Pralhad Joshi, the man who has replaced Pradhan as education minister, is not an improvement. Like Pradhan he is a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the BJP’s far-right parent body. He publicly defended the premature release in 2022 of 11 men convicted for rape in the notorious Bilkis Bano gang-rape case.
Watch: The reason why the RSS wants to maintain an iron grip over Indian education: इंडियन एक्सप्रेस ने छापा प्रधान के इस्तीफे की हकीकत RSS क्यों रखना चाहता शिक्षा मंत्रालय अपने अधीन?
The rebellion in India of the young, led by the Cockroach Janta party (CJP), unfolded against a backdrop of large, abstract, geometrical structures – arcs, planes, hemispheres – that together make up an observatory called Jantar Mantar, built in the early 18th century to refine almanacs and tell time. Jantar Mantar has been a byword for political protest for decades: it marks the space that the Delhi police assigns to the politically disgruntled so they can vent in a contained way. But it had never before hosted a political insurgency that started from scratch and forced the Indian state to back down in less than eight weeks.
When its founder, Abhijeet Dipke, brought the CJP to Jantar Mantar, it was a social media hashtag with 20 million followers. While he was studying in Boston, Dipke took the remarks of chief justice Surya Kant, who is accused of referring to the swathes of unemployed young people and activists as “parasites” and “cockroaches”, and turned them into a here-we-come meme. When he brought the CJP home to Delhi on 6 June to make it real, people were intrigued. Given the mostly dismal fate of civil society movements during prime minister Narendra Modi’s time in office, no one anticipated the David and Goliath contest that came to a head last Saturday.
Like other political tourists, I visited Jantar Mantar on 6 June out of curiosity. On that inaugural day it was modestly crowded and not that different from the dozens of demos I had attended over 50 years. The one difference was how young these so-called cockroaches were. I had seen young people mobilise against Modi’s government at close quarters before when the students of Jamia Millia Islamia, the university I taught in, came out against a pernicious citizenship bill. Their courage and idealism was defeated by a combination of police repression and organised rioting. This government’s willingness to use police brutality, vigilante violence and a pliant judiciary to snuff out protest hung over the fledgling CJP campaign like a shadow….
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After the truth-shower 