New Delhi: With sustained calls for his resignation sparking the largest protest Delhi has seen in years, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan issued his first remarks in weeks on the agitation centring on him, attacking the Congress for ‘exploiting students’ and giving no indication that he intends to step down.In a statement on Tuesday (July 21) night, Pradhan criticised the sit-in protest that Lok Sabha leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi led outside Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s residence hours earlier as “causing inconvenience to the public and disregarding established security protocols”.Gandhi and the Congress, the minister wrote, “continue to shamelessly exploit students as political tools to manufacture disruption” while parliament is in session. The LoP said his sit-in was meant to denounce the police violence against youth-led protesters in central Delhi on Monday, which in turn had coalesced around the demand that Pradhan step down.Pradhan also echoed the government’s line that the Congress rebuffed its assurance to discuss the protests in parliament by conducting the sit-in. The party “chose political spectacle over democratic debate”, he said in his X post, accusing it of chasing “headlines” and “confrontation” rather than “solutions for students”.He went on to say that India’s students are owed accountability but did not indicate that he intends to step down, even as calls for his resignation in view of the NEET-UG paper leak in May – the second time the exam was compromised in three years and after which it was re-administered to some 20 lakh students – have grown shriller over the last three weeks.“They deserve certainty over chaos, solutions over slogans and responsibility over disruption. We owe our students more than outrage. We owe them answers, reforms and accountability. That is exactly what our government remains committed to delivering,” Pradhan said.The statement is the minister’s first exhaustive remark on the protests centring on the demand for his resignation, which regained momentum after inventor-activist Sonam Wangchuk began an indefinite hunger strike at the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)-led protest taking place at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar Road on June 28.Thousands of protesters heeded the CJP and Wangchuk’s clarion call to march from the protest site to Parliament House on Monday, during which Delhi police and security personnel lathi-charged and tear-gassed the youth-led agitators, triggering condemnation.Before Wangchuk began his fast – which he continues in hospital after the police forcibly removed him from his protest site – Pradhan had called the CJP the “B-team of terrorists”. The originally satirical outfit has demanded the minister’s resignation since days after its formation in May.Meanwhile, Gandhi has called both for Pradhan to put in his papers as well as for Modi and home minister Amit Shah to resign in light of the police’s violent response to Monday’s march to parliament.Though the Modi government on Tuesday accused Gandhi of ‘going back on his word’ on ending his sit-in by pressing for Pradhan’s resignation over and above a discussion in parliament, the Congress has hit back saying no one else can dictate what the LoP and students can demand.