Ground Report | ‘Cockroaches Won’: How A Seven-Week Protest At Jantar Mantar Forced Dharmendra Pradhan’s Exit

By Saturday night, Jantar Mantar looked almost like it had never held seven weeks of standoff — barricades still up, but the tarpaulins coming down, the ground getting swept clean by the same hands that had occupied it. CJP formally called off the protest. 

It started on the stage, the way most things at Jantar Mantar had for seven weeks. Abhijeet Dipke stepped up with his phone still in his hand and said the words the crowd had been waiting since June to hear: Dharmendra Pradhan had resigned.

The protesters on the ground erupted into celebration, spilling out across central Delhi. People ran towards the stage just to hear it confirmed a second time. The drums that had carried this movement through baton charges, tear gas, and internet blackouts changed their beat to a faster tempo, closer to a festival than protests. Sweets appeared from nowhere, passed hand to hand faster than anyone could ration them. The stage filled until it could barely hold the people climbing onto it. Hundreds who’d been drifting in and out all week stayed put, unwilling to leave before the day was fully spent. The crowd had broken into song, the kind that only comes when a fight is over.

Abhijeet Dipke took the stage properly a short while later, and turned the movement’s origin story into its victory lap. Months earlier, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant had dismissed unemployed youth as “cockroaches” during a Supreme Court hearing, a remark CJP had spent the summer wearing as a badge rather than an insult. 

Now Dipke used it to close the loop, sarcastically thanking the CJI, for handing the movement its name and its fuel. “If you had not called us ‘cockroaches’, I would not have returned to India,” he told the crowd. 

Behind the scenes

Meanwhile, CJP’s national spokespersons, Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das, had spent the morning still bracing for a fight. Hours before the resignation, with a fresh round of talks scheduled against a backdrop of tightened security and freshly chained barricades, Ranka asked the government that a meeting without Pradhan's resignation on the table wasn't worth having at all. He'd also spent the morning pushing back at Delhi Police, alleging on X that checkpoints five kilometres out were stopping students and food supplies from reaching the protest site. "You cannot stop Pradhan's resignation. He is going," he wrote, hours before it happened.

When it did happen, Ranka's tone shifted from confrontation to something closer to vindication mixed with caution. 

Speaking to reporters afterward, he pushed back on suggestions that CJP had somehow lost control of a movement that had, by the end, grown far larger than its founders. The party never controlled the movement to begin with, he said. The CJP had simply provided people with a platform and pointed toward what accountability would require. He also brushed aside allegations that the protest had been fed by foreign funding, rubbishing them outright.

Beyond the celebrations

The venue told its own version of the story with one made up of people who’d travelled a long way for a single afternoon.

Neha Kumari, 22, who had come from Samastipur, Bihar, said she was glad the government had finally listened. “We spend so much money on education and have started to lose hope because we know all exams are compromised. Today it feels great to be part of the crowd that made some change,” she said,

The trio of Aliya, Saloni and Richa had shown up as supporters rather than aspirants themselves; all three friends had already completed their studies and were working retail jobs that paid reasonably well. “We come hoping that one day, for someone, the studying would actually matter the way it was supposed to.”

Political veterans mixed into the same crowd as first-time protesters. Political analyst and social activist Yogendra Yadav, present at the site, called it more than a symbolic win. “It is a real victory, wrung out of a government that doesn't usually budge. It is a beginning rather than an end: the State had backed down once, because it was frightened of what would come if it didn't, and that fear was itself the leverage the movement now held.”

President of the National Federation of Indian Women Syeda Hameed, who reached in the middle of the celebrations, echoed the caution beneath the joy. “This was the first time the government had genuinely given ground,” she said. “But there was far more work left, and the episode should stand as a warning against letting power make any government blind to the people it answers to.”

Packing Up A Revolution

By evening, the mood had shifted towards something quieter. Neha, 25, who had shown up at Jantar Mantar every day after work for close to a month, spent the final hours with a broom, sweeping the stretch of pavement that had briefly been her second home. “I am finally satisfied with how it had ended and hopeful it would change things for the better,” she said. Around her were students and volunteers clearing away a month's worth of tarpaulin, food wrappers, and protest signs, restoring Jantar Mantar to itself.

Groups of people sat with suitcases and duffel bags, checking train confirmations, ready to head home now that the reason for staying had resolved itself. 

A group of friends from Murshidabad, West Bengal, who'd been sleeping rough on the Jantar Mantar pavement for a week, were among them. Mohammad Humayun, a nursing aspirant among the group, said it had been his first trip to Delhi, made with barely enough money for the journey. “I am leaving with something I hadn't had when I arrived: hope that the trip would end up changing more than just the exam system.”

How it got here

The CJP began in the first week of June as a few dozen students at Jantar Mantar under a satirical banner most people didn't take seriously at first. The demand was singular and specific: Pradhan's resignation over the alleged NEET 2026 paper leak and irregularities in CBSE's on-screen evaluation process. Student groups, the Students Federation of India, the All-India Students Association and the All-India Students Federation, joined in, but for nearly three weeks the protest stayed a fringe story.

That changed on June 28, when climate activist Sonam Wangchuk arrived and began an indefinite hunger strike. His presence pulled in parents, civil society, and eventually politicians who'd kept their distance. The protest site itself grew a kind of infrastructure including community kitchens, medical camps, sleeping arrangements for those who chose to stay around the clock.

Mid-July brought the movement's darkest turn. A march toward Parliament was met with barricades, baton charges, and tear gas; mobile internet around the site was cut, Metro stations shut, the area sealed. 

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both criticised the police response and the communications blackout. Protesters alleged harassment; police alleged that their own personnel had been attacked and property destroyed. Neither side backed down, and the crowds at Jantar Mantar didn't shrink.