An educated mind is the greatest weapon against injustice - Shabnam Nasimi

 Today, India’s education minister resigned. Dharmendra Pradhan sent his letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and a movement that had begun as a joke, a satirical Instagram account for “cockroaches” had won.

Abhijeet Dipke, the student who started it stood outside in Delhi with a mic in his hand and said “it shows that if you refuse to be intimidated, you can even force powerful people to step down,” he said. “Don’t be afraid, because the moment fear takes over, it is no longer a democracy. If you raise your voice, these same people will be held accountable… because the people sitting there today, like kings, are there because of us.”

I’ve read that last line more times than I can count. The people sitting there today, like kings, are there because of us. It is the most ordinary sentence in the world and the most dangerous one. Dangerous, because a population that actually believes it can no longer be governed by fear and fear is the cheapest tool any government owns.

I am sat behind my desk on a Saturday evening, reflecting on how this movement started. In May 2026, India’s Chief Justice, Surya Kant, sat in the country’s highest court and called unemployed young activists “parasites” and “cockroaches”. People, he implied, with no standing to be heard. Within a day, a student named Dipke, then studying in Boston, took the insult and tweeted:

He opened a parody account inviting India’s “cockroaches” to unite. Three million followers in seventy-eight hours. Ten million within five days, more than the ruling party’s own account. Twenty two million today.

“Cockroaches don’t even fear,” he told them. “We will meet their violence with peace and love, but we will not move.”

India’s unemployed young people were called “vermin” because they had studied hard and then found their country had no use for what they’d learned. Forty percent of Indians under twenty-five are out of work. Exam papers for medical school were leaked and sold. Twenty students having failed through no fault of their own, took their own lives. This was never really about one minister. A whole generation was told: study, work, and you will rise. Millions kept their half of the bargain and watched the other half evaporate.

And this is what I keep returning to, and it is the reason for the title above. The powerful have always been more frightened of an educated mind than of an angry one. Anger burns hot and burns out. An educated mind does not because it remembers. It organises.

India, of all places, knows this in its bones. In 1891, Ambedkar, born into a caste that was forbidden to read, but he went on to write the constitution and left his people three words in order:

Educate, Agitate, Organise.

Educate comes first because he understood that agitation without education is just noise that the powerful can wait out, but a mind that has been taught cannot be untaught.

Frederick Douglass, the most important leader of the movement for African-American civil rights in the 19th century, learned the same lesson from the other side of it. When his enslaver discovered his wife was teaching the boy to read, he forbade it, warning that literacy would “forever unfit him to be a slave.”

Douglass later wrote that in that single sentence he had been handed “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” Reading was the threat. Everything else was just chains.

That is the same instinct as a Chief Justice calling students cockroaches because power recognises the educated mind as its natural adversary. And it is right to.

It is right to, because the educated mind keeps winning. In June 1976, the schoolchildren of Soweto marched against being forced to learn in Afrikaans, the language of their oppressor. Hundreds were shot. Apartheid held on for years afterwards but its moral authority never recovered from the sight of children willing to die rather than be miseducated.

So when Dipke says you can “force powerful people to step down,” he describing something that has already happened, over and over, within living memory.

But I want to name the other side of this, because I know it too well. If education is the weapon, then the surest sign a regime is afraid of its own people is that it comes for the schools first.

I think about Afghanistan every single day. The Taliban are the only government on earth that bans girls from secondary school and university, girls have now been locked out of the classroom for nearly five years. They spew nonsense and will tell you it is about culture, or faith. But they understand precisely what India’s Chief Justice understands, what Douglass’s enslaver understood: an educated girl is a girl who will one day ask why.

In Kabul, they answer the educated mind by shutting the gate. In Delhi, the educated mind answered back by forcing a minister out.

And the only thing that separates them is whether people are willing to stay afraid.