So, Dharmendra Pradhan has finally stepped down!
Break out the confetti, roll out the newsroom banners. Let the television news headlines roll, declaring that “the people have won.” We are all expected to join in a chorus of national relief, bow to the magnanimity of the state, clear the streets, and pat ourselves on the back for living in a nation where a minister can be forced out after only a month of national outrage, a wave of suicides and hunger strikes, and days of young people getting their skulls cracked open.
How wonderfully generous of the system. How deeply humbling.
But let’s refrain from popping the champagne just yet. Calling this forced exit a victory of democratic morality requires a staggering loss of memory and is an indictment of how low our expectations have sunk. It asks us to forget the horrors of Jantar Mantar, where teenagers were treated like hostile combatants by their own state. When accountability is delayed until political pressure becomes unbearable, it ceases to be an act of institutional integrity and becomes an exercise in political damage control. Unfortunately, this concession, extracted through civic suffering, has arrived long after the damage has been done.
A Lecture, Not an Apology
Read the resignation letter carefully. There is no folded-hands plea for forgiveness. There is no acknowledgment of the ruined futures of 20 lakh applicants and their families. There is no remorse for the 20 young lives lost to suicide while the government dragged its feet.
Instead, we get a lecture. We are told he is stepping aside not out of guilt or as a penalty for failure, but as a “sacrifice” to protect the nation, and especially its youth, from “anti-national elements” who might try to take advantage of the situation. The same youth, by the way, who were mercilessly clobbered with improvised spikes, tear-gassed, water-cannoned, shot with pellets, and even tased at the barricades.
Think about the sheer audacity of that narrative. It’s so staggering that it’s almost impressive.
The Greater Offense: Bureaucratic Terror Against Children
The paper leak was an administrative failure, but the crackdown at Jantar Mantar was not. That was no oversight but a conscious choice—a direct and calculated, state-sanctioned crime of violence against its own children.
While the ruling party’s online army churned out distraction campaigns to dilute the issue, insisting the protest had “turned political” and running slick campaigns asking, “Is this really about NEET anymore?”, the streets were turned into a meat grinder:
Disproportionate Force: Unarmed teenagers, barely out of high school, were met with pellets, high-pressure water cannons, tear gas shells, and lathis spiked with nails.
Targeting Women and Doctors: Peaceful female protesters were struck by male officers, night-time hunger strikes were broken up in the dark, and volunteer doctors rushing to bandage broken bones were shoved and hit.
Badges of Cowardice: In an act that says everything about who was truly in the wrong, many of those officers systematically removed or concealed their name tags before swinging their batons. Men in civil clothes carried batons alongside uniformed police.
Why hide your identity if you are enforcing the law? The answer is that they knew they were committing a crime. They knew they were fracturing the skulls of the very children they had sworn to protect.
And while top police officers were shuffled and transferred overnight in a frantic bid to erase the paper trail, the online echo chambers doctored videos to blame the kids. Cops were caught on camera damaging vehicles to fabricate charges of vandalism against peaceful protesters.
The Questions a Single Resignation Cannot Erase
A minister’s exit functions as a convenient political eraser. It creates a neat little narrative in which the government claims the matter is closed. But a letter of resignation does not wash away the blood spilled on the pavement.
If we have an ounce of spine left as a society and retain any sense of civic duty, we must stop celebrating this superficial political maneuver and demand precise operational answers.
The Unanswered Dossier
Who authorized the escalation? Who gave the command to deploy such severe force against peaceful and unarmed teenagers?
What was the legal basis for these weapons of force? Why were lathis with attached nails and non-standard equipment used against kids? Was this a civil assembly or a battlefield?
Who authorized electric currents at police barricades? Under what police manual is electrifying public protest barriers permitted against citizens?
Why was disproportionate force directed at women? What criminal and disciplinary charges are being pressed against male police personnel filmed striking female protesters?
Why were officers unidentifiable? Who authorized police personnel to remove their name tags during a public action, and what criminal charges are being brought against those officers?
Who were the men in civil dress? Who were the unidentified men wielding batons alongside the police, and under whose authority were they acting?
Where is the Home Ministry’s statement? The police do not act in a vacuum. They do not execute large-scale suppression without high-level clearance. They simply follow orders. Who in the higher executive chain ordered this crackdown?
What happens to the victims? How many students remain in custody, and what charges have been levied against them? Has an independent judicial inquiry been established to investigate police misconduct?
The “It’s Political!” Fallacy
The andhbhakts whine that the opposition and various activist groups are “taking advantage of this opportunity to attack the government.” To that, anyone who understands basic civics has to ask: What on earth do you expect an opposition to do?
Which political party in human history has seen a massive government blunder and said, “Let’s sit this one out so the ruling party doesn’t feel bad”?
If the roles were reversed, would the BJP have stayed silent? Absolutely not. They would have paralysed cities, burned effigies, and demanded immediate resignations—just as their current ministers did when they were climbing the political ladder years ago. Did the Education Minister himself not build his early political career by leading aggressive student protests? Did Narendra Modi himself not tweet on August 23, 2011, accusing the then-ruling government of using anti-democratic means against Anna Hazare’s movement?
For the ruling ecosystem to now act surprised and aggrieved that “politics” is happening over a massive administrative failure is the ultimate case of the pot calling the kettle black. And as for the complaint that non-students or prominent activists are speaking at these rallies, since when is standing in solidarity with suffering kids a crime?
When a ruling government creates a disaster, opposition parties will jump in. Activists will lend their megaphones. Common citizens will march in solidarity. That doesn’t dilute the cause, nor does it amount to a conspiracy. That is just how a democratic society works when its own people are hurting.
Conclusion: The Ultimate Moral Indictment
Let us be completely clear about one thing: the only reason this resignation happened is because the youth of this country refused to bow down. They sat in the heat, endured the hunger strikes, took the beatings, and held the line. Their courage and resilience are the sole reasons for pride in this entire tragedy.
But in the larger scheme of things, this is not a triumph of our system—it is proof of its decay.
If a nation has to bleed and starve its children on the streets just to extract an obvious, routine administrative resignation, then the system is fundamentally broken. If we clap and cheer because a minister finally stepped down after weeks of public agony, we are conceding that our standards for governance have hit absolute rock bottom.
Dharmendra Pradhan leaving office fixes nothing. It does not repair a compromised examination network, it does not bring back the dead, and it does not hold accountable the men in uniform who beat teenagers in the dark.
Do not let a single resignation be the end of this story. Do not get back to business as usual. The issue was never just NEET. The issue is a state apparatus that believes it can brutalise its own future and settle the debt with a signed piece of paper. Demand the investigation. Demand the court-martial of those police officers, along with those who ordered them to act. Demand the truth. Demand complete justice. Anything less is just accepting the facade.