Pakistan funding for Indian students?
Foreign funding. Say those two words anywhere in Pakistan and watch the room go quiet. Say them in India this week and watch a whole government minister lose his job. Funny how the same phrase behaves so differently depending on which side of the border it lands on.
Let us start with what happened in Delhi. Young people gathered under the banner of the Cockroach Janta Party. They protested against paper leaks in the NEET medical entrance exam. Police used batons. Some Indian voices claimed the protest was foreign funded, blaming Pakistan and mysterious outside money. Delhi police blocked hundreds of social media accounts linked to Pakistan, saying they were spreading a misleading campaign. A court petition even asked for an investigation into whether the protest was part of a larger foreign conspiracy.
The protesters denied all of it. They said the movement began with more than two million students whose futures were shaken by exam irregularities. Political analysts backed them up too, saying the foreign conspiracy story gets pulled out every time young Indians get loud, whether it was the farmers’ movement or the citizenship law protests. This time the story did not stick. Even people inside the ruling party joined the protest, so the usual blame game lost its bite.
Now bring the mirror to Pakistan. Here too, foreign funding is the favourite accusation of anyone who wants a protest silenced without answering its actual questions. And here, a special category exists. Indian funding and Jewish funding are treated like radioactive material. Mention either one, proven or not, and the conversation stops being about exam leaks or student rights and becomes about loyalty and conspiracy instead. It is a convenient trick. It lets institutions avoid explaining themselves.
So here is the honest question worth sitting with. Where are our own protests?
Cambridge examination papers, the ones sat by thousands of O and A Level students across Pakistan, have leaked multiple times in recent memory. Multiple times. Not once, not by accident, but repeatedly. And what followed? No sustained protest. No serious public inquiry that anyone can point to. No Jantar Mantar moment. Students who spent months preparing, whose merit and hard work were undercut by a leaked paper, largely absorbed the unfairness and moved on. Compare that to young Indians who stayed on the streets for ten straight days facing tear gas until a minister resigned.
Then there is the PMDC advertisement mess, freshly reported by Minute Mirror. The Pakistan Medical and Dental Council published a public notice meant to guide students planning to study medicine abroad. Instead of guiding them, it confused them. The wording suggested that every Pakistani student headed abroad, even to Harvard or Cambridge, needed to clear the MDCAT exam first. Senator Anusha Rahman raised the alarm in a Senate committee meeting, pointing out that thousands of students aiming for universities in the UK, US, Canada and Australia were left anxious over a rule that turned out not to apply to them the way the advertisement implied. The PMDC president eventually admitted the wording needed review, and that the requirement was actually meant only for specific cases involving certain university rankings or flagged countries.
A body meant to protect students ended up frightening them through careless drafting. And still, no march. No sit-in. No sustained public pressure demanding accountability for a mistake that could have derailed real academic plans.
Indian students proved something important this week. Persistent, peaceful pressure can still move a government, even one that prefers to change the subject with conspiracy theories. Pakistani students have every reason to ask themselves why similar failures at home, paper leaks, unclear MDCAT policy, confusing regulatory advertisements, are met with silence instead of the same organised anger.
