By Akhlaq Siddiqi
Every time a paper leak scandal erupts in India, the political debate collapses into a familiar and ultimately futile demand: the Education Minister must resign. Opposition parties march. Students protest. Effigies burn. Rahul Gandhi declares he will not stop until Dharmendra Pradhan resigns and a foolproof system is established. Protesters gather at Jantar Mantar. Activists issue ultimatums with deadlines. The minister survives. The cycle repeats.
The resignation demand, however legitimate as political theatre, misidentifies the problem. Dharmendra Pradhan is not the disease. He is a symptom. Demanding his resignation treats an institutional crisis as a ministerial failure, and in doing so, lets the actual architects of India's education collapse walk free.
Two Kinds od Corruption
To understand what has gone wrong, one must first distinguish between two fundamentally different categories of political misconduct.
The UPA era produced corruption of the first kind: individual corruption for individual gain. Ministers and their associates extracted money. When exposed, they faced individual consequences. External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh stepped down after the Volcker Committee linked him to the oil-for-food scandal. Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal resigned when his family was caught in a bribery network. The wrongdoing was personal. The accountability, however imperfect, was personal.
What India is witnessing today under the NDA is corruption of a different and more dangerous kind: institutional capture for ideological control. No minister's family is pocketing NEET fees. No individual is enriching himself through textbook contracts in any traceable way. The beneficiary is not a person. The beneficiary is a movement, and the vehicle is the RSS.
The Architecture of Capture
The evidence is not hidden. It is documented and systematic.
Of the 25 focus groups that the state-run NCERT formed to develop the National Curriculum Framework — the basis for all new government school textbooks, five had officials from Vidya Bharati, the RSS's educational wing, as members. The former president of Vidya Bharati's publishing arm served on the BJP government's National Curriculum Framework steering committee. This is not coincidence. This is architecture.
Year after year, whole sections, topics, and names have been altered or removed from NCERT textbooks. The changes consistently align with the ideological line of the RSS. NCERT has carried out deletions and revisions undermining both academic integrity and constitutional principles. The Babri Masjid was renamed a "three-dome structure" in a Class 12 textbook. Tipu Sultan was dropped from Class 8 Social Science. The word "secularism", explicit in India's constitutional preamble, was subjected to critique in a Class 12 political science text.
Congress leader Jairam Ramesh has directly stated that NCERT has been functioning as an RSS affiliate since 2014 and is mounting an assault on the constitution. This is no longer a fringe allegation. It is a documented pattern across twelve years of governance.
University appointments have followed the same logic. Opposition parties have charged that Vice Chancellors across Indian universities have been appointed by RSS preference, while CBSE has been compromised, UGC hollowed out, and the scientific temper of institutions systematically diminished.
NEET Scandal is a Consequence
Against this backdrop, the NEET paper leak is not an isolated administrative failure. It is the logical consequence of hollowed-out institutions.
In the last ten years, there have been 89 incidents of paper leaks in India, with re-examinations conducted 48 times. The crisis spans every major examination: NEET-UG 2026 saw an alleged leak and cancellation affecting approximately 22 to 23 lakh students. CUET-UG 2026 suffered a technical glitch causing nationwide delay. JEE Main 2025 was marred by answer-key errors. BPSC, DSSSB and UPSC-linked exams in 2026 also faced cancellations and administrative failures.
This is not bad luck. Eighty-nine paper leaks do not happen by accident. They happen when the institutions responsible for examination integrity have been staffed not by merit but by loyalty — loyalty to an ideological network that has made administrative control a strategic priority.
The RSS's long-term project has never been merely electoral. It has always been civilisational, the capture of schools, universities, examination bodies, and the civil services, so that the next generation of Indians is shaped, tested, and certified by institutions that reflect a particular ideological vision. NEET is collateral damage from that project.
Why Pradhan Will Not Resign, and Why That's Not the Point
The BJP's position is that ministers should not resign under opposition pressure, that allegations require legal proof, not political scalp-hunting. This argument has internal logic. Democracy is not trial by media.
But the BJP's defence misses the larger charge. Nobody is accusing Dharmendra Pradhan of personally leaking exam papers for personal gain. The accusation is structural: that under his watch, and under the governance philosophy he represents, the institutions of Indian education have been systematically subordinated to an ideological agenda, and that this subordination has created the conditions in which paper leaks, administrative collapse, and institutional failure have become routine.
In this model, accountability cannot be resolved by one resignation. Because the problem is not one minister. The problem is the system the minister serves.
Democratic Stakes
India's founders understood that democracy requires not just elections but institutions — independent, merit-based, constitutionally anchored institutions that serve citizens regardless of their religion, caste, or political affiliation. NCERT was built to serve all Indian children. The NTA was built to give every aspirant a fair shot. When these institutions are captured, the children who suffer most are those with no alternative: no private coaching, no connected relatives, no ability to buy their way around a compromised system.
The UPA era's corruption was real and damaging. But it was corruption against the state. What is happening to Indian education today is corruption of the state, the deliberate subordination of public institutions to private ideological ends.
That is a different crime. It requires a different reckoning.
Demanding Pradhan's resignation is politically necessary but intellectually insufficient. The real demand must be structural: independent reconstitution of the NTA and NCERT, restored academic autonomy for universities, transparent and merit-based appointment processes for vice chancellors and examination body heads, and a reversal of curriculum changes made without academic consensus.
India does not need a new Education Minister. India needs to reclaim its educational institutions from those who have treated them as instruments of ideological conquest.
Until that happens, the paper leaks will continue. The names of the ministers will change. The system will not.
(Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication.)
