Pakistani? Class 12 Student Gets Online Hate for Calling Out Answer Sheet Mismatch

Vedansh Shrivastava did not hack anything. He did not run a misinformation campaign. He did not have a social media account until recently. He was a Class 12 student who opened his answer sheet and found someone else's handwriting on it. For raising that concern publicly, he was called a Pakistani agent, a Soros-funded plant , and an anti-national . Welcome to India's internet in 2026.

His family had applied for a photocopy of his Physics answer sheet through CBSE's official reevaluation process after he received unexpectedly low marks. What arrived was unambiguously not his work. Different handwriting, different answers, someone else's sheet uploaded under his roll number and evaluated in his name. His brother Siddhant noted publicly that Vedansh had not even owned a social media account before this, having spent the year with his head down studying. The account was created purely to raise a grievance the family could not get addressed through official channels.

The trolling that followed was swift and vicious. Before CBSE even acknowledged the error, Vedansh was being accused of fabricating the story for political purposes, of being a foreign-funded activist, of trying to destabilise the board examination system. CBSE's own official X account eventually confirmed the mistake was real and that the correct answer sheet had been identified. The trolls, predictably, moved on without apology.

Vedansh was not an isolated case. Student Sanjana came forward separately , alleging her Chemistry sheet bore no resemblance to her own work. Another parent reported receiving scanned documents with a page missing entirely. The pattern pointed not to individual error but to systemic failure within CBSE's newly introduced Online Script Monitoring system , which digitises answer sheets for on-screen evaluation and which produced blurred scans, portal crashes and apparently mismatched documents across multiple students.

The situation has now escalated beyond student social media posts. Kerala Chief Minister V D Satheesan wrote to Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan , formally seeking central intervention in the matter and flagging the distress caused to students across the country. That a state chief minister felt compelled to write directly to the ministry signals how seriously this failure is now being taken at the political level.

Over 17.8 lakh students sat for the Class 12 examination this year. The pass percentage dropped to 85.20 percent , the steepest fall in years. For every student behind that statistic, the result is not a data point. It is a door that may or may not open. Vedansh simply asked why his door looked wrong. He deserved an answer, not an abuse campaign.