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.

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.