New Delhi witnessed another heated day in Parliament on Wednesday as the debate over the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Bill, 2026 brought the government and Opposition face-to-face over paper leaks, NEET-UG and the recent student protests. Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi said political parties must respect students’ right to expression and referred to the young protesters who had taken to the streets in recent weeks. He said he felt reassured by what the future of the country had demonstrated on the streets. The debate came after nearly a week of disruptions in the Lok Sabha and focused on proposed tougher punishment and faster trials in paper leak cases. Opposition MPs backed the concerns raised by protesting students and criticised the alleged use of excessive police force, while BJP-led NDA members argued that examination paper leaks were not limited to any single government or political party. They cited cases from the UPA years as well as Opposition-ruled states and maintained that the government was now working on broader examination reforms.

The debate soon moved beyond the provisions of the bill. Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah over police action during the student agitation. She asked who had authorised the alleged use of pellet guns against protesters in Delhi and referred to an incident involving an AK-47 in Bihar. Bihar Police had said that a constable fired in the air in self-defence. Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav also attacked the government, saying he had not witnessed the Emergency of the 1970s but had seen a glimpse of it in Delhi the previous week. The issue created uproar in the Rajya Sabha as well, where Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and BJP president JP Nadda clashed over police action during the July 20 protest. Nadda maintained that action against those taking law and order into their own hands was part of normal policing, while the Opposition continued demanding a response from the home minister. DMK MP Dayanidhi Maran, meanwhile, pushed the debate in another direction by demanding that NEET itself be scrapped. He argued that increasing punishment for people involved in paper leaks did not address what his party considered the fundamental problems with the national medical entrance examination.

The government accused Opposition parties of turning a discussion on examination reform into a wider political confrontation. Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju, ahead of Rahul Gandhi’s speech, said he hoped the Congress leader would address the actual provisions of the bill instead of focusing mainly on unrelated political issues. BJP MP Tejasvi Surya accused the Opposition of wrongly assuming that young protesters were politically aligned with it, while Anurag Thakur described paper leaks as a serious threat to the future of the country’s youth. Defending the proposed amendment, Union Minister Jitendra Singh said paper leaks had occurred in national and state-level examinations under governments belonging to different parties and should therefore not be viewed only through a political lens. The proposed legislation seeks more stringent punishment for individuals, organised gangs and entities involved in examination leaks, along with provisions aimed at delivering speedier justice. The debate also spilled into controversy over Pralhad Joshi, who was given additional charge of the Education Ministry following Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation on July 25 amid the student protests. By Wednesday afternoon, what began as a debate on an anti-paper leak law had expanded into a larger political battle over NEET, student protests, police action and government accountability, keeping examination reforms at the centre of Parliament’s Monsoon Session.