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On Saturday, Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as India's Education Minister after street protests, hunger strikes, violence and tear gas on Sansad Marg, and the physical removal of the Leader of the Opposition from a sit-in outside the Prime Minister's residence. The government called it even. The students called it a victory.  Representational Image: LoP Rahul Gandhi meeting Speaker Om Birla; Via: @INCIndia on X But o n Monday morning, Pradhan walked into Parliament and BJP and NDA MPs received him at the Makar Dwar, draped a shawl around his shoulders, placed a traditional cap on his head, and chanted "Dharmendra Pradhan zindabad." The man who had just resigned under the weight of a nationwide protest was being welcomed back, as Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi would put it the following day on the floor of Lok Sabha, "as if he had returned after fighting a war with Pakistan." That image of the garlands, the slogans and the ceremony is the government's actual m...

India on Sunday observed the 27th Kargil Vijay Diwas, paying tribute to the 527 soldiers who laid down their lives during the 1999 Kargil War, with the principal ceremony held at the Kargil War Memorial in Dras, Ladakh. Via: @rajnathsingh on X Defence Minister Rajnath Singh led the commemorations at Dras, laying a wreath at the memorial and flagging off the culmination of the Shaurya Vijay Yatra, a 1,900-kilometre motorcycle journey from New Delhi to Dras undertaken as part of this year's observance. Chief of Army Staff General Dhiraj Seth and senior military officers were also present at the memorial. President Droupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid tributes separately, with Modi saying the occasion "serves as a reminder of the unparalleled courage and valour of those brave soldiers who dedicated their lives to protecting the nation's pride." Rajnath Singh, addressing the gathering at Dras, warned Pakistan against future misadventures, saying that ...

The Indian government has named Pralhad Joshi as the country's new Education Minister after President Droupadi Murmu formally accepted Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation . By nightfall, the Cockroach Janta Party had called off its agitation at Jantar Mantar, most of the prevailing security had been withdrawn from the protest site, and the Delhi Metro stations that were shuttered for three consecutive days reopened to the public. Pralhad Joshi has taken charge as the union Education Minister. Via: @JoshiPralhad on X The government accepted all three of CJP's non-negotiable demands: Pradhan's resignation, the withdrawal of FIRs filed against protesters, and a commitment to compensation for students affected by the NEET-UG paper leak. A follow-up round of talks between the government and CJP is scheduled in the coming weeks. Joshi, a five-time Member of Parliament from Karnataka's Dharwad constituency and a senior BJP leader, will hold the Education portfolio as an addit...

India's Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan submitted his resignation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday. This marks the most significant political casualty of the student-led protest movement that has gripped the country for weeks. The resignation, which was the central demand of the Cockroach Janta Party since its founding, was submitted by letter.  File Photo Via: @dpradhanbjp Pradhan, who has served as Education Minister since July 2021, said in a statement posted on X: "The situation that has arisen at Jantar Mantar and in the country — anti-national forces should not take advantage of this situation. The unity of the country should be maintained. The future of even a single student of India should not get entangled in legal complications. Our children should spend their time in studies, focusing on building a career. Keeping this in mind, I have sent my resignation to the Honourable Prime Minister." (translation of the original Hindi letter) pic.t...

Delhi Police physically lifted and detained Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in Indian parliament's Lok Sabha , from a sit-in protest outside Prime Minister Narendra Modi 's official residence, as a crisis over irregularities in the country's national entrance examinations escalated into the most serious confrontation between the government and its opponents in years. Image Via: @RahulGandhi on X Rahul Gandhi, his sister and fellow Member of Parliament Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav were removed from the protest site at 7 Lok Kalyan Marg by Delhi Police and the Rapid Police Force after they refused to vacate. Officers were photographed and filmed carrying Rahul Gandhi bodily before placing him in a police vehicle. Reports confirmed by multiple outlets stated that the officers who detained the parliamentarians were not wearing nameboards on their uniforms. Gaand faad edit 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/NzLFhz7aTY — gulvinder (@rebelliousdo...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman Thousands of young Indians marched from Jantar Mantar toward Parliament in monsoon rain and were met with tear gas, lathi charges, internet shutdowns, and mass detentions. Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the Cockroach Janta Party, was detained. Sonam Wangchuk, on the twenty-second day of a hunger strike that had already cost him at least 8.5 kilograms, wrote a handwritten note from his hospital bed requesting temporary release to join the march. The request was not granted. Image Via: @Cockroachisback on X The Education Minister did not resign. The Monsoon Session opened on schedule. The government held.  And yet something has happened today in Delhi that cannot be managed away with a press briefing. How We Got Here What began on May 15 as a Supreme Court judge's offhand comparison of unemployed youth to "cockroaches" became, within six weeks, one of the most significant youth mobilisations in India since the...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman There is a moment on the Kedarnath trail when the body understands something that the mind has been resisting. The trail does not care how much you have read about this place. The altitude does not make exceptions for preparation. The shrine ahead is where it has always been, and you are where you are, and the distance between the two is exactly what it is, and the only way to close it is to keep walking. I have been thinking about that moment for the length of this series, which is to say for the length of the journey that the series is the record of. Sixteen shrines. Several thousand kilometres. Trains and buses and shared sumos and ferries and treks and one ropeway and one Pamban bridge railway crossing at sea level above the Palk Strait that I will not be forgetting for a long time. The Bharat Darshan series began as an act of journalism and became, somewhere between the Nallamala forest and the Gangotri glacier, som...

These are two different shrines in two different corners of the subcontinent and they belong in the same piece because they are asking the same question from opposite positions. At Dwarka, Krishna left. He built his capital on the Saurashtra coast, ruled for a hundred years, watched the sea take it back street by street after his departure, and is no longer here. The Dwarkadhish temple marks the place where he was. The Archaeological Survey of India has been diving in the waters off the coast since the 1980s and has found structures at five to twelve metres depth — stone walls, pillars, pottery, the remnants of something that was once above the waterline. What exactly those structures are and how old and what they prove remains contested between the archaeologist and the tradition in the specific way that questions about mythological sites are always contested, which is to say without resolution and without end. The sea, meanwhile, continues to reclaim the coast. At Puri, Jagannath do...

The twelfth Jyotirlinga is in a village called Verul in the Marathwada region of Maharashtra, one kilometre from the Ellora Caves. This proximity is not incidental. Both — the shrine and the cave temples — are expressions of the same theological imagination working in different materials at the same location in approximately the same century. The Kailasa Temple at Ellora, Cave 16, is a representation of Shiva's mountain carved top-down from a single basalt hill over an estimated hundred years. The Grishneshwar Jyotirlinga is one kilometre away. The same god, the same landscape, the same century — the ambition of one expressed in stone and the presence of the other in a small red temple in a village. The Kailasa Temple is the largest monolithic rock-cut structure on earth. This is not hyperbole. The builders removed the rock that was not the temple. The temple that remains is Kailash — Shiva's mountain — rendered at scale in basalt by human hands over a century of sustained lab...