Dharmendra Pradhan spent five years quietly building the most significant overhaul of India's education system since independence. The people who wanted to undo that work were watching for an opening. NEET 2026 gave them one.
How to read this article
Three tiers are used throughout. Established Fact means multiple independent sources confirm it. Reported Claim means it was reported but not independently verified or comes from a single or partisan source. Editorial Analysis means this is argument and interpretation, not a finding. Weigh each accordingly.
Who Is Dharmendra Pradhan?
Established Fact
Pradhan is not a typical education bureaucrat who came up through academic institutions. He entered politics through student activism with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad in Odisha, the student wing of the RSS. He served in the Rajya Sabha from 2000, became a Union Minister of State for multiple portfolios under Modi, held the Petroleum and Natural Gas ministry from 2014 to 2021, and was appointed Education Minister on July 7, 2021.
He replaced Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, who had managed the chaotic pandemic-era education crisis with limited success. Pradhan came in with a specific brief: implement the National Education Policy 2020, which had already been announced but had barely moved from paper to practice.
He served as the 9th Education Minister of India from 2021 to 2026. His political roots are in Odisha. He represents Sambalpur in the Lok Sabha. He has never been an academician. His critics have used that against him. His supporters argue that education reform requires political will, not academic credentials, and that he delivered both.
The NEP 2020 Legacy
Established Fact, with noted disagreements where they exist
The National Education Policy 2020 is the first full-scale education overhaul India has seen since 1986, a gap of 34 years. It was conceived under a different minister, but Pradhan's job was to turn it into something real. That is a harder job than writing the policy.
What the NEP changed, in structural terms: it replaced the old 10+2 school framework with a 5+3+3+4 design that aligns with the cognitive development stages of children, with particular emphasis on the foundational years from ages 3 to 8. For decades, Indian policy had treated early childhood as a holding area before real education began at Class 1. NEP recognized that what happens before Class 1 determines much of what happens after.
Pradhan oversaw two key documents that gave the NEP its operational form. The National Curriculum Framework for Foundational Stage was released in October 2022. The National Curriculum Framework for School Education followed in August 2023. These are not press releases. They are the guiding documents that determine what every NCERT textbook will contain and how every teacher is supposed to teach. Changing these frameworks is consequential in a way that most education policy announcements are not.
The higher education side saw significant structural changes as well. The Academic Bank of Credits was introduced, allowing students to accumulate credits across institutions and disciplines rather than being locked into a single course at a single college. The National Credit Framework extended this logic across vocational and academic qualifications. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation was established to coordinate research funding and output, addressing India's longstanding gap between its engineering and science enrollment numbers and its research output.
Higher education Gross Enrollment Ratio rose to 28.4 percent during this period, according to government data cited by the Education for All India analysis. That is a real number. Its significance is contested: critics note that enrollment does not equal quality, and that India's dropout rates and infrastructure gaps remain severe. Both observations can be true simultaneously.
What most accounts leave out about NEP implementation
Implementation of NEP has been uneven across states. Tamil Nadu under Chief Minister Stalin publicly resisted the three-language formula, which requires Hindi as a third language in southern states. Maharashtra briefly reversed its decision to introduce Hindi before opposition forced a rollback. The NEP's ambitions for mother-tongue instruction in early years have barely been implemented in most states due to teacher shortages in regional languages. Pradhan's achievement was real at the policy and framework level. What happened in classrooms is a different story that is still unfolding.
The Textbook Controversy
Established Fact, with both sides of the debate presented
This is where Pradhan's tenure became deeply polarizing, and it is the most important context for understanding why certain political actors wanted him removed.
Between 2022 and 2024, NCERT carried out a series of syllabus revisions that cumulatively removed or reduced content on several sensitive historical topics. What was changed is documented across multiple independent outlets. The interpretation of those changes is where serious disagreement exists.
Here is what the changes actually included, confirmed across Business Standard, The News Minute, India Today, and Careers360:
| What Was Changed |
Class |
Year |
| Two-page table of Mughal emperors' achievements removed |
Class 7 |
2022 |
| Discussion of Aurangzeb and post-Mughal fragmentation removed |
Class 8 |
2022 |
| 'Kings and Chronicles: The Mughal Courts' chapter removed |
Class 12 |
2023 |
| Multiple Babri Masjid references removed from political science |
Class 12 |
2024 |
| References to Gandhi's opposition to Hindu extremism reduced |
Class 12 |
2022 |
| Details of Nathuram Godse's ideological affiliations toned down |
Class 12 |
2022 |
| Chapter on American Hegemony removed from Civics |
Class 12 |
2023 |
| Faiz Ahmed Faiz poems removed from Class 10 |
Class 10 |
2022 |
| Chapters on popular movements and Emergency removed |
Class 12 |
2023 |
NCERT described the exercise as “rationalization” carried out by 25 external experts and 16 CBSE teachers to reduce content load on students, particularly after the disruptions of the COVID years. The ministry confirmed this in a written response to Parliament.
