From Ariyalur to Jantar Mantar

S MANIRATHINAM was intent on continuing the struggle. “We will not quit this fight,” he told the hundreds of protesters gathered at Balan Illam, the Communist Party of India’s headquarters in Chennai. It was 25 July, and two thousand kilometres away, in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, the Cockroach Janta Party had called off the wide-scale protests that had swelled for days, up until the resignation of the union education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. “We will continue to demand a ban on NEET,” Manirathinam said, referring to the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, a centralised test introduced in 2017 amidst confusion and opposition. “Let us regroup. Let us continue our protest in a public place with government approval.” A lot of the protesters, however, were disappointed. They had wanted to continue the agitation. Manirathinam himself had spoken from the Jantar Mantar stage just days before and had seen the police beating protesters as they marched towards parliament. For him, and the agitation he returned to in Chennai, the demand was not merely to reform NEET, but to ban it.

The moment carried the weight of a nearly decade-long heartbreaking battle for Manirathinam. His sister, S Anitha, had died by suicide nine years ago, and her image had become a rallying point for Tamil Nadu’s anti-NEET movement. Since then, he had opposed the examination tooth and nail. He had organised petitions, fought legal battles, joined protests and even built a library in his sister’s memory. The Jantar Mantar protest had felt like a turning point: after years of fighting in Tamil Nadu, tens of thousands had finally gathered in the national capital to demand, among other things, accountability over NEET.

But when the protest was called off, the disappointment was palpable. It felt as though the anger that had briefly found a national stage suddenly had nowhere to go. Besides, it was clear to Manirathinam that the resignation of one minister could not settle the question. It could not undo the problems built into the examination, the system around it and the havoc it played on the lives of innumerable students. He believed the examination had deepened inequality in medical admissions and created impossible hurdles for students from rural areas. Nothing less than its rollback would work. The crowd at Balan Illam erupted, shouting, “Ban NEET!”