Accountability Cannot Be a Precondition to Debate
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By Our Editorial Team
First publised on 2026-07-24 08:06:46
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The India Commentary view
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Parliament exists for exactly this kind of crisis. A national examination has been compromised, a minister is under sustained public pressure, and millions of families want to know what the state intends to do about it. That is precisely the situation Parliament was built to resolve, and precisely the situation it has spent four consecutive days failing to address.
The broad outlines of the impasse are clear. Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju has told both Houses that the government is willing to debate the NEET paper leak without preconditions, and has asked the Opposition to decide the format and duration of that debate itself. The Opposition has rejected this. Its position, repeated through four days of disruptions, is that Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan must resign before any debate takes place. The result has been adjournment after adjournment, with the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha unable to conduct the discussion either side claims to want.
This deserves scrutiny on its own terms, separate from whatever the government got wrong in its handling of the protests at Jantar Mantar. That the executive mishandled a student movement, hospitalised its central figure, and only announced fast-track courts once the story had become unmanageable is a matter of record. But once Parliament convened for the Monsoon Session, the venue for holding the government accountable changed. Jantar Mantar is where citizens make a government listen when it will not otherwise. Parliament is where the government's answers are supposed to be tested, on the record, by the people elected to test them. When that forum sits idle, accountability has not been achieved. It has been postponed.
A resignation, if it comes, does not itself explain what went wrong with the National Testing Agency, whether paper transmission was secured, why On-Screen Marking irregularities occurred, or what will stop the next leak. Only a parliamentary debate can compel the government to answer those questions publicly and on the record, rather than through statements timed to manage a political crisis. By making Pradhan's resignation a precondition for debate, the Opposition has left the one forum capable of extracting those answers unable to function. Whether Rijiju's offer was made in good faith or as a tactical response to mounting pressure is open to political debate. The constitutional point, however, remains unchanged: Parliament cannot scrutinise a government if it does not debate the issue at all.
There is a defensible version of the Opposition's position, and it should be stated plainly. Congress and its allies can reasonably argue that a minister facing this scale of allegation should not be the one presenting the government's defence, and that an unresigned Pradhan leading the government's response lets the executive control the very narrative it is supposed to be answering for. That argument has some force. It does not, however, explain why a precondition should be allowed to substitute for scrutiny rather than accompany it. Nothing prevented the Opposition from using the floor of the House to demand the resignation while also forcing the government to answer, on record, for the NTA's failures. Both were available. Only one was chosen.
The cost of that choice falls on the people the protest was supposedly for. Students who marched to Jantar Mantar, who watched their own hunger-striking icon hospitalised by the state, are now watching the constitutional venue meant to vindicate their grievance produce nothing but adjournment notices. A minister's resignation is a political event. It changes who holds an office. It does not audit an examination system, encrypt a question paper, or shorten the time a leak investigation takes. Only a Parliament that actually debates the issue can begin that work, and a Parliament that cannot agree to convene cannot begin anything.
Democracy is weakened less by the existence of disagreement than by disagreement that forecloses the mechanisms built to resolve it. When the government refuses to look, as it did through May and June, that is a failure of the executive. When Parliament refuses to sit because one side has made resignation a condition of debate, that is a failure of politics itself, one in which both government and Opposition find it more useful to hold a position than to test it. Students pay the price for both failures. They are simply left watching the country's elected representatives argue about the sequence of accountability, while the examination system that failed them waits, still unrepaired, for a debate neither side has yet allowed to happen.
