Jul 26, 2026 12:08 pm IST

Opinion | One Resignation, 3 Headaches: The Bigger Politics Behind Dharmendra Pradhan's Exit

The minister's exit revives an old Congress-era tradition and hands the BJP a very contemporary problem to solve on the road to Uttar Pradesh.

Rasheed Kidwai Rasheed Kidwai Columnist

Rasheed Kidwai Columnist

There is a particular theatre to an Indian resignation. It is rarely just about the minister who walks out; it is about the message the walking out is designed to send, to whom, and why now.

Dharmendra Pradhan's decision to send his resignation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 25, amid the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)-led protests over the NEET-UG paper leak and Sonam Wangchuk's fast at Jantar Mantar, belongs to that theatre. It is a gesture with a long lineage in Indian public life - and, like most such gestures, it is being read far more closely for its politics than for its penance.

Indian ministers have periodically reached for the moral high ground of resignation, and the templates are instructive. Lal Bahadur Shastri set the gold standard in December 1956, quitting as Railway Minister after 144 people died in an accident near Ariyalur. "I must do penance for this. Let me go," he told Jawaharlal Nehru - a line that has echoed through every subsequent debate on ministerial accountability. Nehru accepted the resignation not because Shastri was culpable, he said, but to set an example in Constitutional propriety. Shastri was back in government within months, given transport and communications in 1957.

The pattern repeated itself with Madhavrao Scindia, who resigned as Civil Aviation Minister in 1993 after a leased TU-154 crashed in Delhi fog, saying he had decided within 30 seconds because his conscience would not permit otherwise. He returned to the Rao ministry in 1995. Shivraj Patil quit as Home Minister after the 2008 Mumbai attacks and was compensated with a Raj Bhavan posting soon after. TT Krishnamachari resigned as Finance Minister after the Mundhra scandal in 1958, only to be reinducted in 1962 and again as Finance Minister in........

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