It's not Delhi, but Jaipur, where Piyush Goyal gave his verdict on the ongoing tussle between Rahul Gandhi and Amit Shah. The commerce minister told reporters Thursday that no one paid much attention to Rahul Gandhi and that the entire episode was dealt with properly and nothing is wrong in the government's actions. A neat line, making good use of the man's confidence as he would close a file. The trouble is, the file Goyal wants closed has been open for almost three weeks now, and the questions within it have only been getting more numerous.

The comment came just a day after the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha (RSI) met in Delhi with a group of youth who alleged that they were beaten up, pellet-gunned or humiliated by the police during the July 20 crackdown at Jantar Mantar. The protest had already been a flash point once before, when Gandhi had told the Lok Sabha that the protest was on the lines of the botched UGC-NET exam, and that Shah had personally okayed force against the protesters. He hasn't walked that promise back. In fact, he has honed it. The home minister "either is incompetent, not knowing what his police force does, or he is culpable, if he did know what it did, and did not stop it," Gandhi said at his press conference this week, setting up a no-win situation. Shah had earlier asked the Congress to bring the prime minister down, a demand which the Congress has now repeated in three separate public statements.

This round is more than the standard Parliament-floor sparring because it is the alleged victims themselves. Those who did turn up with Gandhi include one girl who says she was shot by pellets and two people who say they were beaten by cops, one of whom said she was beaten “deliberately degrading.” A follower of Gandhi's reportedly 15-year-old son was reportedly pressured into making a public apology after the protest a statement that has left some of the Mahatma's angriest words against the family, which he termed simply "unacceptable" from the pressure put on him to the contrition he was made to show in public. Delhi Police has not come up with a point-by-point, on-the-record rebuttal to these individual cases, and that is why the blanket promise that nothing improper was done rings hollow. A minister's confidence is not evidence and, in the case of allegations that a pellet caused injuries to a minor, evidence is the only thing that counts.

There's this bigger trend as well that's often overlooked when you look at each exchange as an individual news cycle. It is not the first occasion that senior BJP leaders have acted in such a manner as to brand Gandhi "anti-Semitic" instead of debating his remarks. The same ploy was used when he questioned over the issue of Manipur, when he spoke outside India about Indian democracy and now again last week at the Lok Sabha debate on election reforms when Shah appeared rattled and evasive on the "vote chori" allegations that Gandhi made while the home minister's hands were visibly shaking. That's not a good characterization, and the government's response ridicule of the messenger has become automatic and doesn't always serve to be convincing to those who are already dubious.

There is a substantial political and social issue behind the political rhetoric, and both sides have a vested interest in hiding it. The desperation at Jantar Mantar can be understood from the fact that each year, twenty-five lakh candidates appear for the medical entrance exam in India, with only a little more than a lakh seats available for MBBS. Around this scarcity has developed a coaching economy valued near to seven billion dollars within the country, which is expected to more than double by mid-2030s as the families choose to invest in exam preparation instead of just opting out. The sector's advertising practices have already been singled out for criticism by the regulators, who have issued dozens of notices and penalties on misleading toppers' advertisements, and Congress had in separate statements cited a sharp rise in GST collections from coaching institutes as evidence that the sector is under-regulated, and perhaps under-taxed, compared to its actual size. None of that lets anyone know what went wrong with the protesters on July 20, but it clarifies the reason the rage always comes up again every examination period, no matter who the minister is for that week.

To those who have witnessed the reaction of democracies to youth-led protest movements, the pattern will be familiar: a flair for discrediting the opposition leader without opening an independent investigation; the habit of mocking him in public rather than holding him to account; and a whiff of hope that the public will soon forget the hard questions and move on. Perhaps Gandhi's political reputation is not as strong as it was before and many Indians are not convinced by him. But it's another question from whether people were shot at by pellets at school or whether a teenager was forced to do a public apology, or whether the home minister is culpable in all cases.