The Fear Behind the Fence: CJP's 'School Thik Karo' Campaign and the Reaction in BJP-Ruled States

There is a particular kind of admission a government makes when it decides that the problem is not the broken toilet, but the camera that photographed it. Since the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) launched its second campaign, School Thik Karo, on Independence Day, it has encountered resistance of strikingly different kinds across Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled states. In West Bengal, a CJP volunteer’s school inspection was followed by a violent attack on his family in which his father died; in Rajasthan, CJP workers faced confrontation during inspections before the government moved to restrict outsiders from entering schools and recording what they found; and in Maharashtra, where the campaign began, its founder Abhijeet Dipke was himself booked after inspecting a government school in Latur.

The circumstances differ, and the allegations in the Bengal and Maharashtra cases remain matters for investigation. But the pattern is difficult to ignore: when citizens begin looking closely at government schools – and, crucially, recording what they see – the political system has repeatedly found reasons to object to the inspection itself.

The pattern matters more than any individual incident. School Thik Karo asks citizens to enter government schools, document their condition and make what they find publicly visible. Within days, the campaign had encountered accusations of politicisation, alleged political pressure, physical confrontation and administrative restrictions on access and recording. The governments involved may have different explanations for each episode, and those explanations should be tested on their facts. But they share a common feature: the campaign is not merely asking governments to repair schools; it is making the condition of those schools visible. And visibility becomes politically uncomfortable when the evidence is worse than the official narrative.

Rajasthan draws the line around the camera

Rajasthan made that resistance explicit on August 16. Hours after the CJP announced that it would extend School Thik Karo across the state – inspecting government schools in Jaipur, Ajmer, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Kota, Barmer and several other districts – the Directorate of Secondary Education issued a circular restricting access to government schools. Outsiders may not enter without prior permission from the principal or head of the institution, while photography, videography, interviews, audio recording and live streaming involving students, teachers or school activities require prior written permission.

Unauthorised entry or recording can trigger police action and, depending on the circumstances, proceedings under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the POCSO Act, the Juvenile Justice Act and the Information Technology Act. The department justified the restrictions by invoking in loco parentis, Article 21’s protection of life, dignity and privacy, and National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) school-safety guidelines.

The timing deserves attention. The circular was issued on a Sunday evening, within hours of a campaign announcing its intention to document school infrastructure across the state. It also came against a longer history of governments responding to embarrassing images of public schools by restricting the ability to produce or circulate them. In September 2022, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) imposed restrictions after Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) legislators live-streamed visits to dilapidated municipal schools; in Faridabad, an education officer subsequently prohibited the making of “reels” on school campuses after videos of school conditions circulated online. The circumstances are not identical, but the underlying instinct is. When evidence of institutional failure becomes politically damaging, the temptation is to regulate its visibility rather than remedy the failure itself.

That is what makes Rajasthan significant. The circular may be defended in the language of child protection, privacy and institutional discipline – and those are legitimate interests. But it also has the practical effect of placing the production of evidence about publicly funded schools under the control of the very authorities whose performance is being examined. A broken toilet can be repaired. A video of the broken toilet can travel far beyond the school gate. The first is an administrative problem; the second is an accountability problem.

A first toll of a life

Two days before Rajasthan issued its circular, a school-inspection campaign had already turned deadly in West Bengal. On August 13, 25-year-old CJP volunteer Shaik Abdul Hafeez, who had returned to his village after participating in the party’s Jantar Mantar protest in Delhi, visited the government primary school in Karisunda, Bankura, where he had once studied. He went as part of the School Thik Karo campaign, ahead of its formal launch, intending to document the school’s condition.

That evening, according to Hafeez and his family, armed men entered their home and attacked him and his father, Sheikh Mohammad Mafik, after demanding that Hafeez record an apology for exposing the school’s condition. Mafik, 51, was severely injured while intervening to protect his son and died of his injuries on August 15. Eight people were subsequently arrested. The CJP and Hafeez’s family identified the attackers as local BJP workers; chief minister Suvendu Adhikari, however, denied any BJP connection, saying the accused were criminals.

