It was a strange visitor, Sonam Wangchuk received on Monday, an unusual visitor, not at the Jantar Mantar, but in Mumbai, 1,400 kilometres from the venue, at a press conference, where the doctors' findings were that his blood pressure was dangerously low and he had lost nearly eight kilograms in weight after 15 days of a hunger strike. UBT chief Uddhav Thackeray, chief of Shiv Sena, was in front of the cameras and he did what Indian opposition leaders rarely do, backed a protest movement without trying to claim it. This is NOT a political matter," he added. The nation must "awaken. Then, just a split second later, he asked the guy in the middle of it to not starve himself.

The very act of being protested is what they're asking to stop, and with their support.The contradiction in the support and the request to stop the act of support is central to the protest's present state. The activists' Abhijeet Dipke, who is responsible for the name, the Cockroach Janta Party, has been camped at Jantar Mantar since June 20 demanding accountability for the examination system in India which they call 'cockroach'. The engineer-educator from Ladakh, Wangchuk, who was a familiar figure of civil disobedience as part of earlier climate protests, joined eight days later and has since then not taken even a single bite of food. His blood pressure was at 104 over 66 on the weekend, compared to 104 over 74 on Friday, and 106 over 74 on Tuesday, both of which would be considered worsening, not stabilising, day-by-day, medical reports said. His blood sugar levels earlier in the fast were at 60. Workers of an affiliated students' union have also staged parallel hunger strikes at the same location, with at least one of them being admitted to a hospital.

Thackeray's comments on Monday went beyond "sympathy". He named names. Abhijeet Dipke had taken up the NEET paper-leak issue on foreign soil, it had not received much attention here, "a slap in the face" of the "silent political establishment", he said. He had said that he had already invited his party colleague Arvind Sawant to meet Wangchuk weeks ago to discuss against the fast. He had called upon Rahul Gandhi by name to join the battle saying that party flags do not have a place in this fight. He said that his party will have parallel demonstrations in Maharashtra when CJP is marching on July 20 on the opening day of the Monsoon Session in Parliament. He had said that it was nothing undignified to ask a sitting Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign over exam irregularity which has now become a trend in NEET, CUET and CBSE evaluation processes.

The government's camp has taken all this in another light. BJP's national president Nitin Nabin brushed aside the pressure as jingoistic tactics to steer the Indian youth towards negative politics, suggesting that Dipke "has been in the foreign country". That is the frame made of the two possible interpretations of this whole episode real grievance vs manufactured unrest and the only thing Thackeray does to break it is to provoke the very politicisation he is protesting against, by announcing that a political rival is joining the protest.

That discussion forgets that the impetus for it was everything but a small thing. The shadow coaching system in India, with Kota and Latur being single-industry cities populated by NEET and JEE coaching centres, is worth anything between fifty-eight thousand and one lakh crore rupees, depending on which estimate to believe, and involves hundreds of thousands of people who have nothing to do with real teaching. The number of students appearing for the examination is about 24 lakh and only around 1.1 lakh students get seats in the medical colleges across the country this ratio is so skewed that parents are forced to shell out two to four lakh rupees per year to give their children the best chance to qualify. The trail of investigators has led to the corridors of Pune academics and Maharashtra's own coaching hubs, and at least two accused are already in the custody of the CBI. But this imbalance between scarcity and desperation is what makes leaks, analysts increasingly contend, less of an aberration and more of an economic inevitability: When a single exam paper is worth more on the black market than years of coaching fees, somebody will always find a way to sell.

India is not the only nation vulnerable in this regard, however Nigeria, China and a number of Gulf nations have experienced their own leak scandals at the entrance exam at universities over the last decade, and the theme is as predictable as it is familiar a credentialing process that is crucial for higher education but carries relatively little weight, meets with underground test-taking brokers, and then suffers years of erosion in credibility after the arrests. What makes the Indian case different this time is that it is about a body that is visibly losing strength in a public square, not a months-old report of an inquiry.

Meanwhile, the operational needs are largely the same compensation of one crore rupees for the families of students who died by suicide after allegedly being misled by irregularities in the testing agencies and structural changes in the process of conducting tests in India. Thackeray's efforts bring only political muscle, no medical comfort; Wangchuk, by all accounts to the protest site, does not seem to be ready to break his fast before the July 20 march arrives at Parliament's gates. It's not whether it will tip into policy change or just another photo in a long history of hunger strikes getting headlines and little else when it comes to the Indian struggle, that issue will be determined over the next seven days.