AA Edit | CJP-led Stir Forces Govt To Be Held Accountable

The resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan as Union education minister comes as the result of an attempt by the people of India to enforce as essential an element of democratic governance as accountability. It is not a common occurrence for ministers to leave office on this account in India though there is no dearth of governmental failures here and that makes this event a watchable one.

The Indian political scene is witnessing an interesting phenomenon where a hardly two-month-old Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has shaken the foundations of the NDA government at the Centre which is backed by the century-old Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). That the government is led by a team of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and master strategist home minister Amit Shah makes the phenomenon all the more curious, for the duo was considered invincible, at least till yesterday; and has been selling its narratives to the voters successfully for more than a decade.

There are many theories that seek to explain the success of the unprecedented agitation at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar which later spread to other parts of the country over 36 days. One tenable argument is that the BJP team failed to identify the simmering discontentment in its own support base, the middle class, after the mess-up in several examinations, including the cancellation of the Neet medical entrance examination and the goof-up in the evaluation of the answer sheets in the Class 12 examination conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education. Why it failed so is a topic for the BJP and the larger Sangh Parivar to ponder over.

The BJP has been making an effort to spread the idea that Mr Pradhan had to sacrifice his post as he was unfairly targeted by the Opposition and the Cockroaches. This, however, is an untenable position. The National Testing Agency, commissioned to conduct the entrance examination to most top-level educational institutions in this country, bears witness to the callousness with which Mr Pradhan ran his ministry all these years. The agency has no statutory back-up, is manned by a hopelessly inadequate number of people who are either on deputation or on contract, and yet was trusted to conduct successfully 18 examinations taken by more than 65 lakh students. Mr Pradhan, or for that matter Prime Minister Modi, has no excuse to offer for leaving the agency in such a pass, their lack of involvement ultimately costing the lives of 23 bright young Indians. The CBSE mess-up is equally indefensible. The BJP must stop painting Mr Pradhan as the fall guy; it must investigate why these failures took place.

The Opposition’s job is to make the government accountable; and the fact that it required an agitation spearheaded by the young crowd unattached to political parties to wake the government up from its slumber points to its failure as well. Now that they have tasted blood, the Opposition parties may organise themselves into one fighting force to challenge the government on issues they perceive as critical to the survival of the democratic republic. The successful agitation by the CJP must have convinced the established parties that the young crowds are waiting in the wings and it is up to them to form a larger platform with them and take the country’s causes forward.