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The Minister Who Learns 'On the Job': Prahlad Joshi, RSS, Bilkis Bano, and the Great Indian Education Farce

Prahlad Joshi, India's new Education Minister, entered Shastri Bhawan and, in the way of our times, released photographs of his first meeting with officials. “This is a new subject for me,” he was quoted as saying. “I am familiarizing myself with it.”

Fair enough. A minister need not be a subject expert. But when the person who will shape the minds of an entire generation admits the entire portfolio is alien territory, the country has reason to pause. And when that same person, just a few years ago, defended the release of eleven convicts in a gang rape and mass murder case, saying “it happened as per the legal process,” the pause must become a long, uncomfortable silence. A silence that is, of course, filled immediately by the noise of Godi media hagiography and the casual violence of political convenience.

The Bilkis Bano Shadow: “I Have No Objection”

Let us rewind to August 15, 2022. Eleven men, convicted for the gang rape of Bilkis Bano and the cold-blooded murder of fourteen members of her family during the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, walked free from prison. They had served fourteen years of their life sentence. The Gujarat government—then under the BJP—granted remission. On that day, BJP leaders greeted the convicts with flower garlands and distributed sweets. Photographs of a senior BJP MLA sharing a dais with one of the released men later surfaced. It was a celebration of impunity.

At that time, Prahlad Joshi was a minister in the Modi government. When asked about the early release, he told NDTV’s Srinivasan Jain in a 2022 interview: “It happened as per the legal process. Therefore, I have no objection to their release.” He repeated the same line to The Indian Express, adding that the convicts’ behaviour in jail was “found good.”

In January 2024, the Supreme Court of India cancelled the remission. Justice B.V. Nagarathna and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan’s bench ruled that the Gujarat government had no legal authority to decide on early release because the trial and conviction took place in Maharashtra. The remission order was “non est in law.” Yet, Prahlad Joshi, the man now entrusted with the nation’s education, had already given his moral seal of approval. When Priyanka Gandhi raised this exact point in the Lok Sabha, she was expunged and asked to leave. Rahul Gandhi’s statement outside the House met no constructive rebuttal. Instead, the spotlight shifted to Joshi’s “stellar organizational skills.”

The RSS Hand: Education as Ideological Weapon

Prahlad Joshi is the fifth Education Minister of the Modi government. Before him came Smriti Irani, Prakash Javadekar, Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’, and Dharmendra Pradhan. Each brought their own flavour of emptiness, but the ministry’s real controller never changed. As Rahul Gandhi put it bluntly, “Dharmendra Pradhan never ran the Education Ministry. The man and the organization that runs it is called the RSS. An OSD sitting in the minister’s office actually runs it.”

One need not take a politician’s word. Look at the vice-chancellors of central and state universities across India. Year by year, they have been replaced with individuals affiliated with the RSS. The National Education Policy 2020 was drafted under the long shadow of the Sangh. Students who ask uncomfortable questions are branded anti-national. Those who follow their passion are told to worship a fantastical history. Universities, once spaces of argument, have become factories of ‘andh bhakts.’ Prahlad Joshi’s appointment is not a new chapter; it is a continuation of a deeply ideological project.

The Hagiography Factory: Crisis Manager? Low Profile?

Every time a BJP leader takes a new portfolio, a familiar genre of journalism springs to life. The minister is described as a “crisis manager,” a “soft-spoken man with a low profile,” a “confidant” and “blue-eyed boy” of the party. Dharmendra Pradhan got these adjectives. Prahlad Joshi is getting them now. Profiles gush about his ability to suppress his ambition to become Karnataka CM, his “organisational hold,” his “election mastermind” image.

But what did Prahlad Joshi deliver for Dharwad, the constituency he has represented five times since 2004? The Dharwad-Belagavi railway line, a stretch of 73 km, was approved in 2019. By September 2025, as a Deccan Herald report by Srinidhi R noted, 533 hectares of land had still not been acquired, and the project was stuck. Joshi blamed the state Congress government. Yet the BJP was in power in Karnataka until July 2021. Why did land acquisition not happen then? There is no answer.

Instead, you will read that in 2023, after the BJP lost the Karnataka assembly election, several leaders accused Joshi of faulty ticket distribution. Former MLA Chikkangoudar, former CM Jagadish Shettar, and others publicly held him responsible. The media report that Joshi’s brother and nephew later filed an FIR in a ticket-selling scam—a man named Shekhar Nayak allegedly paid Rs 5 crore by cheque and Rs 25 lakh in cash to Joshi’s brother. Joshi’s response: he had not spoken to that brother for 30 years. The Karnataka High Court later quashed the case against the brother. Meanwhile, the journalist Gauri Lankesh, who wrote two critical articles about Joshi, was sued for defamation by Joshi’s personal assistant. She was convicted and fined. This is the man the media calls “soft-spoken.”

