It almost seems unheard of for a sitting Prime Minister of India to make a vertical reel at nearly midnight stating that he has forgiven the teenagers who abused him. But that's exactly what Narendra Modi did on Friday night, telling the followers on his Instagram page that he would pardon the young protesters who had used foul language on him and his late mother during the NEET-UG protest at Jantar Mantar. His second such video in a span of only a week could not have come at a better time as the video was uploaded just a day after a 15-year-old girl from Noida was booked in a zero FIR for allegedly using abusive language against the PM, which has since been their own controversy after the girl posted a tearful public apology.

Take the pomp out of it, and what you're seeing is a clash between two facts that India has been grappling with for years: the first is that an exam system sucks a lot of savings out of a young family, and the second is that anonymous teenage rage is something that needs the personal attention of the head of government and something that really hasn't existed in the country for a long time. Modi's words were carefully crafted to be both large-hearted and chiding. He stated in the video clip that "words do not suit civilized society" and that "the mistakes are made when you're young, and it's a time to fix the mistakes, not punish them. He said the students shouldn't be dragged through the courts. The forgiveness being expressed on Instagram and the reality on the ground are not synonymous, however, as the Noida FIR has been registered under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita vide which are in relation to intentional insult, public mischief and defamation, and has been transferred to the Parliament street police station for investigation.

The protest began with the cancellation of the NEET-UG examination that was held over the past two months for around 22.7 lakh aspirants in the city of Nashik and extending to the city of Sikar, where investigators found a leaked “guess paper” circulating in WhatsApp groups that was almost identical to 120 out of 410 plus questions in the paper. The going rate at the time was about five lakh rupees days ahead of the paper, falling to thirty thousand on the eve of the test, with the help of networks that investigators say extended from Maharashtra to Haryana, to Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh. Since then, the CBI has taken over the investigation and the repercussions have been harsh on many of the students who had invested a year or two and several lakh of rupees in coaching. The NEET exam fee is refunded, and a standard year of preparation can cost anywhere between Rs.1.5 lakh and Rs.3 lakh, with additional costs for accommodation, food and test series resulting in a sum of more than Rs.5 lakh for premium Kota batches a decent bet for a family of a schoolteacher earning twenty something thousand per month.

There is also a greater logic in the arithmetic. Likewise, competition for medical seats in India is around sixteen aspirants for each seat and the disparity is almost similar in the case of engineering seats as well when it comes to number of registrants for JEE Main exams and the number of seats of first-year engineering students in the top hundred institutes across the country, which is around a lakh and a third of seats. Meanwhile, the National Testing Agency, which has been working off this anxiety, has quietly built a healthy balance sheet thanks to the application fees it has been gathering since 2018, spending around 87 per cent of the money it has collected on conducting tests and making a surplus of over 448 crore rupees, while it has not released salary and expenditure information on an RTI application. Interest on a family's coaching loan will not be lost because they have cancelled their exam.

On top of the exam economics is a second, more recent, battle for who will be in control of the online narrative. The government had summoned Meta's global affairs chief just days before this new video for the short video, which was originally an address by Modi to the protests, but was instead affected by an automated filtering error and then fixed soon thereafter. However the episode revealed a darker trend an opposition party's verified social media account that had twenty million followers suddenly became inaccessible in India, a clip from a foreign broadcaster of a wounded student was geo-blocked without notice, and creators complained that they were finding their posts about the protests being throttled. Meta has been accused of attempting to ‘ring fence’ high-profile political accounts to prevent a repeat, though the incident is stirring greater unease about how far platforms can reach into citizens' view of political speech and how far their reach extends.

Not to be overlooked in the politics of the moment is the calendar either. A viral reel that has been released to condone Bihar's "misguided children" is as much about the BJP's reputation management ahead of elections as it is about its personal magnanimity, given the state of the economy and the fact that youth employability and exam integrity are key issues right now. Whether it's a message of protest for the Indian youth or just a message from a leader who has been sitting on the sidelines too long for a failing examination system, the ninety-second video will probably be less impactful than the words of a protester.