Youth at the vanguard: On the Education Minister’s resignation

A government that does not bend to the will of the people risks being broken. The resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan as Union Education Minister, after a sustained agitation by youth led by the satirically named Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), is more than just a ministerial casualty of the “paper leaks” scandal. It is a seminal moment in the unravelling of what political scientists describe as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-dominant party system in Indian democracy, which allows little elbow room for a fragmented Opposition. Entrance examinations are the gatekeeping mechanism that determines which young Indians get to enter the narrow but reassuring world of formal employment later on, in a country where most work remains in the grinding unorganised sector. Repeated leaks across several examinations have turned an apparatus for testing merit into one of widespread graft. Close to 20 lakh candidates were made to take the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Undergraduate) again after gruelling preparation that coincided with their school examinations. Several students did not survive the ordeal. The grievance bound youth across castes and religions, the very identities that political mobilisation in India has been confined to in recent years. Bypassing a television establishment largely aligned with the ruling dispensation, the faceless protesters built support on social media within days. The high-handedness of the Delhi police and the attempts to throttle the Internet and mobility around the protest venues only swelled their ranks. The government eventually found that this agitation could not be crushed, swayed, split, distracted or left to dissipate, as others have been over the past 12 years. It was forced to negotiate, and in the face of the CJP’s rightful stubbornness, Mr. Pradhan’s continuation became untenable. The nothing-to-lose desperation of the protesters gained a political halo that came from their non-alignment with electorally focused established parties. This was a movement that could not be hijacked or undermined by the political elite, whether of the Opposition or of the government.

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But Mr. Pradhan’s announcement of his resignation does not inspire confidence. Instead of accepting moral responsibility for the failures in the conduct and the marking of various examinations, he tactfully sought to present his stepping down as an attempt to prevent “anti-national” elements from exploiting the situation created by the protests. Evident in his resignation letter is the government’s mindset that sections of the students were acting against the Indian state with ulterior motives. This is also part of the same narrative that prompted the Delhi Police to meet the protests with shock batons, pellet guns, and lathis with nails. The police actions were nothing short of calculated brutality that violated all protocols of crowd control. The resignation is a tactical retreat on the part of the government, not a realisation of mistakes made; it came after the abject failure of efforts to paint the protests as communal, as inspired by foreign agencies, and as designed for political mileage. Among the several missteps, the government first acted as if the social media followers were made up of mostly bots who would vanish from view if their accounts were withheld, then as if their virtual presence would have no real-life consequences, and finally as if they could be fought off with Instagram reels. Only on encountering failure after failure did the government get Mr. Pradhan to sign off. But, commendably, the protesters withdrew the agitation once their demands were met.

In the days ahead, the impact of the protests will be far wider than what the government hopes to restrict it to. Over the years, the Narendra Modi-led BJP government has converted mostly narrow electoral victories — a plurality of votes yielding a majority of seats, singly or in coalition — into expansive mandates. It has used them to break the constitutionalist consensus on settled questions of secularism and federalism, advancing a unitary, majoritarian agenda by creeping degrees. It has simultaneously raised its floor of support by radicalising sections in the north, west and now the east of India on the communal plank, which has in turn helped secure its legislative strength. It has recast dissent as anti-national or separatist and hollowed out the Opposition through induced defections and selective deployment of enforcement agencies. Combined with the pusillanimity of other institutions, including a passive judiciary, this has led to what many describe as a managed democracy living under an undeclared emergency for civil liberties. A nation born of non-violent struggle has needed, more than once since Independence, a non-parliamentary convulsion to turn its institutions back towards the vision of the freedom-fighting generation that framed the Constitution. The CJP, and those who stood with it — Sonam Wangchuk fasted for 26 days — have shown that a just demand, pressed through the quintessentially Indian route of satyagraha, can outlast the state’s brutality and move an inflexible government to action. This is a lesson for the institutions charged with checking the executive, and for those charged with questioning authority, especially the media, which — barring some notable exceptions — have mostly played a negative role. They must play their constitutionally mandated and socially responsible role rather than give in to browbeating or expediency. Whether they do so will be tested as the government sets about reforming the entrance examination system with a different Minister in charge. What is certain is that India is yearning for change and rejuvenation.