Beyond the Headline: Why Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation wasn't really about CJP
The overwhelming narrative since Saturday has been that the Cockroach Janta Party brought the Union government to its knees. A loose coalition of Gen Z
The overwhelming narrative since Saturday has been that the Cockroach Janta Party brought the Union government to its knees. A loose coalition of Gen Z protesters took on one of the most politically formidable governments in independent India’s history and emerged victorious. Dharmendra Pradhan resigned. The government accepted virtually every major demand the protesters had made. The CJP called off its agitation. Case closed. Read Full Story Except, that might not necessarily be what happened. The government certainly conceded. There is little doubt about that. But did it concede because it was apprehensive of the CJP? In fact it can be argued that the BJP was looking beyond the protesters and worrying about who stood to gain from the political undercurrent they had created. The author had already argued in an earlier piece that the Centre might incur a higher political cost by retaining Pradhan than by letting him go. In that sense, Dharmendra Pradhan may not have been sacrificed because the government lost to the CJP. He may have been sacrificed because the BJP feared losing something far more consequential. To understand why, it is worth looking at where the movement stood just before the resignation. On the face of it, the CJP did not appear to be at the peak of its momentum by the end of the week. Its moral centre had always been Sonam Wangchuk. Like Anna Hazare in 2011, Wangchuk’s fast transformed what could have remained a student agitation into a broader moral movement.
He was not merely another protest leader; he was the Gandhian figure whose hunger strike appealed to the country’s conscience. But Wangchuk eventually broke his fast after receiving assurances from the government in the presence of two Union ministers. Those assurances were about accountability for the paper leak. They did not include the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, which remained one of the CJP’s central demands. Whether intentionally or otherwise, that created a divergence between Wangchuk’s position and that of sections of the movement which wanted to continue the agitation. It is impossible to know how that would have played out. But it is equally difficult to ignore that governments have often dealt with protest movements by engaging with their moral leadership while allowing internal differences to gradually widen. The CJP was never a conventional political party with an organisational structure capable of surviving indefinitely. It was a coalition brought together by anger over a common cause. Movements like these can grow remarkably quickly, but they can also lose momentum just as fast once their leadership begins pulling in different directions. Which is why the timing of Pradhan’s resignation comes across as politically curious. If the government genuinely believed it had begun creating space between Wangchuk and the rest of the movement, why suddenly make the biggest concession of them all? The answer, one suspects, lies not on the streets but inside Parliament. Throughout the week, Rahul Gandhi displayed a degree of political doggedness that is easy to miss in the daily churn of events.
The BriefWire