The political context matters. West Bengal has been governed by the BJP since May 2026, when Suvendu Adhikari became chief minister after the party’s victory in the state election. Rajasthan, too, is governed by the BJP. Thus the same party governs the state in which a CJP volunteer’s father died following an alleged attack linked to a school-inspection campaign, and the state that, three days after the attack and on the day of Mafik’s death, moved to restrict outsiders’ access to government schools and their ability to photograph or record them.

That does not establish that the two measures were centrally coordinated. But the juxtaposition is politically significant: in one BJP-ruled state, a campaign to document government-school conditions was followed by a fatal attack; in another, the government moved to regulate precisely the independent documentation of government schools. The two events therefore belong to the same political context, even though the evidence does not establish a common cause.

What the numbers actually show

The reason images of broken toilets, dilapidated classrooms and missing facilities are politically uncomfortable is that they are not merely isolated failures. They sit within a school system whose own data reveals enormous gaps in infrastructure, retention and learning. India’s schools serve 24.69 crore students across 14.71 lakh schools, with 1.01 crore teachers.

Government schools constitute 69% of all schools and educate 49% of the country’s students. Yet only 47.2% of children who enter Class 1 remain in school through Class 12. At the secondary level alone, 42.7 lakh children dropped out in 2024-25, despite a substantial improvement over the previous year. And only 63.5% of schools nationally had internet facilities, the figure falling to 58.6% among government schools.

The learning evidence is no less stark. ASER 2024, an independent rural household survey rather than a government assessment, found that only 44.8% of Class V children in government schools could read a Class II-level text, while just 30.7% could solve a basic division problem. These figures represent an improvement over 2022, but they still mean that a majority of government-school children in Class V could not perform either task.

These are not obscure figures buried in an annexure. They come from the government’s UDISE+ database and from one of India’s longest-running independent assessments of elementary learning. What CJP’s volunteers are doing, school by school, is giving a face and a location to problems that the data already documents at national scale. That is precisely why a camera at a school gate can be more politically uncomfortable than an opposition speech in the Assembly. A speech can be rebutted; a video showing a broken toilet, a missing facility or a classroom in disrepair creates a concrete record that cannot easily be argued away. It can only be prevented from being taken.

Is the ban actually lawful?

The government has a legitimate interest in protecting children from unregulated strangers photographing, filming or interviewing them. That interest is real. But invoking child safety does not end the constitutional inquiry. A restriction affecting fundamental freedoms must still satisfy the requirements of legality, legitimate purpose and proportionality. The Rajasthan circular raises serious questions on each of these fronts.

First, proportionality. The Supreme Court’s proportionality doctrine requires a rights-restricting measure to pursue a legitimate aim, bear a rational connection to that aim, impair the right no more than necessary, and maintain a proper balance between the public interest and the right affected. Protecting children from unauthorised photography plainly qualifies as a legitimate aim. The harder question is whether requiring prior permission for photography, videography, interviews, audio recording and live streaming across government schools is necessary to achieve it.

The circular does not, on its face, distinguish between filming an identifiable child without consent and documenting a broken toilet, a collapsed wall or an empty classroom. Less restrictive safeguards – such as prohibiting identifiable images of children, requiring consent, restricting access to classrooms during teaching hours, or requiring visitors to be accompanied – could potentially protect children without placing the same prior-approval barrier on all public-interest documentation. Whether the state’s blanket permission mechanism survives the necessity and balancing stages is therefore a serious constitutional question.

Second, the question of purpose. The timing is difficult to ignore. The circular was issued on August 16, the same day that CJP announced its statewide School Thik Karo campaign and its plans to inspect government schools in several districts. Contemporary reports explicitly connected the two events. Timing alone does not prove mala fide; a court would require evidence that the stated child-protection purpose was a pretext for suppressing political or public scrutiny. But the sequence is plainly relevant to that inquiry. A restriction imposed precisely when an opposition-aligned campaign announces plans to document government schools inevitably invites the question whether the order protects children – or protects the government from scrutiny.

Third, the Right to Education framework points in the opposite direction from administrative opacity. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 created School Management Committees in specified schools precisely to institutionalise parent and community participation in monitoring school functioning and development. The Ministry of Education itself describes the purpose as giving parents, recognised as primary stakeholders, a meaningful role in the monitoring and management of schools.

