Pellet Gun Victims Move SC; CJP to Renew Protest if Cases Not Withdrawn; New Exam Review Panel's Expertise is Aadhar, Policing, Outer Space and Cow Urine, Not Education
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Snapshot of the day
July 27, 2026
Siddharth Varadarajan
Accusing the Modi government of backtracking on the commitment two senior ministers gave on Saturday when the Cockroach Janata Party called off their four-week long protest, CJP’s spokespersons today threatened to resume their agitation if all criminal cases filed against protestors in Delhi and elsewhere are not withdrawn by Tuesday as promised.
The issue is critical because the Bihar and West Bengal governments continued to target students with arrests and cases over the weekend.
On Monday, Neha Bora, head of the All India Students Association – who had joined Sonam Wangchuk’s hunger fast and stayed the course for 20 days along with two other AISA activists – travelled to Patna and managed to secure a statement from the Bihar government withdrawing all cases against protestors in the state. But West Bengal has yet to deliver on Nadda’s assurance – a significant omission given disturbing evidence of the BJP chief minister trying to use the protests to drive a wedge between Hindus and Muslims.
Two victims of the pellet guns used by the Rapid Action Force on protestors in Delhi on July 20 have approached the Supreme Court seeking a ban on the use of the weapon as a crowd control measure against civilians.
On Saturday, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan became Narendra Modi’s first cabinet minister to resign under public pressure – following paper leaks and other irregularities on his watch – but chose to portray this not as a recognition of the accountability principle but as a paternalistic concession offered to ignorant youngsters. In his resignation letter, Pradhan could not bring himself to explicitly address the weeks-long agitation that sought his head. Instead, he said he had resigned to prevent India’s youth from getting “trapped in confusion and deception”:
“Considering the situation at Jantar Mantar and elsewhere in the country, and so that anti-national forces do not take advantage of the circumstances, national unity is maintained, no student’s future gets entangled in legal complications, and our children can focus on their studies and building their careers, I have submitted my resignation to the Honourable Prime Minister.”
In other words, Pradhan did not quit his job to accept responsibility for the NEET-UG’s two-time leak, the compromising of other exams and the CBSE’s chaotic rollout of its on-screen marking system under his watch. If the youth protests really were simply a ‘misunderstanding’ on the part of the youth, why did Pradhan himself not address them before they became a tinderbox for these ever-nebulous anti-national forces to exploit? Instead he had actually called the protesters the ‘B-team of terrorists’.
That is a question whose answer we will hear neither from Pradhan nor his erstwhile colleagues. This latter group has in fact come out and enthusiastically batted for Pradhan, and BJP and NDA MPs today greeted him with shawls, a turban and chants of ‘Dharmendra Pradhan zindabad’, as if to suggest that his resignation is a matter of pride and not an occasion for solemn introspection.
One prominent colleague, though, has not mentioned Pradhan’s resignation at all: Prime Minister Modi. He has instead released a third self-recorded video announcing the formation of a high-powered task force on “revamping examinations by the NTA”. This will be led by former UIDAI founding chairman and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, best known for his championing of Aadhar, and its members are former Intelligence Bureau chief Tapan Deka (education experience nil), former ISRO chairman S. Somanath (education experience nil), IIT Madras director V. Kamakoti (fun fact: he is an advocate for consuming cow urine for medicinal purposes, a cause scientists say is actually harmful), Gujarat cadre IAS officer Anita Karwal (who was education secretary and CBSE chairwoman), and former coal secretary Amrit Lal Meena (education experience nil). Meanwhile, what will happen to the recommendations of the K. Radhakrishnan-led panel that was formed after the 2024 NEET-UG episode?
Parliament may finally debate the examination leak issue on Tuesday, with the government having readied a new law mandating a stiffer – 10 year – maximum penalty for those found guilty of “paper leak and unfair means in exams”.
A day after Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi accused the PM Modi-led government of being “murderous” towards students, pointing to reports of bullets being fired, hundreds of arrests and FIRs against protesters, the Bihar
