In Tamil Nadu, to many, NEET is more than an exam; it’s a wound. A wound stitched across the psyche of a state that sees education not as a privilege, but as an instrument of social justice.
Every mention of the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) seems to reopen that wound — reminding many of dreams derailed, disparities deepened, and, for some families, of bright children with promising futures that they can no longer hug.
Now, with the BJP and AIADMK formally reviving their political alliance ahead of the 2026 Assembly elections, a question hangs heavy in the Tamil air: what does this alliance mean for a state where, for years, NEET has been less ‘unpopular’ and more ‘viscerally opposed’?
Ever since NEET was imposed in 2017, Tamil Nadu has resisted it with a rare bipartisan ferocity. The exam — meant to standardise medical admissions across the country — collided headlong with Tamil Nadu’s decades-old model of Class XII board-based selection. NEET demanded central uniformity; Tamil Nadu demanded contextual justice.
In a state with a strong state board system, a large Tamil-medium population, and rural, first-generation learners, NEET was seen as inherently skewed. That it ‘favoured’ CBSE students. That it ‘advantaged’ those who could afford expensive coaching. That it ‘punished’ those who couldn’t speak Hindi or English fluently.
And it turned deadly.
The suicide of 17-year-old Anitha in 2017 — a Dalit girl from Ariyalur who scored 1176/1200 in her board exams but couldn’t clear NEET — became an inflection point. Her death was mourned, politicised, mythologised, and weaponised.
In the years since, over 18 NEET-related student suicides have been reported in the state.
The scars, undeniably, run deep.
The AIADMK, under the late Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, took a clear stand. She called NEET discriminatory, anti-poor, anti-rural. Her government passed two Bills in 2017 seeking to exempt Tamil Nadu from the test. But with Jayalalithaa gone and central resistance stiffening, the party’s spine seemed to have softened.
By the 2019 elections, the AIADMK was walking a tightrope, talking about "temporary exemptions" from NEET while staying in alliance with the BJP, its principal architect.
In 2021, despite backing the DMK’s anti-NEET Bill in the Assembly, the AIADMK’s own manifesto was silent on abolishing the exam. Critics accused it of posturing in Tamil Nadu while capitulating in Delhi.
Yet from within the party, the defence has always been that governance is not about slogans, but about survival and negotiation. As part of a national coalition, the AIADMK has often framed its stance as pragmatic, trying to extract whatever relief it can for Tamil Nadu students, even within policy constraints.
Coaching centres for underprivileged students, pleas for Tamil-medium NEET papers, and requests for temporary exemptions were part of this strategy.
Seen from that lens, AIADMK’s journey is perhaps not one of surrender, but one of managing contradiction in a federal system, where opposition at the state level must sometimes coexist with partnership at the centre.
During the 2023 fallout with the BJP, the AIADMK snapped ties and fought the 2024 general elections solo. Its manifesto slammed NEET and promised to fight for a return to Class XII marks-based admissions. That brief divorce seemed to reawaken its Dravidian conscience.
Then came April 2025. The reunion.
For the BJP, NEET is a settled matter. It’s a flagship reform: clean, meritocratic, pan-India. The courts back it. The President backs it. The Prime Minister won’t touch it.
Union ministers like Piyush Goyal and Dharmendra Pradhan have repeatedly dismissed Tamil Nadu’s opposition as “political.” The BJP’s Tamil Nadu leaders — most recently, K Annamalai — called NEET a “boon,” citing a rise in government school students cracking the exam.
But that selective statistic ignores the broader truth: NEET, as per the 2021 AK Rajan Committee report, has led to a sharp decline in rural, Tamil-medium, and poor students getting MBBS seats.
That said, it would perhaps be incomplete and oversimplified, if not irresponsible and biased, to say the BJP’s defence is about policy dogma. For them, NEET represents an attempt to clean up what they saw as a corrupt, donation-heavy admission system, where merit took a backseat to money.
Central leaders often point to years of opaque admissions in private colleges and argue that NEET, despite its rough edges, is a more transparent solution. And within Tamil Nadu too, BJP leaders have tried to make a case — politically and morally — that students from poor but academically strong backgrounds can and do benefit under NEET.
