The Race Was Rigged Before It Started: What the NEET Protests Left Unsaid About Muslim Education

A meme that became a movement

For weeks this July, students camped at Delhi's Jantar Mantar under a name that began as an insult and was reclaimed as a rallying cry: the Cockroach Janta Party. When their march turned toward Parliament on the 20th, the state answered with tear gas and baton charges, cutting internet access street by street. What had drawn them out was the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, India's medical college entrance exam, compromised for the second time in 2026 by a leaked paper. The exam was scrapped and re-held, throwing an entire year's medical admissions into chaos. Coverage of the protests noted that more than twenty students had taken their own lives after the previous leak. On 25 July, education minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, saying students' futures "must not become victims of a political battle."

It was a real victory — a movement that began online had brought down a minister. But it was also a victory won entirely on one side of a much larger problem. The students were right that the race is rigged, and the evidence backs them. But a race can be rigged in two ways: at the finish, through a leaked paper or a fixed seat, or before it even begins, by deciding who is allowed to reach the starting line. For one of India's largest communities, the rigging happens at the start. Muslims make up about 14 percent of India's population but under 5 percent of everyone enrolled in higher education — a smaller share than Dalits.

Access, not just competition

The distinction matters. Every demand at Jantar Mantar was about competition — making the exam fair for people who had already reached it. But competition can only be fair between people who started from the same place. Move one runner ten metres back before the gun, and an honest referee simply certifies an unfair result. The point is not that anyone deserves a head start; it is that some people are being denied a fair one, which is precisely what the Constitution promises and, according to the data, has stopped delivering for this community specifically.

There is a familiar explanation offered for why Muslims sit so low on these numbers: that they undervalue education, that madrasas are preferred over schools, that it is a cultural choice. A household survey of 2,700 families and nearly 4,000 children in Jamia Nagar, a Muslim-majority part of Delhi, tested that claim directly. It found 94 percent of children enrolled in school and more than 97 percent of mothers saying they wanted their children to go to college. The aspiration is not missing; it is overwhelming. The failure lies elsewhere — in Shaheen Bagh, one of the most densely packed neighbourhoods in the same city, there is not a single government school, so 57 percent of children are pushed into private schools their families can barely afford, then into coaching on top of that because the school itself does not finish the job. The result: in class three, fewer than four children in a hundred can read at their own grade level. Enrolled, aspiring, paying — and not learning. That is not a culture rejecting education. It is a system failing a community straining every muscle to get in.

A gap that stopped closing

The scale of the stagnation becomes clear over time. In 2006, the Sachar Committee — the government's own inquiry into Muslim socio-economic conditions — found Muslims at the bottom of nearly every indicator and recommended real affirmative action. At the time, Muslims made up about 3.5 percent of higher education enrolment. Two decades later, that figure sits at just under 5 percent — a gain of roughly one percentage point in fifteen years. Over the same period, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, who also started from a low base, climbed several times faster. In the most recent official survey, while Dalit, Adivasi, and OBC enrolment all rose, Muslim enrolment actually fell by more than 8 percent in a single year. Muslims remain the only large group whose literacy still sits below the national average. Part of the explanation is structural and long-standing: the Sachar Committee found the state had simply built fewer schools in Muslim areas to begin with, a finding the Jamia Nagar survey echoes. As tens of thousands of government schools are shut or merged nationally, the neighbourhoods that started with the fewest schools have the least left to lose.

Dismantling the ladders

What has changed more recently is not just the absence of new investment but the active withdrawal of what already existed. The Maulana Azad National Fellowship, which funded doctoral research for Muslim students unable to otherwise afford it, was ended by the government in December 2022, on the stated grounds of "overlap" with other fellowships — even though a scholar can hold only one fellowship at a time on a single national portal, making the overlap largely notional. The pre-matric scholarship, which had covered classes one through ten, was cut back to cover only classes nine and ten. A scheme helping minority students afford study abroad was discontinued. A row of schemes for skilling, for girls, and for school dropouts were scrapped or quietly dropped between 2022 and 2025. In February 2024, the Maulana Azad Education Foundation, which had worked on minority education since 1989, was ordered shut after 35 years, with no reason given. The budget has not compensated: the entire Ministry of Minority Affairs receives about six-hundredths of one percent of the union budget for a population nearing one in five Indians, and even that allocation is often revised down midyear and left unspent.

The squeeze extends to institutions the community has built for itself. Muslim-run colleges and universities make up just over 2 percent of both categories nationally, most of them small — over 60 percent enrol fewer than 500 students — and new construction has slowed almost to a halt since 2014. Some existing institutions face active threats: this year, 38 of the 40 buildings at Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar University in Rampur were served demolition notices, a functioning university now moving through the courts toward possible bulldozing. Madrasas have been surveyed and struck off the rolls across Uttar Pradesh, and an entire state madrasa board was abolished in Uttarakhand. One further fact complicates any reading of these institutions as sectarian projects: at Muslim-run colleges, 55 percent of students are Hindu. Institutions built by the community serve the whole country.

Answering the counter-arguments

Three objections deserve a direct answer. The first holds that singling out Muslims fractures what is really a shared, class-based crisis of governance — and this is partly true, since the crisis is shared. But naming a steeper slope is not dividing the hill; a single remedy applied to unequal starting lines does not produce equality, it freezes the gap in place. The second holds that these schemes were cut for honest administrative reasons — overlap, waste, poor delivery — and there is something real here too: some schemes were badly run, and part of the community's own leadership underinvested in its students. But under the Constitution, educating the weakest is the state's obligation, not a favour it can withdraw because a community fell short of helping itself; underspending is a reason to deliver better, not a reason to shut a scheme down. The third and oldest objection is cultural — that Muslims simply do not value education as highly. The Jamia Nagar numbers already answer that: 94 percent enrolled, 97 percent aspiring. The wanting was never the problem.

A pattern larger than one community

The pattern documented here — scholarships withdrawn, a foundation shut, a budget hollowed out, a university facing demolition — cannot be proven to reflect deliberate intent behind each individual decision. But intent is not required to recognise a pattern, and every item on this list falls in the same direction, onto the group already standing furthest from the starting line. And this system of unequal starting lines is not confined to Muslims. Rohith Vemula, a Dalit research scholar in Hyderabad, had his fellowship stopped and was pushed out of his hostel before he died by suicide in 2016; his offence had been organising against caste. Najeeb Ahmed, a Muslim student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, vanished after a hostel clash the same year and was never found, the case eventually closed without answers. Two names, one machinery: a scholarship quietly withdrawn, a door quietly closed, and no one required to explain why.

The Constitution does not stop at promising equality on paper. Article 14 and Article 16 promise equal opportunity; Article 46 directs the state to actively promote the education of the weakest; Articles 29 and 30 give minorities the right to build and run their own institutions. Equal opportunity was never meant to be only a fair finish — it was meant to be a fair start, for the Dalit and the Adivasi, for the daughter of a daily-wage worker, and for the Muslim child in Jamia Nagar who is enrolled, aspiring, paying, and still not learning.

The students at Jantar Mantar were right that the system is rigged, and they won a resignation for it. They may yet win a fairer exam. But a resignation builds no school, restores no fellowship, and reopens no foundation. Employment justice, in the end, is downstream of access justice — and fixing the exam only repairs the last few metres of a race that was decided long before anyone reached the starting line.