People's Democracy

Higher Education Under Saffron Siege

Nalini Taneja

SAFFRONISATION and privatisation define the essence and purpose of Hindutva strategy in the 1990s. Nowhere do the two aspects combine so devastatingly as in the field of education. While parliament and political parties have been paying attention to the changes in school syllabi and the loopholes in the Right to Education Act, the forced changes by the BJP government in higher education have gone almost unnoticed and largely unprotested, except when they have impinged on service conditions. The large majority of teachers and students have simply not taken the government’s agenda of privatization and communalization of higher education seriously, and the government is getting away with much more than the academic community realizes.

Saffronisation and privatization link up in so many ways and through so many threads that it is impossible to separate the two in terms of the consequences for higher education. The large scale endorsement of what have come to be known as ‘market friendly courses’ and the withdrawal of the state from financing higher education at the behest of the GATTS regime, which would like an ‘even playing field’ for foreign entrepreneurs of education, ties up only too well with the BJP government’s scheme of down grading and pushing through their own agenda in social sciences and liberal education which form the basis of rational thought and intellectual climate in which democratic politics thrives. Hitler had understood this only too well, and much of what we see happening around us today in the field of academics and universities is inspired by the nazi assault on education through promotion of right wing sectarian ideologies, suppression of democratic thought and hounding of liberal and left wing intellectuals.

SURREPTITIOUS

CHANGES

The government has decided on general rather than particular measures, economic rather than political forms of suppression except when it pertains to issues of school syllabi and the wholesale revamping of school texts and withdrawal from schools of history books written by "leftist historians". The government has adopted the policy of promoting certain trends, taking over of institutions, and ensuring a shift in the patterns of funding to prioritise research that endorses a Hindutva worldview, although one should note that even here there is a more aggressive stance taking shape. The pushing through model syllabi in various subjects in the university and suppression of Anand Patwardhan’s film critical of its nuclear policy are expressions of this aggressive stance. DN Jha’s book on dietary patterns in ancient India would certainly not make it to reading lists in universities.

Through a premium on self-financing market friendly courses at the cost of social sciences, humanities and pure sciences the entire direction of higher education is being changed. In addition a very large part of the infrastructure for education, created through public funds and people’s toil is being made an adjunct to the needs of multinationals and big business. The areas left open for government funding are being sabotaged towards fulfilling the Sangh Parivar’s agenda in a more open way through common agreement between the Sangh Parivar and the corporate sector. Each has its own playing field to serve mutual interests. The market logic is here made operative through the term majority community, which defines the nation in Sangh Parivar’s language. Education must reflect the prerogatives of this majority, defined in religious, Brahmanical terms, even if in reality it is only a privileged minority.

In terms of content of higher education this has meant an assault on reason and people’s perspective in various fields of knowledge. This is, as Prabhat Patnaik once defined it, a virtual "counter revolution", of the kind that Lukacs saw as doing the spadework for fascism.

The coming to power of the BJP government has given actual entry to the RSS shakha as an ideological factor in social science research. There is today a smooth passage from the shakha culture and politics through the shishu mandirs and Vidya Bharti schools into ‘higher research’. The Vidya Bharti schools and shishu mandirs teach and translate into formal learning the unadulterated RSS view of history and society perfected in the shakhas. This entire package has now penetrated into higher research through RSS affiliated ‘scholars’ in India and abroad, and is struggling to assume mainstream status through identification with and takeover of established and reputable autonomous academic institutions in the country.

Under the hegemony of imperialism and the Hindutva movement, mainstream economics, has developed a right wing, irrational core, which serves the interests of Hindutva politics, while history, archaeology and sociology have found scholar karsevaks willing to serve the Hindutva cause. Shakha culture and politics have virtually transformed the content of reputable journals, of the Indian Science Academy, the Archaeological Survey of India, the Geological Society of India and other such autonomous research institutions. It seems there is suddenly a spurt of ‘new discoveries’ and ‘new evidences’ for Hindutva claims, earlier confined to shakhas and Vidya Bharti schools. Projects in ICHR are geared to proving Hindutva claims.

ASSAULT

ON HISTORY

Archaeology has become a favourite subject with the RSS-linked historians busy concocting 'evidence' to 'prove' that the Indus valley civilization was Aryan civilization, that the Aryans were original inhabitants of the Indian soil, and that Indian culture is Vedic in essence—all necessary to cater to the RSS fetish for Hindus as the only original inhabitants of India.

Every common place of worship becomes a potential site for a communal campaign, and a temple is projected below the ruins of every medieval monument not just by Bajrang Dal goons, but also their ‘archaelogists’ and ‘scholars’, many of them in the universities in the west. Indus civilization is now referred to in many of the write-ups in these journals as Indus-Saraswati civilization to give it a Hindu flavour, and to show its origins in India rather than in areas that now lie in Pakistan. Ruins of Jain temples have been ‘discovered’ below the Fatehpur Sikri in Agra, the horse (a feature of Aryan civilization, which came only with the Aryans) has been 'discovered' in the Harappan inscriptions and seals, great scientific discoveries are attributed to ancient India, and so on!

In a near echo of the Sanskar Saurabh series for the RSS schools, it is being claimed that humankind evolved and diffused from the upper Saraswati region i. e., northern India, that Aryans were migrants from India to Europe, that Sanskrit is the root of all languages, and so on. The dates for the Vedic civilisation are pushed back to earn for the Aryan culture a unique antiquity that would prove the theory of ‘we gave civilisation to the rest of the world’, and Vedas are said to contain the sum of mankind’s achievements in knowledge. One could go on with such claims endlessly.

There is a need to recognise the considerable shift that has taken place in the intellectual climate of this country as a result of globalisation policies and Hindutva politics. Science has become a dirty word, and terms like secularism and rationalism are being identified with western dominance in the name of indigenism in sophisticated intellectual circles. There is a devaluation of scientific temper when courses on vedic astrology get introduced as science courses, and myth gets promoted as social science. Lukacs in his Destruction of Reason has shown us where all this can lead us, and what happened to the social democrats and working class movements in the intellectual climate of irrationalism and the onslaught of capital at this juncture should be a lesson to us. A resistance once fascism takes control is that much more difficult to resist.

That many of our renowned social scientists and left wing intellectuals still roam free and are published in newspapers is no consolation because this government has been able to change much without facing the kind of resistance yet that could have called forth violence on its part, except in the form of down grading the teaching process as a whole and negatively changing teachers service conditions. In a sense this government has teamed up with the corporate sector in the country and the GATTS regime to intimidate and root out the sources of mass resistance by academics, and of popular resistance to education policies, by keeping the axe hanging over the heads of the entire teaching community, the ‘centres of excellence’ and other research institutions, the bodies for framing syllabi and implementing education policies and so on through its purse strings and withdrawal of funds and the general cut in welfare that has left people pressured in their daily lives even as they are angry.