The Central government’s decision to offer the exam in Tamil, and the push to expand rural coaching schemes, were framed as proof of responsiveness, not rigidity.
The BJP isn’t unaware of Tamil Nadu’s sensitivities. But it also believes that justice should look the same from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, and that the idea of “one nation, one exam” is as administratively sound as it is philosophically fair.
In a country of vast inequalities, the BJP argues, standardisation is itself a kind of equity.
April 11, 2025. A new BJP state president is appointed: Nainar Nagendran. A former AIADMK man with Thevar roots and an old-school sensibility. His appointment, sources say, was meant to soothe AIADMK feathers ruffled by Annamalai’s aggressive style.
Nagendran’s elevation coincided with Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s visit to Chennai. The message was clear: the NDA in Tamil Nadu is back. The BJP will defer to EPS (Edappadi K Palaniswami), AIADMK Leader and former Chief Minister, as the state leader. AIADMK will rejoin the fold. But on NEET? Nothing.
When Chief Minister MK Stalin convened an all-party meeting to discuss the President’s NEET Bill rejection, the BJP boycotted it. The AIADMK did too.
Some saw the boycott as a scheduling issue. Many saw it as a signal.
Perhaps it could also be interpreted as an avoidance of theatrics, not of commitment. AIADMK sources argued that the meeting would not yield concrete outcomes, and that real relief for Tamil Nadu students lay not in symbolic resolutions, but in legal or institutional routes.
For the BJP, the optics of attending a meeting framed in staunch opposition to central policy may have seemed politically unworkable, especially just days after solidifying the alliance.
The AIADMK, which once orchestrated statewide protests against NEET, now chose silence. Stalin called it a betrayal. Political observers called it realignment. Either way, the AIADMK's absence spoke louder than any statement.
The DMK has made NEET its moral crusade. In 2021, it swept to power promising its abolition. It commissioned the AK Rajan report. It passed a Bill. It took on the Governor. It even got every party — including the AIADMK — to support an all-party resolution against the exam in 2023.
Now, with the NEET Bill formally rejected and the AIADMK re-entering the NDA, Stalin’s party is preparing for a reckoning. Already, DMK leaders are reminding voters how EPS flip-flopped on NEET. Social media campaigns are resurfacing AIADMK’s 2021 protests, juxtaposed against its 2025 silence.
In short: the DMK plans to turn NEET into a test of conscience, with the message that the BJP and AIADMK have aligned not just politically, but morally, and that too against the will of Tamil Nadu. Within that moral clarity lies, perhaps, a political calculation.
The party knows NEET is emotive. It knows the battle it could not win in Delhi can still win votes at home. Its narrative, while earnest, is also electoral. NEET, then, is both symbol and strategy.
The BJP-AIADMK alliance has its calculations. With the 2026 Assembly elections in sight, both parties want to focus on law and order, corruption charges against the DMK, and consolidation of southern caste blocs. NEET, they hope, will fade from memory, dismissed as a court-settled issue.
But Tamil Nadu has shown time and again that it doesn’t forget easily.
NEET is no longer a policy dispute. It’s a cultural symbol. A battle of state rights. A marker of political spine. An election won or lost not on arithmetic, but on empathy.
By reuniting with the BJP and skipping the all-party meet, the AIADMK has gambled that NEET fatigue has set in and that Tamil voters will move on. The DMK is betting otherwise.
It could be argued that both are missing a deeper truth: that the electorate may no longer be looking for slogans or purity, and is instead for deliverables. For assurance that their children will not be left behind, whether through exemption, coaching, quotas, or policy redesign.
The BJP and AIADMK may yet find a way to reframe the NEET debate around access. They may point to schemes, statistics, and success stories. The DMK, meanwhile, seems to be intent upon holding the moral line.
Is this merely a battle between Delhi and Chennai? Between three-letter parties?
Or is it a battle for how India defines fairness? And whether a child’s future can ever be standardised in a nation of so many differences?
Time will tell.
