Twenty-two days after the protest at Jantar Mantar started, the sit-in over the nation's largest examination scandal in years has morphed into an unwavering political duel and now Maharashtra's BJP unit is leading the charge to discredit the movement that put the issue on the national agenda.

Top Maharashtra BJP leader Chandrashekhar Bawankule set the ball rolling this week by branding the anti-NEET agitation as ‘nautanki' and saying that it was not spontaneous but had been “engineered”, and that the person funding and orchestrating the protest will soon be named publicly. His argument is based on a very basic provocation that neither he nor Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan leaked any paper and why should the government's leadership be the subject of a campaign this coordinated. It's a line designed to redefine a governance failure as a conspiracy, and it has got there at a time when the story of the protest is already complicated enough to make the claim hold true to some degree with at least part of the public.

The murky is real. CJP began life in May as an internet satire account, before the account's founder Abhijeet Dipke, a digital strategist from the U.S., arrived to make it a physical agitation at Jantar Mantar. Some critics, both pro- and anti-government, have noted that, while it was indeed calling for Pradhan's resignation, it was also focused on very specific cases, and that its key organisers were also associated with Aam Aadmi Party. One popular interpretation of the episode is that this was an attempt by the ruling party to divert attention from the Congress' own “paper leak” campaign, which inextricably involved the Ladakh climate activist Sonam Wangchuk in the hunger strike in late June. If Wangchuk is right, and he has recently stated that he was asked by his Lieutenant Governor in Ladakh to reach out to Dipke in the first place, then it would prove the very sort of a managed-opposition theory Bawankule is now attempting to use against the protesters.

In any case its parentage, the movement has since gained an independent life beyond anyone's expectations. Wangchuk's quick recovery after now more than three weeks had him admitted to Medanta Hospital in Gurugram, where Union Health Minister JP Nadda and Union PMO Minister of State Jitendra Singh went over the weekend, which was interpreted as both concern and damage control in Delhi. A "Chalo Sansad" march towards Parliament on Monday was met by a crackdown by the police which dragged the Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi into the fray and he staged an unauthorised sit-in outside Prime Minister Narendra Modi's residence in protest. BJP MP Ravi Shankar Prasad said that it had been a “shameful day” for parliamentary decorum as no leader should “disrespect the sanctity” of the PM's residence “on any grounds”. An independent investigation into the police action of July 18 and guidelines to safeguard the constitutional right to peaceful assembly are being heard by the Delhi High Court which will likely determine the scope of legal protection the state will have for further police action. The fact that the government has blocked CJP's digital platforms under the 2009 IT blocking regulation, which is based on intelligence agency advice on a threat to national security, is a subplot in itself, and has prompted some critics to wonder why a protest by students against exam fraud should be considered a threat to national security.

Below the political melodrama is a real big economic story, as to why this matter continues to resurface, regardless of the government. India's private coaching industry, whose entire concept is based on exams such as NEET and JEE, CAT and UPSC, is now worth approximately seven billion dollars and rising at a rate of nearly fifteen percent per year with some industry estimates estimating that it could climb to seventeen billion dollars by the early 2030s. Every year, some twenty-three to twenty-four lakh students take the NEET-UG exams, vying for a mere hundred thousand MBBS seats available throughout the country, with less than five percent being accepted making preparations a parallel economy, mostly unregulated. The experience of name brand coaching centres in Kota or Rajasthan can run into Rs. 5 lakhs per session for 2 years for a single seat; a gamble taken just for the prestige of the exam that it makes sense to make. Each credible leak, in turn, does not just cause annoyance among students who have lost out on some of their hard-earned marks, it can also jeopardize the entire business model which sustains crores of rupees in the test-prep industry and tuition chains and hostel economies around exam towns.

This is the underlying significance of the counter-attack Bawankule has made, not just in Maharashtra. By making the protest look like a "crowd of paid activists" rather than a group of citizens protesting, the government will have de-politicized a protest that has an impact on the financial anxiety of millions of families in India who aspire to a different way of life. If it doesn't, the growth story of the coaching industry and the government's credibility regarding examination reform suffer, as the youth vote increasingly gets to the polls at state elections. In any case, this social media account has made itself an experiment of how much room does India's institutions, courts, police and markets have for a battle between proponents of what a rigged exam will actually cost a nation.