First things first. Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on Saturday, announcing it himself on X. “I am pained to see the events of the past 10 days,” he wrote. No union education minister has ever resigned over paper leaks before. That this one did – a minister central to the BJP’s political organisation in Odisha, a man with the organisational leverage to dig in had he chosen to – makes it, as CNN put it, a rare defeat for a government that does not, as a rule, bend to street protest. Perhaps he chose to fight and lost. Perhaps he chose not to fight at all. In the end, it did not matter. The resignation went up anyway.
And already, the fictionalising has begun. The simplistic version writes itself: Abhijeet Dipke came, sat, and did what the opposition could not do in twelve years. He shook the government. It is a satisfying story. It is also, I would argue, mostly wrong. We have a national tendency to revise history in real time, to compress messy sequences into clean hero narratives. But as Mark Twain observed, truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction is obliged to make sense. So let us resist the fiction and look at the sequence – date by date, mistake by mistake.
