Granite and Grade Sheets: Pradhan Ji Out, Prahlad Cha In

Who Gets to Name a Place: Boniyar, the Ministry, and a Diwas of Contested Memory

There's a granite temple in Boniyar that nobody can agree on the name of. Alexander Cunningham, reading it the way a 19th-century colonial surveyor reads most things in the subcontinent, traced it to "Bhawani" and filed it under goddess-cult architecture. The people who actually live around it have mostly never used that name — they call it a Pandava site, something out of the Mahabharata, older than any colonial epigraphist's guess and answerable to nobody's inventory. The temple itself is a rarity even by Kashmir's standards — granite in a valley of limestone, a quadrangular cloistered plan, a lotus-carved dome, Greco-Buddhist echoes that likely predate the Karkota period it's usually dated to. It sat for over a thousand years on the old corridor connecting the Valley to Gandhara and Taxila, a waypoint for traders and pilgrims long before it became a name in anyone's security bulletin.

Two names for one structure, and the gap between them is the whole argument decolonisation is trying to make: that naming a place is never a neutral act of description. It's a claim to authorship over what that place means.

Which is what makes today land the way it does. Hours before this year's Kargil Vijay Diwas ceremony at Drass, a single-source report surfaced of drone activity near Boniyar itself — still unconfirmed by wire services as of writing, but not implausible either, since this stretch of the Baramulla-Uri corridor was already one of the sectors targeted during the May 2025 drone escalation. And the anniversary it landed on has its own settled narrative, restaged every year in the same key: tribute at Drass, a warning to Pakistan, this year Rajnath Singh promising a response "beyond imagination" and closing on Vikram Batra's Yeh Dil Maange More. A thousand-year-old temple, a border narrative it never asked to be the subject of, and a war remembered in exactly one register — all sitting in the same twenty-four hours.

Modi has spent years talking about decolonisation — freeing Indian institutions and mindsets from what he calls colonial hangover, renaming laws, renaming roads, insisting on an India that writes its own narrative rather than inheriting someone else's. It's a real argument, and not one I'd dismiss outright. But this same week, the government's own citizens have been out at Jantar Mantar telling it, in effect, that it hasn't earned the right to lecture anyone about authorship — because it's been busy failing at the one place where the state actually writes the first draft of a person's political consciousness: the Ministry of Education.

I keep thinking about that gap because it isn't unique to a temple. It's the same mechanism that shapes a person.

I love watching Panchayat, and Phulera works as a setting because it's a microcosm — a place small enough to hold an entire worldview inside it. Students at fourteen, fifteen, are living in something similar: a Phulera of the mind, aware mostly of what's immediately required of them, rarely able to see past the edges of their own syllabus. But unlike Phulera, the Education Ministry doesn't stay contained to that scale. It's the first real point of contact a young person has with the state, earlier and more direct than any election, any tax form, any web series.

Mine happened in 2013. The real break point isn't 2009, though — it's 2004. Murli Manohar Joshi is generally regarded as the last Education Minister who left the ministry in working order; everything after UPA took over in 2004 has, by most honest accounts, been managing a decline rather than reversing it. The CCE pattern — CBSE's Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation — arrived inside that decline, introduced in 2009 and sold as a holistic break from rote exams. Kapil Sibal, then at the head of the ministry, had effectively imported the model from the West, and BJP as the opposition of the day made it a target almost immediately. By 2013 — when I was living through it as a minor, unable to vote, with no say in any of this — it was, by most accounts, at the epitome of its own misuse. That was my first entry point into Indian politics: not an ideology I chose, but a grading system imposed on me that I watched fail in real time. The certificates for a 10/10 CGPA that year were signed by Manju Devi, then Education Minister — a name I still remember precisely because it was attached to a document that felt, at fourteen, like it was telling me something true about myself, inside a system I was already learning not to trust. From there the line runs fairly straight: reading Sagarika Ghose's columns at eighteen, the slow drift toward left-leaning politics — one column leading to the next conviction, the left's own domino effect. By 2017 the CCE pattern was formally phased out, but I was already done metabolising what it had taught me about how casually a state can experiment on children who can't yet vote against it.

