The Tents Are Gone, The Test Is On: New Edu Minister Pralhad Joshi Takes Charge as Cockroaches Go Home to Rest

For 36 days, Jantar Mantar ran on noise, slogans, speeches, generators, the occasional stone. On Sunday, it ran on nothing at all. NDMC workers moved through the site clearing the last of the tarpaulin and tent poles that had stood in for a parliament of sorts since June 20, and by evening the road wore barely a trace of the movement it had hosted for over a month. The Cockroach Janta Party had called off its agitation the previous evening, once the government agreed to what remained on its list: compensation for the families of students who died by suicide, and the withdrawal of FIRs against protesters. Abhijeet Dipke, still on an IV drip at home with typhoid, marked the moment less like a revolutionary and more like an exhausted parent: "Today, finally, I could go to sleep and wake up in the bedroom without thinking about what to do next." Sonam Wangchuk, recuperating in hospital after 26 days without food, called the last stretch "really, really difficult," which, for a man who lost 11 kilograms doing it, may be the understatement of the movement.

Into the vacancy Dharmendra Pradhan left behind stepped Pralhad Joshi, a six-time cabinet veteran who has now run Coal, Mines, Parliamentary Affairs, Consumer Affairs and New & Renewable Energy, and who accepted his new education portfolio with the kind of studied humility ministers reach for after a predecessor has just been forced out by a hashtag. He said he would carry out the responsibility " with complete humility," a phrase that will be tested the moment anyone asks him about NEET-UG 2027.

Joshi is not, by any measure, a stranger to friction. The 63-year-old, a five-time MP from Karnataka's Dharwad and a former state BJP president, first made his name organising the tricolour-hoisting movement at Hubballi's Idgah Maidan in the early 1990s, a campaign that produced its own share of law-and-order headaches for the administration of the day. Since 2019 he has cycled through Coal, Mines, Parliamentary Affairs and, most recently, Consumer Affairs and New & Renewable Energy, a portfolio spread that says more about his standing as a trusted RSS loyalist than any particular expertise in blackboards or entrance exams. Whether that makes him the right man to rebuild an examination system currently missing 47 of its officials is a separate question, one Joshi will presumably discover the answer to the hard way, on live television, sometime in the next few months.

Not everyone in government was in a conceding mood, though. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh pushed back on the framing of the last month altogether, accusing the opposition of using students " as a political tool," even as he insisted the government remained committed to addressing their concerns through Parliament — a reminder that Saturday's climbdown on Pradhan hasn't translated into the BJP's top leadership admitting the protest was right.

What's harder to hand over to a new minister is the movement itself, which by Sunday had long since outgrown the man who started it. Dipke's satirical response to a chief justice's insult has, in ten weeks, built an Instagram following of roughly 26.3 million — well ahead of the Congress's 14.8 million and the BJP's 9.5 million individually. Reels, memes and livestreams did the recruiting; volunteers who had never met Dipke or set foot at the protest site kept it running by ordering food and water online for strangers camped in Delhi's heat.

For now, though, what's left is largely paperwork and recovery. The tents are down, the FRS cameras presumably still running out of habit, and a fresh minister at Shastri Bhawan is left to inherit an agency that just fired 47 of its own people. Thirty-six days ago, nobody in government would have predicted that a joke about cockroaches would end a cabinet career; on Sunday, the joke went home to rest, and so, at last, did the square that hosted it.