The Making of a Career: Hubli Idgah and Communal Politics

Joshi’s political rise is inseparable from the 1994 Hubli Idgah flag-hoisting incident—an event known as “Karnataka’s mini-Ayodhya.” Uma Bharati and RSS workers broke curfew to unfurl a Tiranga on the Idgah ground. Police firing killed six people, and riots engulfed Hubli. The BJP, which had won only 4 out of 224 assembly seats in 1989, captured 44 seats in the very next election. Joshi’s active role in that movement cemented his place in the BJP’s communal laboratory.

According to the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) portal MyNeta, four criminal cases were registered against Joshi between 1995 and 1998. Yet in his 2024 election affidavit, he declared no pending cases. In 2018, a fresh FIR was filed after Joshi compared the Sadar Sofa area of Hubli to Pakistan, claiming mosques there stored weapons. The charges: promoting enmity between religious groups and wounding religious feelings. The case seems to have vanished without any public resolution.

Energy Minister with a Broken Grid: A Triumph of PR

Before education, Prahlad Joshi held the Renewable Energy portfolio. In 2025, TIME magazine listed him among the world’s 100 most influential climate leaders. It praised his “green energy push” and claimed India had met its 2030 targets a year ahead. This is the official narrative. Now, look at the ground.

In the same month that this global recognition arrived, The Indian Express’s Pratush Deep reported that India’s grid lacked the capacity to store solar power. Between April and June 2025, a staggering 8,133 Gigawatt-hour (GWh) of solar energy could not be absorbed and was simply wasted. That is enough electricity to power lakhs of homes. A Dhwair report by Vaishali Basu Sharma added that in 2025, 2.3 Terawatt-hour (TWh) of power was squandered because the grid couldn’t absorb it. Renewable energy is being generated—yes—but there is no basic infrastructure to deliver it. Who gains from this chaos? Private players who sell storage solutions? The same ones who donate to political parties? The question hangs in the air like the wasted electrons.

Educated in a Ruin: The Minister’s College and Your Children’s Future

Prahlad Joshi’s educational qualification is a Bachelor of Arts from Shri Kadasiddheshwar Arts College, Hubli, under Dharwad University. If you visit the college today, you will find buildings. What you will not find is the soul of a place of learning: no academic reputation, no research output, no vibrant intellectual life. It is a shell—a representative specimen of the hollowing out of India’s higher education. It is the same hollowness that produces millions of unemployable graduates every year, even as the government celebrates education budget cuts.

Meanwhile, the education budget itself tells a brutal story. While India’s overall budget has been growing by roughly 10% annually since 2009-10, education expenditure in 2025-26 slipped to just 2.5% of GDP. Compare this to 2014-15, when it hovered around 4%, and you see a steady, unremitting decline. The numbers below are approximations drawn from Union Budget documents and various parliamentary standing committee reports:

Financial Year	Education Budget as % of GDP (approx.)
2014-15	~4.1%
2019-20	~3.1%
2025-26	~2.5%

During the same period, Prahlad Joshi’s personal assets grew from Rs 11 crore to Rs 21 crore (an 89% jump in five years), as per his own election affidavits. He is not an exception; he is an embodiment of the system.

During the Russia-Ukraine war in February-March 2022, when thousands of Indian students were stranded in Ukraine, then-Minister Joshi made a remark so insensitive that students and the opposition alike condemned it. It was dismissed as a “misstatement,” but it reflected a habit of mind: detachment from the lives of the young this government claims to serve.

Criticisms

These are points of criticism, delivered without softening because the nation's children deserve better—and because silence, at this hour, is complicity.

• The Education Ministry is handed to a person who publicly defended the release of convicted rapists and murderers.
• The education budget is continuously slashed while political leaders’ personal wealth multiplies unchecked.
• Under this minister’s watch, renewable energy is generated but allowed to go to waste because the grid infrastructure is deliberately neglected.
• A criminal record, including cases of communal hate speech, is conveniently omitted from election affidavits, and the media fails to investigate.
• Journalists who criticize such a minister are dragged to court, fined, and silenced through legal harassment.
• The RSS’s ideological stranglehold over universities is deepened through the appointment of vice-chancellors from its ecosystem, strangling academic freedom.
• Railway projects meant to connect constituencies remain incomplete for 22 years, yet the MP is hailed as an organisational genius.
• The ‘crisis manager’ label is manufactured by media outlets that have outsourced their editorial judgment to the ruling party’s publicity wing.
• Ministers are allowed to treat portfolios as mere postings—openly admitting the subject is new to them—without any accountability for previous failures.
• The celebration of raw communal politics (Hubli Idgah) is sanitised and rebranded as ‘nationalism,’ while students are punished for asking hard questions.

This is not a person. This is a pattern. And the pattern is eating the country alive.