The ministry kept moving too. Manju Devi's love-hate relationship with Amethi eventually cleared the way for Pradhan Ji to take over — and Pradhan Ji's own tenure has just ended in the same kind of collapse mine with CCE did back in 2013, more than two decades after UPA first set the ministry on this course. BJP has held this ministry for most of the last decade and never actually cleaned out what UPA left behind; it inherited a wrecked apparatus and, by and large, kept running it as-is. This year's CBSE board exams were run through a newly mandated On-Screen Marking system, pushed out by circular in February with almost no runway for teachers to train on it. When Class 12 results landed in May, students found blurred scans, missing pages, answer books swapped with strangers'. Running alongside it, the NEET-UG paper leak: 2.27 million students sat the exam on May 3, and by May 12 it was cancelled outright after leaked papers were found to match the real ones. Teachers weren't spared either — KVS, NVS, and EMRS Tier 2 results have sat unreleased for over 120 days now, an entire cohort of future teachers watching the same institutional silence from the other side of the desk.

Two months of protests followed — Jantar Mantar, hunger strikes, a Sansad Chalo march that ran into police lines — until Pradhan Ji resigned on July 25, the day before this Kargil Diwas, and Prahlad Cha was handed the ministry the same afternoon. Whether the protest itself was a nuisance is a fair question to sit with honestly, and I think the government made it worse than it needed to be. The usual toolkit got deployed — ignore, then crack down, then discredit, only then negotiate — and it backfired at every stage, escalating a movement that started small into something the government spent far longer fighting than it would have taken to simply sit down and listen. BJP's own supporters clearly still exist in large numbers, but there's a mental fatigue setting in among a chunk of them too, a quiet exhaustion with defending an institution that keeps failing the same people every year.

There's an old line — if you're not a liberal before twenty-five you don't have a heart, and if you're not a conservative after thirty you don't have a head. I don't know that I fully believe it, but it's useful here, because whichever side of that line you sit on, it doesn't actually settle whether this protest mattered. And I think it did, for a specific reason: CAA and the farmers' protests both had an air of manufactured urgency around them that made them easy to dismiss as someone else's fight, contained to a religion or a few states. The Education Ministry doesn't have that luxury. It touches almost everyone — rich, poor, urban, rural, every state, every caste — which is exactly why this one was harder to wave away as astroturf, and why the accountability it produced actually meant something.

So: Pradhan out, Prahlad Cha in, and now Nandan Nilekani heading a fresh task force on exam reform, alongside genuinely serious names — a former ISRO chief, a former IB director, an IIT Chennai director, a former education secretary. On paper, that's a real answer. But it's worth sitting with who's leading it. This is the same man who's spent the last two years telling India not to bother building its own frontier AI models — arguing at a Meta summit that India should let "the big boys in the Valley" spend the billions on foundation models while India builds small applications on top of them. Big boys build, and India adapts. Why not Indians? That instinct — that the frontier belongs to someone else by default, that India's role is application, not authorship — is its own quiet form of internalised colonialism, dressed up as pragmatism. I wish him well. I hope this task force doesn't disappoint a system that's already disappointed a generation twice over. But it's hard not to notice the irony of asking a man whose signature belief is "let the West build it first" to lead the reform of a system this government insists it wants to decolonise.

Because decolonisation was never going to arrive through a task force, or a ministerial reshuffle, or a policy circular. It isn't a thing leadership announces into being. If the Education Ministry is actually serious about it, decolonising doesn't mean adding more Ramayana to the syllabus and calling it done — it means teaching the humanities with their actual nuance intact, presenting students with the right-wing reading, the left-wing reading, and the centrist reading of the same event, and trusting a fourteen-year-old to hold all three at once rather than handing them one and calling it history.

That's the throughline, if there is one: Boniyar has never gotten to narrate itself. Cunningham named its temple. The state now names its skirmishes. A ministry once, quietly, helped name my politics before I could, and it's still doing that to someone else's fourteen-year-old right now. Decolonisation, in the end, isn't really about statues or street signs or task forces — it's about noticing how rarely the place, or the child, or the temple gets to hold the pen, and starting, finally, to hand it over.