Devendra Nath Mahto has ended his 16-day hunger strike after Jharkhand agreed to cancel a disputed recruitment exam, but protesters say they will stay on the streets until India’s top federal investigation agency looks into wider exam irregularities.
Devendra Nath Mahto has ended his hunger strike after the Jharkhand government agreed to scrap another controversial recruitment examination, but the wider protest is not over.
That anger exploded in Jharkhand state on 25 July. Job seekers claimed the civil service results were manipulated. Answer sheets shared online showed some successful candidates had answered fewer questions than expected.
Mahto became one of the faces of the movement. He refused food. Sixteen days later, his body started failing, and he was moved to a hospital in the state capital, Ranchi.
On Monday night, the government folded. Chief Minister Hemant Soren scrapped the controversial exam. He also cancelled every test run by the private company that handled the process, and ordered a review of recruitment exams going all the way back to 2014.
“Many shocking facts are emerging,” Soren told reporters, adding that the matter was still under investigation.
The announcement lit up the stadium in Ranchi, where protesters have been camping for weeks. People danced and cheered in the dirt.
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But not everyone is packing up. The demonstrators want India’s top investigative agency, the CBI, to take over the case. They do not fully trust the state to investigate itself.
“Until that demand is met, we will not move from here,” student activist Ravindra Paswan told news agency ANI.
The victory has also created a new problem. Candidates who passed the cancelled exam and already started working are now furious, worried their jobs will vanish with the paperwork.
The hunger strike is over, and the government blinked. But in a country where one exam can decide a whole life, cancelling a test does not bring the trust back.
