Two weeks after resigning from the Union Cabinet, Dharmendra Pradhan has finally said something about it. Gen Z got misled, he says and he was the one who paid for it.
Speaking at a Padma awardees felicitation event in Sambalpur, the former Union Education Minister and BJP MP said he’d pushed Prime Minister Modi to take the protesters’ concerns seriously, rather than let the NEET paper leak controversy spiral into something purely political. He didn’t let his own reputation get in the way of that, he said.
Calling himself a “victim of Gen Z,” Pradhan was careful to frame it as anything but a personal grudge. “I have been a victim of Gen Z. For some time, the way this whole episode unfolded, I felt some people tried to mislead the children of the new generation,” he said, referencing the student protests at Jantar Mantar.
He described going to Modi directly about it. “I met the Prime Minister and requested him to agree to the desire of Gen Z. I told him to allow me to acknowledge this in front of the children. I never staked my personal honour in the matter. The Prime Minister accepted this, and later he himself spoke about it in front of the children,” Pradhan said.
From there he moved to India’s demographics. “Every year, around two crore children are born in India. If we look at those between the ages of 15 and 25, within a period of 10 years, there will be 20 crore children of the new generation on whose shoulders India will become a global leader,” he said.
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Not everyone’s buying the framing. Rohit Pujari, BJD’s Sambalpur district president and a former minister, pushed back hard on the “victim” language. “Nobody had defamed Pradhan. His party and government have defamed him by police resorting to lathi-charge, tear gas and atrocities during the peaceful student agitation at Jantar Mantar. Pradhan was facing criticism because of such incidents and ultimately he resigned,” Pujari said.
Pradhan’s actual resignation letter, dated July 25, tells a slightly different story on paper. Addressed to “my young friends,” it said he was stepping down to keep “anti-national forces” from exploiting the situation at Jantar Mantar and beyond. He wanted to ensure “not a single Indian student’s future gets entangled in legal complexities,” and said his exit would let students “devote their time to studies and focus on building their careers.”
Protests had been running since late June. Pradhan didn’t respond until July 21, the same day Rahul Gandhi staged a protest outside Modi’s residence. At the time, Pradhan accused Gandhi of “exploiting students,” insisting “we owe the students answers, reforms and accountability,” while staying silent on the resignation calls building around him. He kept posting education-related content on social media the entire time the protests were escalating.