That does not create a general statutory right for journalists or strangers to enter a school and film it. But it does make the idea of a publicly funded school being insulated from outside scrutiny through an unrestricted permission regime constitutionally and administratively contestable. The RTE framework is built around participation and accountability, not simply administrative control.

Fourth, there is a revealing precedent in Delhi. In September 2022, after AAP legislators livestreamed the condition of MCD schools, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi issued an order restricting outsiders from entering its schools without prior permission and directing that visitors not take photographs or videos. The MCD justified the order on school safety after incidents involving outsiders, while the political context was unmistakable: the restrictions followed the public exposure of allegedly poor school conditions. That episode does not establish that Rajasthan’s order is unlawful; nor did I find a judicial ruling striking down the Delhi order. But it demonstrates that the conflict between child protection and public scrutiny of government schools is not new – and that such restrictions can arise precisely when the physical condition of public institutions becomes politically embarrassing.

None of this means that Rajasthan’s circular is certain to be struck down. Schools are not ordinary public spaces, and the state has special responsibilities towards children. Privacy, dignity and protection from exploitation are legitimate constitutional concerns. The question is therefore not whether the government may regulate access to schools. It plainly may. The question is whether it may make the principal the gatekeeper for virtually every act of independent documentation—including documentation of the school itself – without distinguishing between a threat to a child’s privacy and scrutiny of a public institution.

That distinction matters. A stranger photographing a child is one thing; a citizen photographing a broken toilet is another. Treating both as requiring the same prior permission may be administratively convenient, but constitutional reasonableness is not measured by administrative convenience. The Rajasthan order may therefore survive a challenge – but it cannot simply be presumed lawful because it invokes child safety. Its breadth, necessity, and timing are all legitimate subjects for constitutional scrutiny.

The Cost of getting the response wrong

What should worry the BJP in both states is not merely the legal exposure but the political risk. History offers a recurring warning: when governments respond coercively to grievances that initially appear narrow or mundane, they can transform an accountability campaign into a much larger political confrontation. Soweto is an obvious example. The June 1976 protest began with schoolchildren objecting to the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction; police opened fire, killing children including Hector Pieterson, and the resulting images helped turn a localised school protest into a national and international crisis.

Birmingham in 1963 offers another example: police violence against schoolchildren during the Children’s Crusade generated national outrage and helped accelerate federal civil-rights action. The lesson is not that every school protest becomes a Soweto or Birmingham. It is that the state’s response can determine whether a limited grievance remains limited or becomes a symbol of something much larger.

That is what makes the events in West Bengal and Rajasthan politically significant. Whatever the investigation ultimately establishes about the death of Abdul Hafeez’s father, the reported sequence is already combustible. CJP alleges a political motive, including involvement by BJP supporters, while the police have disputed elements of that account. In Rajasthan, meanwhile, the government issued restrictions on outsider entry and on photography, videography, interviews and livestreaming at government schools within hours of CJP announcing its statewide inspection campaign.

The coincidence of those events creates a political problem the governments cannot easily wish away. One state is confronting allegations of violence against a family whose son was documenting a government school; the other has responded to a campaign of school documentation by making access and recording subject to official permission. Neither fact, by itself, establishes a conspiracy. Together, however, they create precisely the appearance that a campaign demanding accountability is being met not with greater transparency but with resistance.

And that is the danger. The more the state tries to control the camera, the more important the camera becomes. A school inspection campaign can be dismissed as partisan politics; a photograph of a broken classroom, a locked toilet or a collapsing building is much harder to dismiss. Conversely, a violent attack on someone documenting such conditions can transform an infrastructure grievance into a question of power, intimidation and citizenship.

The governments therefore face a choice that is larger than either the CJP campaign or the immediate controversies. They can allow the evidence to be seen, investigate allegations of violence transparently, and demonstrate that public institutions are open to public scrutiny. Or they can treat scrutiny itself as the threat. The first course may expose failures. The second risks making the failures politically explosive.

History’s warning is not that every grievance becomes a movement. It is more uncomfortable: sometimes the state creates the movement by the way it responds to the grievance.

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