Reform Without A Reckoning: Do Fast-Track Courts Answer The Pradhan Question?

When A Government Answers One Question And Avoids Another Sonam Wangchuk's

26-day fast has ended and the Centre has moved with unusual speed: fast-track courts, a tougher law, Prime Minister Modi's personal backing. On the surface, this looks like a government that listened. Look closer and it becomes clear the government has only answered half the question it was asked.

Two Demands, Deliberately Blurred

The protest at Jantar Mantar was never carrying a single ask. One demand was structural - fix the examination system so leaks like the NEET-UG breach stop recurring. The other was personal and political - hold someone accountable for the fact that this happened on Dharmendra Pradhan's watch, not once but twice, in 2024 and again in 2026.

The government's announcement addresses only the first. Treating the fast-track courts as a full response to the protest conveniently allows the second demand to quietly disappear from the conversation.

Why This Distinction Matters

A tougher law changes incentives going forward. It does nothing to establish whether the minister overseeing the system that failed twice bears any personal responsibility for that failure. These are not competing asks that trade off against each other - they operate on entirely different registers.

One is administrative repair. The other is political answerability. Conflating them lets a government claim credit for reform while sidestepping the accountability question entirely and that conflation is doing real work here: it is easier to point to new courts than to explain why the same minister survived the same failure twice.

The Investigative Gap Beneath It There is a

structural reason the accountability question keeps getting deferred. As this paper's own reporting has shown, paper-leak trials move at a crawl even after charges are framed - which means the criminal-law track cannot, by itself, produce a timely verdict on who was negligent and how.

In that vacuum, ministerial accountability has to be a political judgment, made through Parliament, not something that can be outsourced to a court docket that may take years to resolve.

What A Genuine Response Would Look Like

An honest reckoning would keep the two tracks visibly separate rather than letting one substitute for the other. The reform track - fast-track courts, the tougher 2024 Act, structural changes to how the National Testing Agency operates - deserves support on its own terms.

The accountability track needs its own forum: Parliament, where elected representatives, not press releases, decide whether Pradhan's tenure inspires the trust this moment demands.

The Test Ahead Wangchuk and the

CJP have done what civil society movements rarely manage - they forced a government response within days. Whether that response was genuine repair or a well-timed distraction depends entirely on what happens next: whether the accountability question gets asked in Parliament or whether it is allowed to fade once the fast-track courts headline stops trending.