The government's argument: Indian history education had been shaped by a post-independence framework that overcorrected for colonial-era narratives by constructing an idealized view of certain medieval rulers. Reducing that content brings balance. The chapters removed were not the entirety of Mughal history; references remain in other parts of the curriculum. A chapter on American hegemony being removed from Civics is a pedagogical choice, not erasure of history.
The critics' argument: Kerala Education Minister V. Sivankutty wrote to Prime Minister Modi calling the changes “an injustice to students” that would produce an “incomplete understanding of Indian history.” Historians including Romila Thapar and others publicly criticized what they described as ideologically driven selective deletion. The fact that some controversial deletions were not listed in the official rationalization notice, something NCERT later called a possible “oversight,” gave ammunition to those who argued this was surreptitious rather than transparent.
One thing both sides agree on: these changes were politically significant. And that significance made Pradhan a target.
PM SHRI and Infrastructure
Established Fact
The PM SHRI scheme, Pradhan Mantri Schools for Rising India, upgraded over 13,000 schools across India into model institutions with smart classrooms, ICT-enabled teaching, science laboratories, libraries, sports facilities, and infrastructure meeting environmental standards. This was a genuine institutional investment, confirmed by BJP IT Cell head Amit Malviya's documented social media thread and independent education policy analyses.
The National Professional Standards for Teachers and National Mission for Mentoring programmes were also launched under his tenure, addressing the longstanding gap in teacher training quality. These are not headline-grabbing programmes. They are the kind of infrastructure investments whose absence is felt for decades.
What Kind of Enemies He Made
Established Fact and Editorial Analysis, labelled separately
Established: The NCERT changes generated sustained opposition from a specific political and academic ecosystem. Left-leaning historians, opposition-aligned educators, Congress and AAP leaders, and certain state governments publicly opposed the curriculum direction. Tamil Nadu refused to adopt parts of NEP. Kerala threatened to teach the deleted portions independently. These are documented facts reported across multiple outlets.
Editorial Analysis: Pradhan had, over five years, made enemies of exactly the group that had dominated Indian educational institutions for decades: the post-Nehruvian academic left. This is not a neutral observation and I want to be clear it is my reading of the pattern. But the people who wanted Pradhan gone were not a random cross-section of Indian opinion. They were concentrated in a specific ideological space that had strong institutional presence in universities, student unions, and media. When NEET 2026 gave them a legitimate grievance to attach to, that pre-existing hostility explains the speed and organization of the response.
The NEET Failure: What Is Actually His Responsibility
Established Fact
This section matters because conflating everything under “Pradhan is the target” risks obscuring what he is actually responsible for, which is real and cannot be dismissed.
The NTA operates under the Ministry of Education. Pradhan was the minister. The NTA presided over a major NEET controversy in 2024 and another in 2026. The organizational security failures that allowed an organized criminal network to compromise the question-setting process happened on his watch. He acknowledged this directly in his resignation letter.
Ministers are not personally responsible for every criminal act committed inside their ministry. But they are responsible for the systems and oversight mechanisms that allow such acts to continue. The NTA's opacity, its continued reliance on paper-based examinations at thousands of centres despite documented fraud in 2024, and the failure to implement systematic security upgrades after the first scandal: these are governance failures at the ministerial level.
Pradhan took responsibility. That matters. The fact that political opportunists used the legitimate grievance for other purposes does not reduce the legitimacy of the underlying accountability demand.
Why Pradhan Specifically Was Targeted
Editorial Analysis, with supporting facts noted
The demand for Pradhan's resignation began almost immediately after the NEET cancellation, before the CBI had completed its investigation, before the re-examination had been held, and before the scale of the failure was fully established. That speed is worth noting.
For context: India has had dozens of state-level exam paper leaks over the past decade. Very few resulted in demands for ministerial resignations that reached the intensity of the 2026 campaign. The question of why this particular scandal produced this particular political response is legitimate.
The factual answer involves several documented elements. First, the CJP movement emerged from a pre-existing political frustration that the NEET scandal supercharged. Second, left-wing student organizations with a specific institutional presence in Delhi universities joined quickly. Third, opposition parties including Congress and AAP had been demanding Pradhan's resignation since 2024, over the first NEET controversy, and the 2026 scandal was the continuation of that campaign. Fourth, Pradhan's curriculum changes had generated a genuine and organized opposition that was politically ready to mobilize.
