Protesters celebrate at Jantar Mantar after Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigns from his post on Saturday.
| Photo Credit: ANI
The Prime Minister blinked! The government blinked! Unfortunately, the blinking was over something that was never called for in the yesteryear of politics. A Railway Minister would resign, in those times, following a terrible railway accident.Not that it was his personal negligence. But he took responsibility as the ultimate authority. Unfortunately, that sense of honour, self-respect, and decency is lost in politics today. The cars with red lights, a house in Lutyens’ Delhi, and a false sense of aggrandisement is now the priority.The resignation of an Education Minister, which should have been immediate — following the NEET catastrophe —became an issue requiring a huge protest. The reparation of the damage and taking serious and sincere measures to quell the rot in the education system (alas, just one of many rots in various departments) required a protest of the magnitude one has seen, to make the government decide to actually perform its duty, function, and responsibility.But one very great takeaway and benefit that has come out of this (for, after all, every negative has the prospect of resulting in something positive) is that an authoritarian government which had grown to believing, and behaving, like it was a body, a party, above the people, with its threats and possible vindictiveness, to anyone who did not “toe the line”, realised that, when you suppress the people, in the end, they are the masters, and the self-important government functionaries are but their servants.In a way, the NEET incident has been a positive development in the current Indian landscape. At last people have risen against authoritarianism, against fear, against the threat of reprisal, from those who are given power by the very people they now consistently let down. The threat of government reprisal against those who protest or object. The threat of being planted with drugs or false rape charges and of being incarcerated without bail, in the belief that a pliant judicial system would blink, and turn away from injustice, has finally found people, and fortunately the youth of this country who say, “this much and no more”.I am proud of the youth. They have risen as one. With no religious or other artificial divides. They have shown the courage that elders, who had the wherewithal to show, lacked. They have shown us that cowardice, impotence, and willingness to bow to such authoritarianism as pliant and obedient cattle, to safeguard the positions we have reached without inviting any unrest or destabilisation of our own self-comfort is unacceptable.Go forth, youth! You are not cockroaches. We elders will hopefully find the courage, through your strength, to stop being cockroaches and shed our fears and not be protective of our own survival.The greatest threat to authoritarianism is to take it too far and to such sectors that cannot and will not tolerate it any more. This has been a protest, not just against the NEET debacle, but against the authoritarian rule that prevails. From the heart of a man known to be completely apolitical and who has judged each issue on the strength of its own right or wrong, unmindful of whether the ruling dispensation or the opposition is to blame, all I can say is — may this swing against authoritarianism spearheaded by the youth succeed, so that we can all truly say Jai Hind.C. Aryama Sundaram is a senior advocate in the Supreme Court. The views expressed are personal. Published - July 25, 2026 06:33 pm IST
