Mumbai: Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) president Raj Thackeray on Thursday supported educationist Sonam Wangchuk's demands, and alleged that the BJP-led government at the Centre seemed to have decided to get rid of Wangchuk as well as the "space for protest in the country". Transparency is essential not only in NEET but in all examinations, Thackeray said in a social media post, and urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to pay attention to the issue.
The controversy related to the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test was no trivial matter and the irregularities have jeopardised the future of lakhs of students, Thackeray said.
"The reports regarding his (Wangchuk's) health and the visuals on television are certainly alarming. It is deeply distressing to say this, but it appears the government has decided to get rid of Sonam Wangchuk, and by extension, the very space for protest in this country," Thackeray said.
"The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena fully supports Sonam Wangchuk's demands. Transparency is essential not just in NEET, but across all examinations, and the ministers responsible must resign," Thackeray said.
The NEET paper leak was not an isolated incident as such things had occurred in the past too, the MNS chief said. During the BJP's tenure, irregularities in examinations have been rampant, he alleged, citing the Vyapam scam in Madhya Pradesh and the latest leak of teacher eligibility test papers in Maharashtra.
BJP supporters too must have suffered due to such incidents, and therefore it was a sign of the BJP's shortsightedness that it was viewing the agitation at Jantar Mantar through a political lens, he said.
Wangchuk joined the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP)'s protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi on June 28 and has been on an indefinite hunger strike since then against alleged examination irregularities and to press for Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation.
The institutions that are supposed to function independently are being captured and elections are being manipulated to suit specific agendas, the MNS chief further alleged in the post, adding that the mainstream media by and large was failing to question the source of the huge amounts of money being spent for this.
He also noted that there was a time when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) held Sonam Wangchuk in high regard. The saffron party values an individual as long as it suits its purposes, he said.
When Wangchuk demanded statehood for Ladakh, two Lok Sabha constituencies and the protection of local people's land rights, the government took no action, Thackeray said.
The MNS chief, however, also noted that the CJP's protests were being driven by social media algorithms and had become trapped in a cycle of memes, reels, the quest for engagement, dancing with flags and songs to garner 'likes', and chasing 'million-like' milestones.
Civil society in the country is also getting caught up in this trend and people have developed an unwarranted disdain for politics. As a result, a large, enlightened section of society has distanced itself from politics, getting stuck instead in the pursuit of likes and shares on social media, Raj Thackeray said.
(Except for the headline, this article has not been edited by FPJ's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)
