Just as the movement over the NEET paper leak in India and the demand for the education minister’s resignation have come to the centre of discussion, an incident of exactly this kind made Dharmendra Pradhan known as a student leader almost three decades ago. It was mainly through protest against an exam paper leak in Odisha in 1997 that he gained wide recognition in the political arena.
At that time Dharmendra Pradhan, an ABVP student leader, took to the streets against the government of Odisha’s Congress chief minister Janaki Ballabh Patnaik. Entering politics at just 18, the young Pradhan studied anthropology at Utkal and served twice as the ABVP’s national secretary between 1994 and 1997.
At that time, over allegations of a paper leak, he held a peaceful demonstration with about 1,500 students in front of the secretariat in Bhubaneswar. But he was seriously injured in a police baton charge, and several bones in his body were broken. It was this fighting spirit — forged through the fierce contest of campus politics and police repression — that later built him a strong position in the BJP’s mainstream politics.
Advancing step by step from that thorny path of student politics, Dharmendra Pradhan took charge as the country’s education minister in 2021. His long organisational role was also extremely important in strengthening the BJP’s base in Odisha, which led to the BJP coming to power there for the first time in 2024, ending the Biju Janata Dal’s long rule.
And today, in the present context, an identical NEET paper-leak affair and the police crackdown on students in Delhi that followed it have brought that old history of 1997 back to the fore. The paper leak against which the young Dharmendra Pradhan once fought in the streets is the very kind of crisis he has now faced as education minister — and it is he who has been put in the dock by the opposition’s movement.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report