New Delhi: Congress MP Shashi Tharoor Wednesday appealed to activist Sonam Wangchuk to end his fast at Jantar Mantar over alleged irregularities in the NEET exam, and urged the government to engage in dialogue, asserting that such a move is not a sign of weakness but of statesmanship.
In an open letter to the Jantar Mantar protestors, Tharoor said that with Parliament in session again from Monday, there will be an opportunity to raise the students’ issues at the highest forum of democracy.
That’s where the problem should be addressed, not by fasting unto death. Please heed my plea, he said.
My dear young friends, I address you today not as a politician or an MP, but as someone deeply troubled by what is happening to your generation of young Indians. This is personal for me. I was born to a middle-class family; my father was a salaried newspaper employee, my mother a homemaker, with three children to educate on one income, he said.
For a family like ours, merit was not a slogan. Scholarships, fair examinations, honest results -” these were the only way one salary could carry three children’s dreams, the MP from Thiruvananthapuram said.
The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has been holding a protest at Jantar Mantar demanding Pradhan’s resignation over alleged irregularities in the NEET examination. Wangchuk joined the agitation June 28 and has been on an indefinite fast since then. The organisation has also announced a march to Parliament July 20.
Tharoor said that he went to school in Mumbai and Kolkata, to college in Delhi, topped the university and earned admission into IIM, but chose instead to follow his passion for international affairs in the US, on a scholarship.
Nothing was inherited; everything was earned by hard work and exams, he stressed.
So I know that a fair, merit-based system is the only ladder for young people from lower and middle-income families to climb up. When that ladder is broken -”- papers leaked, examinations cancelled, trust destroyed– the children of the rich and powerful do not suffer.
They have other ladders. It is your dreams, and your families’ sacrifices (and tragically, in some homes, young lives themselves) that are betrayed, Tharoor said in his open letter on X.
