Win polls, lose authority: The lesson of July isn’t that GoI lost a minister, but that authority has to be earned between elections

On Saturday, Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as Union education minister, felled not by the Opposition or a court of law, but by a movement that began as a joke. Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) - born in May as an online parody of the ruling party after NEET paper leaks, and after CJI Surya Kant had described unemployed youngsters entering fields like media, social media or activism as 'cockroaches' - swelled in two months into the largest display of public dissent India has seen in years: over a month-long occupation of Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, hunger strikes, marches, and tens of thousands of young Indians in the streets of cities across the country whose names the government would rather not list.

Narendra Modi does not do concessions easily. His instincts - float above the fray, promise grandly, deflect blame downward - have served him for a decade. This time, they failed sequentially. Blaming ground-level bureaucrats did not work. Promising fast-track courts did not work. Nor did the darker script: foreign hand, opposition puppetry, 'anti-national' tag.

This vocabulary, calibrated to sectoral lobbies and partisan rivals, falls flat against a leaderless, self-mocking movement of the youth whose demands are as unanswerable as they are simple: fairness, accountability and democracy. And the repression that usually accompanies, or ends, such episodes only fed this one: every lathi charge, every tear-gas canister, every detention produced more 'cockroaches'.


It might be tempting for BJP to file the minister's resignation as a political setback, absorb it and move on. That would be a misreading of what has happened. The episode has exposed something more corrosive: the widening gap between BJP's electoral dominance and political authority.

On paper, the party has rarely looked stronger. After the setback of 2024, it has stacked up state after state. The BJP electoral machine - money, organisation, messaging - remains unrivalled. But seats do not automatically equate to authority. Authority is what allows a government to be believed when it speaks, and obeyed without tear gas when it acts. Legitimacy is the presumption, extended by citizens, that the system's verdicts are fair. On both counts, the ground has been shifting under GoI's feet even as its tally of legislators has grown.

The examination scandal is precisely about this presumption. NEET is the narrow gate through which 2 mn families must push their children each year, having mortgaged land and futures to private coaching. When its question papers are sold, the state defaults on its most basic contract with aspirational India: work hard, and the best will win in an honest contest. The genius of the cockroach symbol is that the young grasped this instantly. They cast themselves as vermin in the eyes of a system that rigs the game, and as survivors who cannot be exterminated.

And the rot is not confined to examination halls. The same suspicion now attaches to elections themselves. Opposition charges of doctored voter rolls and a pliant Election Commission - dismissed by GoI but believed by a growing share of voters - have corroded the assumption that victories are cleanly won. BJP is largely responsible for this: a decade of capturing and instrumentalising referees, from investigative agencies to regulators, has taught many citizens, rightly or wrongly, to doubt every verdict, including electoral ones.

Herein lies the trap the party has created for itself. When the process is suspect, each win purchases less legitimacy. The NEET affair resonated so widely because it was the election in miniature: a contest every aspirant must enter, run by an arbiter with diminishing trust.

The generational arithmetic should worry BJP more than the electoral one. Young Indians were, until recently, among its most reliable voters. This movement revealed a chasm between them and a gerontocratic leadership utterly unprepared for defiance without deference. The protests were urban in their epicentres but echoed deep into small towns and villages, cutting across caste and class, through the very coalitions the party has spent years stitching.

The Opposition, meanwhile, participated from the sidelines. They were supportive without hijacking or sidelining the protesters, which is hard to achieve. But a pattern remains: under BJP rule, every successful protest movement has been won without opposition parties, who have repeatedly failed to harvest the discontent that fuels them. The opportunity is there, though: a campaign centred squarely on democratic restoration and fair process may finally pay dividends.

Nor should Pradhan's exit be mistaken for accountability. Neither the minister nor the prime minister has admitted responsibility for the rot in competitive exams. A resignation was offered as a pressure valve, not a reckoning. Besides, the education portfolio will now be overseen by another RSS swayamsevak.

The protesters know this. Which is why their demands extend beyond one ministry to fairness across public systems and to democratic restoration. The lesson of July is, therefore, not that the government lost a minister. It is that dominance can be manufactured at the ballot box, but authority has to be earned between elections, through institutions people trust and contests they can believe in. Squander that, and even a parody becomes a political force.

The cockroaches, as they cheerfully remind us, survive everything. Governments would be wiser not to test whether the same is true of themselves.