India’s ‘cockroach’ movement ousts education minister : NPR

NEW DELHI — India’s education minister tendered his resignation on Saturday, meeting a key demand of students whose anti-government protests swelled this week beyond the capital New Delhi and onto the streets of more than a dozen cities.

Following news of the resignation of the education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, a spokesman for protest leaders Saurav Das, called on demonstrators — mostly students — to go home. He said the protests, which began in early June, would end “in good faith.” 

The students held Pradhan responsible for a series of leaks in nationwide exams for university seats or government jobs, which millions of students take every year.

The protests posed the most serious challenge to the 12-year rule of India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi. For weeks, the government had ignored the protesters, then vilified them, with the education minister calling protest leaders “the B team of terrorists,” according to the Indian daily The Hindu. Presenters of Modi-loyal media outlets suggested the protest leaders were paid by India’s enemy and neighbor, Pakistan.

“The government realized that the familiar playbook that it’s often deployed to deal with these kinds of agitations was not working,” said Milan Vaishnav, senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and host of a popular podcast, Grand Tamasha. 

He added: “They were not easily able to undermine the credibility of the protesters. The pressure was mounting … I think this was their way of trying to cut their losses.”

In a two-page letter posted on X, Pradhan said he was resigning because he didn’t want the students’ anger to be exploited by “anti-national forces.” He did not clarify what he meant by “anti-national forces,” but it appeared to be a dig at insinuations that the protesters were led, or infiltrated by enemies of India. Pradhan did not apologize for the paper leaks.

Near the main protest site in New Delhi, streets echoed with cheering students, whose celebrations went on well into the evening. Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old whose satirical group ‘Cockroach Janta Party’ has been leading the protests, fell to his knees on hearing the news. Then he raised his fist and announced: “We have done it.”

Even as leaders told protesters to go home, Dipke said in a statement that the students had other demands: compensation for the families of students who died by suicide after questions of a medical entrance exam paper leaked in May, forcing some 2 million students to retake the test – one of the incidents that initially sparked these protests.

The local newspaper The Indian Express reported at least a dozen students died by suicide following the announcement, with some leaving notes behind saying they could not bear the idea of resitting the exam.