Dosanjh also gave some clarification about the protest after backlash but to be honest it's easy to drop a story when you are sitting in a different country. And What About me? Did Yash Gadade attended the protest? The answer is Yes, I did. I was at protest that happened in Dadar's Shivaji Park for Neet exams.
What Is CJP? Understanding the Party Behind the Protest
If you're asking what is CJP, you're not alone, I had to look it up too long back. CJP stands for the Cockroach Janta Party, founded by Abhijeet Dipke. It's a newer, unconventional political outfit, and it's the group currently at the center of the Delhi protest making headlines. The name itself is a kind of provocation, cockroaches survive anything, and maybe that's the point the founders are making about ordinary citizens outlasting a broken system.
Whatever you think of the branding, what CJP as a party represents right now is a rallying point for people angry about one very specific failure: the exam system meant to decide who becomes a doctor in this country. The funny point is the education ministers daughter herself is studying abroad while the whole nations students are suffering under her father's system.
Why the NEET Paper Leak Lit the Fuse
The NEET paper leak isn't a new story, irregularities in the medical entrance exam have surfaced before. But this time, the anger didn't fade after a news cycle. It hardened into a movement. Students who spent years preparing, who sacrificed sleep and social lives and, for many families, significant money, watched the exam get compromised again. CJP has used this failure to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, arguing that repeated lapses point to a system that isn't being fixed, just apologized for.
I think this is the part that stays with me. A leaked paper isn't just an administrative scandal. It's a quiet message to an entire generation: the rules you were told to follow don't actually protect you. That's not a small thing to metabolize at eighteen or twenty.
Inside the Delhi Protest at Jantar Mantar
The Jantar Mantar protest has now stretched across multiple days, with organizers saying the crowd keeps growing rather than thinning out; usually the opposite of what happens to sit-in protests after the first news cycle fades. Sonam Wangchuk, known for his earlier climate and education activism, joined in with a hunger strike that reportedly stretched to twenty days before he was hospitalized. That detail alone tells you this protest was never just about one paper leak. It became a proxy for a much older frustration with how institutions in India treat the people who depend on them.
What struck me reading about the Delhi protest wasn't the slogans, it was a smaller, uglier detail. Organizers alleged that Delhi Police started asking people who brought water and bananas to protesters for their Aadhaar details and home addresses. If true, that's not crowd control. That's a chilling effect dressed up as paperwork. It tells ordinary bystanders: helping is being watched.
The Online Cheering Section
There's another layer to this that doesn't get talked about enough: the people watching from their phones, cheering on the crackdown. I saw a post circulating from an Instagram account making a version of this argument that the people online mocking or defending the alleged police intimidation are making a dangerous bet. Their reasoning goes something like this: apathy is easy when the fire is happening to someone else. But institutions that learn they can act without consequence rarely stop at the people currently in front of them. The comfort of watching from a distance isn't permanent, and neither is the assumption that you'll always be the one on the safe side of the barricade.
I don't think that argument needs to be shouted to land. It's just a basic observation about how power tends to behave once it's tested and finds no resistance. Whether or not you agree with CJP's methods or politics, the question of what happens to people who are simply distributing water and bananas is worth sitting with on its own — separate from whether you like the party asking for donations in the first place.
Why Farmers Are Protesting Again
A separate but connected thread running through all this is the question of why farmers are protesting again. Farmer unions have extended support to the CJP demonstration, and there's real solidarity there but it's also worth being careful here, because misinformation moved just as fast as the real story. A viral video of tractors with saffron flags was widely shared as farmers marching into Delhi to back the students. It turned out to be old footage from a 2025 dam protest in Guna, Madhya Pradesh, nowhere near Jantar Mantar.
That mix-up says something honest about where we are. People wanted to believe farmers and students were marching together, because it fit a story we already believe about who gets ignored in this country. The desire for solidarity outran the facts. I don't think that makes the underlying solidarity fake farmer unions really have expressed support, but it's a reminder to hold even the protests we agree with to a standard of accuracy, not just sentiment.
Manto's Mirror, Held Up to Now
This is where I keep landing back on Manto. He wasn't writing about exam leaks or Aadhaar cards, obviously. But the instinct behind his defense "I'm not making society uglier by describing it, I'm just refusing to pretend the ugliness isn't there" feels like the only honest way to write about a protest like this one.
It would be easy to write a blog that either romanticizes the CJP protest as pure moral clarity, or dismisses it as political theater riding a real grievance. Both would be a kind of clothing. Both would be tailoring the story to fit a shape I'm comfortable with.
What I actually see is messier: a genuine institutional failure (the leak), a genuine human cost (a hunger strike that ended in a hospital bed), a genuine act of solidarity (farmer unions showing up), and a genuine information problem (a video that wasn't what it claimed to be) — all tangled together in one protest site. I don't think it's my job to smooth that into a clean narrative. Like Manto said, that's the tailor's job, not the writer's.
Where This Leaves Me
I don't have a tidy conclusion, and I'm suspicious of pieces that manufacture one just to end on a high note. What I have is a smaller, more honest question I keep sitting with: when an exam meant to decide who gets to heal people is compromised, and the people who point that out get asked for their ID card for handing out bananas, what exactly is the "obscenity" here, and what's just description?
Manto never answered that kind of question for his readers. He just made sure they couldn't look away from it either. That feels like the most useful thing a blog like this can do too.
