D
evendra Nath Mahto hadn't eaten in five days when a doctor strapped a saline drip to his arm this week. His blood pressure had crashed. His blood sugar wasn't much better either. He kept talking anyway, telling anyone who came near that he wasn't going to stop until Jharkhand's government agreed to scrap an exam that thousands of young job seekers believe was rigged before it even began.
He's not doing this alone anymore.
By Thursday, seven other protesters had joined him on hunger strike at Ranchi's Jaipal Singh Munda Stadium. They're spread across two separate stages, oddly enough, plus one lone holdout camped under a statue of the tribal leader the ground is named after. Umme Habiba is among them. There's a photo of her from the stadium, clutching a copy of the Indian Constitution while she fasts.
Go back to April, and the trigger becomes obvious. The Jharkhand Public Service Commission ran its 14th Combined Civil Services Examination that month, and it didn't take long for aspirants to start crying foul. A leaked question paper, they said. A compromised answer key. The usual complaints, except this time nobody let it drop.
By late July the anger had organized itself. The JPSC-JSSC Reforms Manch pitched a sit-in at Jaipal Singh Munda Stadium on July 25, timed almost exactly to when the commission was supposed to hold its mains exam.
That exam never happened. JPSC postponed it, blaming "unavoidable circumstances", and it's been in limbo ever since.
Police haven't exactly sat on their hands. Fourteen arrests so far, eighteen locations raided. The former JPSC chairman, a man named L Khiangte, has been called in for questioning four separate times since late July. And still, nobody's gone home.
For a while it was just a sit-in, hundreds of students camped out on a stadium ground, tents and tarps and the usual noise of a protest that refuses to end. Then, on August 2, Mahto, who belongs to the regional Jharkhand Loktantrik Krantikari Morcha, said he was done eating until his demands were met.
Two days later, five more followed him into it. Two of them women.
The rain hasn't made any of this easier. Protesters have spent night after night soaked through at the stadium, refusing to pack up even as Ranchi's monsoon turned the ground to mud underfoot. To their credit, organizers keep insisting the whole thing has nothing to do with party politics, and for what it's worth, the meals and shelter keeping the broader sit-in going have mostly come from local temples and volunteer groups, not any political outfit.
What they want hasn't budged. Cancel the 14th JPSC exam, full stop. Hand the investigation to the CBI, or at minimum a panel of retired High Court judges pulled in from outside the state. And fix the JPSC and JSSC for good, so this doesn't happen to the next batch of aspirants too.
At some point this stopped being a Ranchi story and became a national one. Sonam Wangchuk, the education and climate activist, reached out to Mahto this week and talked him into at least drinking water again. Congress MP Rahul Gandhi sent a delegation down to meet the fasting students in person. Even Abhijeet Dipke, who runs a Delhi-based political outfit, has said he's coming to Ranchi to show support.
Back in the assembly, things got predictably sharp. BJP legislators staged their own demonstration outside the Jharkhand Vidhan Sabha right as the monsoon session opened this week, using the protest as ammunition against the ruling coalition. Chief Minister Hemant Soren, for his part, insists his government is taking this seriously, that investigators are working around the clock, that the guilty are being jailed.
The students aren't buying it. Internal inquiries and scattered arrests, they say, aren't the same as an investigation that isn't answerable to the very government that appointed the officials now under the scanner.
Nobody's backing down yet. The All India Students' Association called for a march straight to the assembly today, August 7, and put out the word for aspirants from every district to show up. If the government still hasn't budged, a bigger push is already scheduled for August 10, a tricolour march plus a statewide gherao of the Vidhan Sabha.
There's word that state officials have quietly opened talks, sending someone to the protest site with a proposal of some kind, though nobody's saying much about what's actually on the table. Whether that's enough to get Mahto and the seven others eating again, or whether this whole monsoon session wraps up with the stadium still full of students refusing food, is anyone's guess right now.
They're still there. Still not eating. Still soaked, most likely, given how this monsoon's been going.
Photo: @ANI
