Head: Cockroaches, Cinderellas, and a cloistered Cabinet

Strap: The student protests were the reckoning for eight decades spent treating education as India’s most disposable portfolio

Gautam R. Desiraju and Deekhit Bhattacharya

On July 25, 2026, following weeks of protest by students against exam paper leaks that the government expended significant energy ignoring, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan announced his resignation. Twelve years into the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, this was a first. Not because a minister finally fell over an exam leak — India has absorbed leaks and quiet reshuffles before without so much as a murmur — but because this resignation was extracted by the street, rather than surrendered in Parliament. A government that prizes discipline and message control had, for the first time, been made to answer to Jantar Mantar before it answered to Parliament. This is neither hard-fought democratic compromise nor governmental magnanimity; only the groans of a dysfunctional system.

The scandal itself was almost incidental to what it revealed. The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), sat by nearly two million aspiring doctors, was compromised again, layered on top of irregularities in the CBSE’s own on-screen marking. Students who had lost years to a cancelled, re-conducted, endlessly litigated exam took their own lives, and an unfortunate and ill-timed remark comparing unemployed youth to cockroaches and parasites, detonated what had been accumulating for years. A satirical outfit calling itself the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) turned the insult into a movement within days; by the time police were firing tear gas and swinging canes at students marching towards Parliament, the government had lost the argument.

None of this was really about Pradhan, despite repeated leaks, accreditation........

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