The resignation of India’s Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on 25 July brought an abrupt end to the student-led protests over the NEET-UG 2026 exam paper leak. The protesters’ central demand was that someone at the top take responsibility. After weeks of demonstrations at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, led chiefly by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), that demand was met. Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, protest leaders declared victory, and a confrontation that had appeared to be escalating ended through political concession rather than a prolonged standoff. Yet the significance of the episode lies less in its outcome than in the language that surrounded it.
For observers in Bangladesh, parts of that language felt familiar. The resemblance was not in the scale of mobilization or the level of violence. Bangladesh’s July 2024 uprising was incomparably larger and bloodier. The comparison concerns a recurring political reflex: the tendency of governments to delegitimize protesters before addressing the grievances that brought them into the streets.
Both movements began with non-partisan, legitimate demands. In Bangladesh, students challenged a recruitment system that reserved a large portion of public-sector jobs through quotas they considered unfair and depriving. In India, students demanded action over an entrance exam paper leak and broader failures in the examination system. In both cases, the protests emerged from questions of fairness, reform, and accountability. Student movements pose a particular challenge for governments precisely because they are difficult to dismiss through conventional partisan narratives. Students are not opposition parties. They enter the political sphere through a specific grievance rather than an ideological program.
Their demands therefore tend to attract wider public sympathy. A protest about examinations, education, or employment resonates far beyond campuses because it touches the concerns of millions of families. Governments frequently struggle not because student movements are powerful organizations, but because they possess a degree of moral credibility that established political actors often lack.
That is why governments often apply a different response. On 14 July 2024, then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina invoked the term “razakarer baccha” (the son of the Razakar) against student protesters — one of the gravest insults in Bangladesh’s political vocabulary. Notably, Razakars were considered pro-Pakistani or anti-liberation elements during Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War. The 2024 movement was increasingly presented as the work of BNP-Jamaat elements and a conspiracy against the state. In India, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan initially branded the protesters as a “B team of deshatgards” (terrorists) in a televised interview with NDTV. Ruling party BJP politicians and allies framed the agitation as foreign-funded and driven by anti-national interests. Pro-government media amplified the narrative. The details differed, but the impulse was the same.
Governments facing popular protests generally have two choices. They can address the grievance, or they can delegitimize those raising it. The first option often requires uncomfortable admissions of failure. The second does not. It is politically easier to suggest that a movement has been manipulated by sinister actors than to acknowledge that thousands of young citizens may have legitimate complaints. Rather than judging the validity of the protest, governments begin framing the protesters as potential enemies. Once that shift occurs, the original issue begins to recede.
In India, the rhetoric also acquired a communal dimension. Although protesters came from varied backgrounds, parts of the movement were folded into a narrative of Muslim extremism masquerading as student dissent. After clashes in Kolkata on 24 July, West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari used the term “Shukravari” to describe those arrested, tying them to Friday prayers, a reference to Muslims, while alleging that they were not students but “foreign-funded Jamatis.” Of the sixteen people arrested in the crackdown that followed, fifteen were Muslims.
This framing encouraged selective suspicion and persecution on the grounds of religious identity. The unlawful detention of a 24-year-old student, Mohammad Junaid — a volunteer at the protest providing food and water to others — along with the harassment of his family, is an illustration of this case. Junaid alleged that he was blindfolded overnight, confined inside a police vehicle for nearly six hours, and interrogated about the source of the funds used to supply food to demonstrators. The protests were increasingly portrayed as a vehicle through which radical forces sought to destabilize the country.
This is where political labelling becomes consequential. When a protest is diverted into a question of patriotism, religion or national loyalty, citizens stop debating the substance of the issue and start choosing sides. The purpose of such labelling is not to explain but to disqualify.
Political language creates the conditions in which coercion becomes easier to justify. Once protesters cease to be viewed as students with grievances and become enemies of the nation, it generates the political permission for others to act against them. It not only justifies state repression but also encourages social hostility. In Bangladesh, Chhatra League (the student wing), Jubo League (the youth wing) and other affiliates of the then-ruling Awami League confronted and attacked student protesters alongside the state’s security apparatus.
Although the Delhi Police charged batons and tear gas, injuring dozens of protesters, India did not see an equivalent mobilization of ruling-party youth wings. The BJP’s student affiliate, the ABVP, publicly condemned the violence at Jantar Mantar. However, the leaders of the right-wing Hindu nationalist organizations, particularly the Bhartiya Gau Rakshak Dal (BGRD) and the Hindu Raksha Dal (HRD), publicly threatened to physically confront the protesters and brought out counter-processions. They made a slogan like ”Jay Shri Ram”.
Repression does not begin with force. It begins with a narrative. Students cease to be students. They become threats, conspirators, or agents of hostile interests. And once that transformation occurs, extraordinary measures become easier to defend. After the labels, come the lathis.
Bangladesh’s uprising evolved into a nationwide crisis marked by mass casualties, internet shutdowns and a political rupture that transformed the country’s history. More than 1400 dead, several thousand injured, and a government overthrown — India’s protest never approached that level of confrontation. The scale was smaller, the violence was far more limited, and the movement remained focused on a specific institutional grievance. Whether compelled or strategic, with the resignation of the Education Minister and a political concession, India produced a different outcome. Had Bangladesh’s then Home Minister, Asaduzzaman Khan, resigned on 16 July 2024 instead of the police firing live ammunition on students, the trajectory might have been different.
Any serious comparison must acknowledge these distinctions. Recognizing the differences, however, should not prevent anyone from examining the similarities. Those similarities appeared before the violence, not after it. In both cases, there was a moment when the political establishment redefined dissenters as enemies of the state to be punished rather than citizens with legitimate grievances to be addressed.
That is why the comparison matters. Not because India and Bangladesh are the same on many grounds, but because authoritarian politics everywhere follows a familiar logic. First comes the delegitimization. Then comes the dehumanization. Then comes the justification for violence. Blind loyalty replaces critical thought. Dissent becomes treason. Criticism becomes sabotage. Violence becomes acceptable. Democracies do not collapse in a single moment. They deteriorate gradually, with the indifference of citizens.
Every society that has descended into political repression has travelled this road. Not in the same language, not under the same flags, but through the same process. The use of language like “Razakarer” during the July Movement and “deshatgard” in the KJP movement are different expressions of the same impulse: the refusal of power to tolerate dissent. The warning is therefore not only for governments. It is for ordinary citizens. Authoritarianism does not begin when the prisons fill or when bullets are fired. By then it is already established. It begins when society accepts the demonization of dissent. It begins when people stop asking whether protesters are right and start asking whether protesters deserve rights. The warning signs are visible before the disaster. The question is whether they are recognized in time.
History rarely announces its return. It whispers through familiar slogans, familiar accusations, and familiar enemies. Bangladesh paid for its politics in blood. The lesson is not that Narendra Modi will inevitably meet Sheikh Hasina’s fate. The lesson is that Hasina, too, was once convinced she never would. Every government that begins dividing citizens into patriots and anti-nationals believes the consequences are for somebody else, somewhere else, and sometime later.
Reasoned concerns are reasoned concerns, no matter whether they are in Bangladesh, India, or any other country. They need to be addressed. The two movements indicate that the government should address the reasoned concerns and stop using anti-state narratives, at least when the concerns are reasoned and the movement that follows the reasoned concerns. This will help improve not only the conditions related to the reasoned concerns but also political culture.
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