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

A government that does not bend to the people’s will 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 what political scientists describe as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s-dominant party system in Indian democracy. Entrance examinations are the gate-keeping apparatus that determines which young Indian gets 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. More than 20 lakh candidates were made to take the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) again after gruelling preparation that coincided with their school examinations. Several students did not survive the ordeal. The grievance bound youth across caste and religion, the very identities that political mobilisation in India has lately 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 had 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.