The editorial argument I am making is this: Pradhan was not only targeted because 22 lakh students were wronged by an exam paper leak. He was targeted because he had spent five years systematically undoing an educational consensus that a specific political and academic ecosystem had spent decades building. The paper leak was the door. The agenda was larger.
That does not make the paper leak less real. It means two things were happening simultaneously and should be understood separately.
The Resignation: What He Said and What It Means
Established Fact (his own words, published in full by The Week and confirmed across outlets)
Pradhan resigned on July 25, 2026. His resignation statement, published in full by The Week and confirmed across multiple outlets, is worth reading closely because it does several things at once.
He acknowledged the NEET failure directly: “Irregularities came to light in the NEET-UG examination held on 3 May 2026. The Government of India took immediate note of this, handed the investigation to the CBI, cancelled the exam, and announced a date for the re-examination.” He said he took responsibility from day one.
He then gave his stated reason for resigning: “Considering the situation that has developed at Jantar Mantar and across the country, that anti-national forces should not benefit from this situation, that the country's unity must be preserved, that not a single student's future should get entangled in legal complications... with these thoughts in mind, I have sent my resignation letter.”
This is a carefully constructed statement. He resigned not only to accept accountability for NEET, but specifically to prevent what he described as anti-national forces from continuing to use the protest as a platform. Whether you accept that characterization depends on where you stand politically. What is clear is that Pradhan himself, in his own words, named the dual nature of what had happened: a genuine student grievance being used for a purpose that went beyond student welfare.
What Most People Miss
Editorial Analysis
The standard coverage of Pradhan's resignation frames it as a victory for students over a minister who failed them. That framing is not wrong. But it is incomplete in a way that matters for understanding what actually happened.
Pradhan was targeted twice for NEET: once in 2024 by the same coalition of opposition parties and left-wing student bodies, and again in 2026. In 2024, the movement did not succeed in forcing his resignation. In 2026, it did. The difference between 2024 and 2026 was not simply the scale of the scandal. It was the emergence of the CJP as a vehicle that gave the same political coalition a new and more effective organizational form.
What most people miss is the continuity. This was not a spontaneous uprising that happened to catch a minister off guard. It was the continuation of a campaign that had been running for two years, given new fuel by a genuine failure and a new organizational vehicle. Understanding that continuity helps explain why the response was so fast, so organized, and so politically precise in its demands.
The other thing most people miss: Pradhan's resignation may have been the tactically correct move for the BJP too. It conceded the legitimate accountability demand, defused a movement that was attracting more public sympathy than the government wanted to fight, and allowed the party to reset the education portfolio under Pralhad Joshi without endorsing the broader political agenda that the protest had acquired. Sometimes a resignation is not a defeat. It is a strategic reset.
My Analysis
Editorial Analysis
Dharmendra Pradhan leaves office with a complicated legacy. That is not a diplomatic way of saying his legacy is bad. It is an accurate description of someone who achieved significant things while also presiding over genuine failures, and who operated in an environment where every decision was a political battlefield.
The NEP implementation was real. Arguing otherwise requires ignoring the National Curriculum Frameworks, the PM SHRI schools, the Academic Bank of Credits, and the structural changes to higher education. These are not small administrative outputs. They are the foundation on which Indian education will operate for the next two decades. Whether that foundation is the right one is a legitimate debate. That it was built is not in question.
The NCERT changes were politically motivated, at least in part. I think that is honest and obvious. Whether they were educationally justified is a separate question on which I have less certainty. Indian education did spend decades with a particular ideological orientation. Whether correcting that orientation required removing Mughal chapters entirely, or could have been done through addition rather than deletion, is a real pedagogical argument. The process was also less transparent than it should have been. Those are fair criticisms.
The NEET failure was his responsibility in the ministerial sense. He acknowledged it. The NTA failed, and the NTA reported to him. Governance accountability has to mean something real, and the students who lost years of preparation deserved to see that consequence fall at the right level.
What I find most worth watching is what happens next. Pralhad Joshi holds the education portfolio now, on additional charge. The NEP frameworks are in place. The NCERT changes are done. The question is whether the next minister continues that direction or whether the political cost of this resignation creates an opening for reversal. That is the real consequence of what happened at Jantar Mantar for Indian education, and it has nothing to do with which slogans were raised in the crowd.
The students who fought for accountability over NEET were right to fight. Pradhan was right to take responsibility. The people who tried to use that fight for a different purpose were wrong, and the country was right to name them. All three things are true. The problem with most coverage of this story is the assumption that only one of them can be.
The Karnataka Test: Rahul Gandhi's Selective Outrage
Established Fact, sourced from Deccan Herald, The Tribune, and Careers360
Rahul Gandhi has a well-documented pattern on exam paper leaks. He visits protest sites, gives impassioned speeches about students' futures being stolen, and demands ministerial resignations. In January 2025, he traveled to Patna to meet BPSC exam students and said paper leaks are “a weapon to take away the rights of youth.” He specifically said such incidents were “happening everyday in BJP-ruled states.”
