There is a particular kind of political moment when a metaphor escapes the control of the people who coined it. This summer, a remark from the bench about the ease with which the GenZ dismissed authority - “cockroach” - was meant to be an aside. It became instead the banner under which tens of thousands of students converged on Jantar Mantar, forced a sitting Union Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, to resign, and extracted from the state an admission that the machinery entrusted with the simplest promise a republic can make to its GenZ - that merit will be tested fairly, had failed catastrophically and repeatedly. The resignation was not a small thing. In a political culture that has made a fetish of never admitting error, it was, briefly, a demonstration that democratic pressure, applied with enough moral clarity, still moves institutions.

It is exactly because that demonstration was real that a harder question now presents itself to Kashmir’s own GenZ. If a minister at the centre can be made to answer for a system of examinations that betrayed the trust of millions, what account is owed by those who preside over an examination ecosystem in Jammu and Kashmir that has, by any honest reading of the record, been no less compromised, and in some respects considerably more so, for considerably longer? The JKSSB’s sub-inspector examination was compromised in 2022. Its junior engineer and finance-account assistant examinations were cancelled after leaks. The Fire and Emergency Services recruitment drive is, at the time of writing, the subject of ongoing arrests by the Anti-Corruption Bureau. Aspirants for the JKPSC’s 10 2 lecturer post allege that questions were circulating in private coaching academies days before the paper was administered. This is not a single scandal; it is a pattern that spans lieutenant-governor rule and elected government, spans parties, and has outlasted every change of administration since 2022. If Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation was the price of one national failure, the studied silence around Kashmir’s own paper-leak economy is difficult to justify by any standard except the reflexive tolerance a periphery is routinely asked to extend that a capital is not.

But it would be a mistake and........

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