Rahul Gandhi didn't have to say much in a full sentence on Friday to keep a political firestorm rolling. As he walked out of Parliament, when a reporter asked him to comment on a press conference organised by the injured Delhi Police personnel's families several hours back, the Leader of Opposition fired back with one question: "Aap BJP ke ho kya? No comment, no elaboration, simply a pointing out that the question itself had a partisan agenda. He then moved on. Its fleetingness has made it yet another flash point between the police and the protest, as it moved from the Jantar Mantar protest camp into the Lok Sabha's well and the Supreme Court's corridors, and the debate on accountability has now become political.

The families who spoke with reporters earlier on this morning have told a story very different from the one which Gandhi has been telling the country. The wife of Assistant Commissioner of police said that the night of July 20 has left a deep impression on her and her two-year old daughter as her husband came back home that night with injuries. A daughter of an injured sub-inspector, who worked in the Marine Commando (MC), said that her father was dragged into a mob near the stage at Jantar Mantar and was unconscious for almost four hours before he was taken to RML Hospital for stabilisation. Another family member said what happened on that day wasn't really a student demonstration, but an operation being used by the bad elements to discredit the protesters and embarrass Parliament. Their message was simple; that the leaker(s) should be punished, but that the actual students who had come to release their anger over the NEET-UG paper leak should not be considered as equally guilty.

That framing doesn't sit well with that account which Gandhi has been pushing for more than a week. He had asked for a high powered committee overseen by the Supreme Court to look into the case of disproportionate use of force by the police against the students who gathered at Jantar Mantar to seek accountability on exam cheating scandal a day before the families spoke. He has also gone further in the past few days, accusing police officers of firing upon protesters and holding Union Home Minister Amit Shah responsible as the Delhi Police, Rapid Action Force and CRPF are all under his control. The government has vehemently denied that any bullets were fired and a junior minister told the Lok Sabha that only tear gas was fired to disperse the crowd. But the issue has already made its way to the nation's Supreme Court. In a suo motu case this week, a bench headed by the Chief Justice of the Delhi high court ordered the government to ensure treatment for protestors who suffered what were described as “pellet-type” injuries, giving at least some credence to claims by the opposition that it has been making since the clashes broke out.

The political theatrics of the affair have ramped up as the legal one has. BJP MP Anurag Singh Thakur had filed breach of privilege notice against Gandhi a day before he responded tersely to the reporters over the remarks he made in the Lok Sabha on July 29, while debating the anti-paper-leak bill. Thakur's complaint states that Gandhi had mentioned the terms "idiot" and "andhbhakt" while narrating a dialogue with a student, disregarded several requests by the Speaker to remove the language and made baseless allegations against Shah without giving him prior notice as is stipulated in the parliamentary rules. The notice requests the Committee of Privileges to consider the remarks, and Gandhi to apologize unconditionally to the House and the Home Minister. Congress has termed the move as a ploy to shift focus from the substance of what transpired during the Jantar Mantar protest, while the BJP has argued that the stir has been a handy cover for an “opposition leader” who has been making “serious allegations” without any concrete evidence.

The shouting match has a financial scandal at heart, and one that is quite significant for the reasons why so many young people were out on the street in the first place. The CBI has informed a special court that the re-conducting of the NEET-UG was an ex-ante spending of Rs 600 crore, excluding the cost of the helicopter to fly freshly prepared question papers. Over two and a half crore students were sent back to preparation mode, and an independent estimate of the cost of the entire travelling, lost workdays and coaching cycle business suggests that the total household cost of the exam nationwide is in the vicinity of three hundred crores of rupees before the arrest of its founder, the network in Latur alone was worth some fifteen hundred crore of rupees. The families of NEET aspirants who died in the wake of the controversy have also demanded a crores each as compensation and the resignation of the education minister, which has already fallen from the bench.

What emerges is not one controversy, but three: a legitimate complaint from average candidates and their families that an examination process has let them down; a legitimate complaint from police households that they have been injured in the line of duty when dealing with a crowd which allegedly contains disruptive individuals; and a parliamentary battle for language and decorum that has taken up attention that should have been dedicated to mending the system. Both sides will have statistics, court orders, and personal testimony on their side, and both sides have reason for not wanting to give up the fight. As long as responses, such as Friday's, continue to fill in the void where answers should be, there will be no independent inquiry court-monitored or otherwise that has reached a conclusion that both sides agree to.