That qualifier matters. BJP-ruled states.
Karnataka, governed by the Congress party under Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, has had its own exam paper leak problems. Six teachers were arrested and two minors detained in a Karnataka SSLC paper leak case, confirmed by Deccan Herald. There have been documented incidents involving the Karnataka Public Service Commission and the KPSC civil services examinations, where then-Chief Minister Siddaramaiah accepted in the state assembly that “irregularities had taken place.” Rahul Gandhi, who describes paper leaks as a weapon against youth when they happen under BJP governments, has not spoken about any of these cases.
The contrast became impossible to ignore on July 25, 2026, the same day Pradhan resigned. Shivakumar announced that District Commissioners in Karnataka would be held responsible for paper leaks in the state going forward. Not the minister. Not the political leadership. Officials. Deccan Herald reported this directly. BJP leader R. Ashoka immediately called it out: “Rahul Gandhi. Priyanka Gandhi. D.K. Shivakumar. Three faces. One hypocrisy. In Delhi, the Congress ecosystem demands resignations. In Karnataka, the same Congress government has exposed its real mindset.”
The logical gap is not subtle. If a central education minister bears moral and political responsibility for an exam conducted under a central agency, then a state chief minister bears exactly the same responsibility for exams conducted under state agencies. The principle does not change based on which party holds power. Applying it to one government and not the other is not accountability. It is targeting.
Editorial Analysis
JP Nadda, addressing this directly in a press conference reported by The Tribune, named alleged paper leaks across INDIA bloc-ruled states in the 2025-26 period: Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Punjab, Kerala, and Karnataka. He asked Rahul Gandhi: “Why are you so selective? Why did you never speak of paper leaks in governments run by INDIA allies?”
That is a fair question. No honest commentator can dismiss it. And Rahul Gandhi has not answered it.
The Punjab Test: CJP's Silence Speaks Louder Than Its Slogans
Established Fact, sourced from The Week, India TV News, Republic World, and Indiablooms
Punjab is governed by the Aam Aadmi Party, the same party whose leaders stood at Jantar Mantar backing the CJP protests and demanding Pradhan's resignation. AAP MP Sandeep Pathak demanded Pradhan's resignation in 2024 over the first NEET controversy. The party's support for CJP was public and consistent.
In Punjab, under the AAP government, multiple exam paper leaks have been alleged. The Shiromani Akali Dal and the BJP both cited six incidents: the Punjab Teacher Eligibility Test, the Class 12 English examination, a pharmacy officer recruitment test, a PSSSB Group B recruitment exam in 2025, and others. Congress leader Amarinder Singh Raja Warring raised the issue at Jantar Mantar itself, asking: “When will Punjab Education Minister Harjot Singh Bains be held accountable?”
CJP was asked about this directly. Republic World reported that “the CJP protesters, vocal on national issues like NEET paper leaks and demanding ministerial resignations, have so far remained silent on the Punjab cases.” When founder Abhijeet Dipke was pressed, he said, per India TV News: “We will announce the future strategy soon. Please give us a little time. We are currently planning for it.”
This came one day after Dipke had celebrated Pradhan's resignation as a “huge victory of the youth.”
Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann denied that any paper had been leaked under AAP's watch, calling reported incidents “cheating at two centres,” not leaks. That is his position, and he has the right to make it. But the BJP spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla made a pointed observation, reported by The Week: Arvind Kejriwal had previously said that if a paper leak happened under his government, he would resign. “Today, six to seven paper leaks have occurred in Punjab,” Poonawalla said. “Their shameless Chief Minister has not resigned.”
Editorial Analysis
A protest movement that claims to speak for students across India, that spent 36 days demanding a central minister's resignation over a national exam, and that fell silent when asked about paper leaks in a state governed by its political allies has revealed its priorities. It does not have to state them. The silence does.
The students of Punjab who appeared for the PTET, the Group B recruitment exam, and the pharmacy officer test are not less deserving of accountability than the students who sat for NEET. Their futures are not less important. The exam integrity violation is not more acceptable because it happened in an AAP-governed state.
If CJP follows through and campaigns against Harjot Singh Bains in Punjab with the same intensity it brought to Jantar Mantar, I will update this assessment. That would be evidence of genuine consistency. Until then, the pattern is clear: the movement that said it was about students chose its targets based on which party held power, not on where students were actually being failed.
These two data points, Karnataka and Punjab, are not peripheral details. They are the test of whether this protest was about principle or politics. The results of that test are in.
Santhosh Vishwamitra
Web Developer and Founder of Vishwamitra Chronicles, launched in February 2026.
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