Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher teaches that modern power operates through the production of Homo Sacer, the sacred man who may be killed but not sacrificed, a figure stripped of political voice ( rights) and reduced to bare life, exposed to sovereign violence without legal recourse. Parallel to this is the ‘state of exception’, where the sovereign suspends the normal juridical order under the guise of emergency, creating a zone of indifference in which law applies by not applying (illegality of the law appears legal). Both concepts illuminate the plight of Indian students amid the chronic failures of our education system, the recent wave of protests, and the state’s response.
India’s competitive examination regime, epitomized by NEET and other national tests, has long manufactured generations of Homo Sacer. Students enter a system that promises mobility through merit but delivers precarity: leaked papers, arbitrary cancellations, coaching cartels, and intense psychological pressure culminating in suicides. The education apparatus, with several of good features doesn’t seem to recognize them as full political subjects with rights to transparent institutions. Instead, they are reduced to bare lives and become statistics in a biopolitical machine optimizing “human capital” while discarding the failures that convent them into one dimensional man as taught by Hebert Marcuse . Their deaths by despair rarely trigger systemic sacrifice or accountability; they are mourned individually (by kith and kin) but not politically. This pre-existing reduction to bare life sets the stage for the current discontent leading to the explosive uprising all over the country.
The “Event,” in the sense of an unpredictable rupture ( named by alien Badiou’s philosophy) that demands fidelity, erupted in 2026 with renewed revelations of irregularities in medical entrance examinations. What began as administrative lapses exposed deeper rot: a National Testing Agency struggling with credibility, youth unemployment compounding educational anxiety, and a generation unwilling to accept normalized betrayal. Students coalesced under inventive banners like the Cockroach Janta Party, transforming a judicial slur into a symbol of resilient survival. This uprising represented fidelity to the Event which manifests as a refusal to let the rupture be reabsorbed into bureaucratic repair. Protests at Jantar Mantar, marches toward Parliament, and demands for ministerial resignation articulated a political claim: we are not mere examinees but citizens entitled to a system that honours its promises.
This assertion of political existence inevitably collided with sovereign power. The state’s response on July 20, 2026 with tear gas, baton charges, pellet injuries, alleged planted intruders and heavy policing exemplifies Agamben’s state of exception. The march toward Parliament was framed as an urgent threat to order, justifying the temporary suspension of ordinary tolerances for assembly and dissent. Police action operated in that liminal zone: legally enabled by security protocols yet producing effects outside full accountability. Injuries occurred, detentions followed, yet judicial bodies showed reluctance for immediate intervention, and the executive announced fast-track courts for culprits as a sovereign gesture of control. Here, law includes its own suspension. The exception masks itself as legality, allowing the sovereign to decide who counts as a disruptor and to manage bare lives through calibrated force.
The spiral is instructive. Students, already Homo Sacer within the educational machine, stepped out of bare life by politicizing their suffering. This politicization provoked the violence of the the state of exception, which in turn seeks to re-impose bare life by criminalizing or dispersing the collective. Agamben warns that the exception tends to become the rule in contemporary governance. In India, recurring exam scandals and protest management risk normalizing this pattern: grievances are met with performative punishment for scapegoats alongside forceful containment, leaving structural failures intact. The education system itself functions as a standing exception, a zone where ordinary rights to fairness are suspended in the name of “merit” and “national standards,” producing disposable youth manifesting the power of necropolitics at play.
How, then, can students transform this imposed status of being Homo Sacer? Agamben’s analysis is diagnostic rather than prescriptive, but it points toward reclaiming the political from the biopolitical. Transformation requires moving from bare life to form-of-life, where existence itself becomes a site of resistance and potentiality.
First, sustained fidelity to the Event is essential. Students have the challenge to refuse the normalization that follows crackdowns. The Cockroach Movement’s persistence despite police action demonstrates this: by holding space at protest sites and broadening demands beyond immediate leaks to reforms in the National Education Policy and testing infrastructure, they prevent the rupture from closing. This fidelity exposes the exception as such, denying it the cover of permanence.
Second, strategic legal and institutional engagement without illusion. Agamben highlights how the exception blurs law and fact; students can exploit this blur by forcing the juridical order to confront its own thresholds. Public interest litigations, documentation of excesses, and alliances with opposition parties and civil society can compel courts to reaffirm norms, even if imperfectly. However, over-reliance on institutions risks co-option. The goal is not mere inclusion in the failing system but its reconfiguration.
Third, reimagining education as a common good beyond the biopolitical exam factory. Students could build parallel structures: student-led audits of testing agencies, alternative learning networks, and campaigns linking education failures to broader issues like unemployment and inequality. By forming communities that affirm collective dignity, they reject the isolation of bare life. Creative symbolism that turned “cockroach” insult into a badge of endurance is already gestures toward this, subverting sovereign language.
Fourth, international and intergenerational solidarity. Agamben’s work draws global parallels, from ancient sacred men to modern camps. Indian students’ struggle resonates with youth movements worldwide facing neoliberal precarity. Alliances with teachers, parents, and labour groups can thicken the political fabric, making it harder for the sovereign to isolate students as mere agitators.
Crucially, transformation demands recognizing that the education system’s production of Homo Sacer is not accidental but functional to a governance model prioritizing control and spectacle over flourishing. The high hand of the law like the batons justified as order, fast-track courts as justice sustains this. Students must articulate an alternative sovereignty: one grounded in the people’s constituent power rather than executive decisionism.
The Indian context adds layers. A vibrant democracy with constitutional rights provides tools unavailable in fuller authoritarian exceptions. Yet neoliberal pressures and majoritarian politics tempt the slide toward permanent exception. The student uprising reveals both danger and hope. If fidelity wanes, the Event dissolves, and bare life resumes under slightly adjusted rules. If it deepens, it can expose the machinery producing disposable youth and force a genuine shift.
Agamben teaches that the state of exception reveals the hidden foundation of power: the sovereign’s ability to decide on life. Indian students, by rising from the examination hall’s bare life, challenge this decision. Their bodies on the streets, voices demanding accountability, and refusal to disperse declare: we are not killable without consequence; we are political. The path forward lies in sustaining this declaration not through romantic revolution alone, but through persistent, inventive practices that weave the exception back into accountable law and affirm education as a shared human potential rather than a sorting mechanism for bare lives.
In the end, the students’ discontent is not merely about paper leaks. It is about who counts as fully human in the polity. By transforming their imposed Homo Sacer status, they do not just reform exams, they contest the biopolitical logic that reduces citizens to data points in a sovereign machine. The outcome remains open, but the Event has already disrupted the old coordinates. Fidelity now determines whether the exception hardens into rule or yields to new possibilities of justice.
