People's Democracy

Incapacitating An Entire Society

Nalini Taneja

 THE BJP-led government has been in power for a continuous stretch of six years now, from 1998 onwards. In these six years it has played havoc with the educational system in this country. It is no one’s case that the essentials of the BJP policies on education came into being only with the coming to power of the BJP government at the centre. Much of what we criticise by way of privatisation and commercialisation of education became part of official policy with the New Education Policy Document of 1986 formulated during the Rajiv Gandhi regime. Communal interpretations of history and communal school texts are also not new. Vidya Bharti schools have been around for a long time, and they have been incorporating within the school curriculum much of what is taught in the RSS shakhas. In a general sense too the educational edifice has served well the interests of the ruling classes. It has successfully created a kind of consensus around the existing social system rather than provoking its questioning. It has been an instrument for consolidating the hegemony of the ruling classes.

Yet the coming to power of the BJP has made a qualitative difference to the educational scenario Through the BJP-led NDA government, the RSS has laid claim to the entire educational enterprise, both at the level of higher education and at the school level. The national funds alloted for education are being utilised for fulfilling the RSS political agenda. The sheer resources at the command of the RSS have increased tremendously, through the agency of the BJP government and also through the enormous funds that the RSS receives from North America in the name of social work and charity. With regard to government funds, those from MHRD, women and child welfare and tribal welfare, as also grants from CAPART go into RSS channels through a variety of NGOs, and are freely used for ‘educational’ ventures of the RSS. The foreign funds too, as numerous citizens’ reports have shown, get channelised into creating the RSS schools in villages and tribal areas.

COMMUNALISATION OF EDUCATION

The sheer scale of the process of communalisation of education has therefore taken a tremendous upswing with the BJP government at the centre. The process has also got far more organised and is now not confined to RSS linked schools but has found full and systematic implementation at the government level through BJP government authored policy documents on education. Communalisation of education is a priority with the BJP government.

In school education, through a new National Curriculum Framework, the entire syllabus has been changed in social sciences and humanities. History textbooks, especially, have been extensively revised, and they now carry all the prejudices against minorities and the entire perspective of the Sangh Parivar with regard to Muslim rulers in medieval India.  In the Vidya Bharti schools, which are RSS run schools, there are absolutely no holds barred. What is taught in these schools is the unadulterated RSS view of society and history. Muslims are presented in a bad light as cruel, breakers of temples. Much of what is written in their textbooks is aimed at creating communal disharmony and hatred against the Muslims, in order to justify the anti-minority stance of the Sangh Parivar.

Such changes in education are designed to divide people along lines of religion and caste when what we most require today is unity of the working people. Such syllabus content is also against the spirit of the Constitution, and all norms of democracy and secularism. Through them young victims are being transformed into future accomplices of the RSS’s sectarian right wing project, even as they are being incapacitated through the inculcation of closed minds and an inferior education.

The Sangh Parivar has taken over all the important academic and research institutions and filled them with people linked with the RSS in order to change the direction of educational policy. The autonomy of national level institutions like the UGC, Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR), Indian Council of Social Science Research, (ICSSR), Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (IIAS), Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), National Centre for Education Research and Training (NCERT), National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA) has been undermined and they have been made into instruments for implementing the political agenda of the Sangh Parivar.

In all these institutions there is a shift in terms of grants towards those areas of study and research that tie up with the political agenda of the Sangh Parivar. For example, in the institutions related to history several high funded projects are underway whose primary purpose is to ‘prove’ all those theories that the Sangh Parivar promotes in its anti minority campaigns and in its shakhas --- such as that the Aryans were the original inhabitants of India and that the Indus valley civilisation was an Aryan civilisation and that Muslims and Christians are ‘foreigners’. The idea is to somehow show that India is essentially the land of Hindus and Hinduism alone forms the base of Indian cultural heritage.

While cutting funds for general science education and social sciences in universities, government grants are being made available for starting courses in many universities on astrology and karmakand.

DISCRIMINATING UNDER PRIVILEGED

Also, at the heart of the BJP’s educational agenda is a process of elimination. In school education, as much as in higher education, the kind of changes that are being brought about will make good education out of the reach of the majority. The entire drive towards privatisation of education and cut in state funds for education are directed towards this end and tell this story --- that education is not the responsibility of the State, even as the government commits a fraud on the entire nation by making a show of passing a Bill that makes education a fundamental right, and has been a signatory to numerous such agreements at the international level.

We must also understand that this is not a neutral process. When those who cannot pay get left out from the benefits of education, those who actually get eliminated from the educational system belong mainly to those sections that are already unpriviliged and handicapped in several ways. The minorities, dalits, tribals and women are worst affected, along with the poor from the upper castes, because in statistical terms there is an identity between the poor and these sections of society. We also know that in conditions of scarce or shrinking family resources it is always the girl’s welfare, which is first sacrificed. There is a general decline in enrollment at all levels of education, and this decline is that much more pronounced in the case of dalits and women, as revealed by all statistics and reports.

All the changes of the BJP government with regard to education will increase the already large gap between those who are privileged and those who are not. The government’s emphasis on increasing the sector of non formal education at school level, and distance education at the higher level, will mean two kinds of education for two kinds of people - the privileged and the unprivileged - because experience has shown that distance education or non formal education in this country is second grade education, which simply does not prepare its students to change the quality of their life or advance in economic or social terms. Such an unequal educational system will reinforce social inequalities, create permanent social barriers and close all chances for social mobility. It will put an end at the very beginning to any aspirations that a young person may have in life.

INADEQUATE ALLOCATION OF FUNDS

According to a statement signed by several MPs and given to the deputy prime minister, LK Advani on March 15, 2003, the Budget had not allocated to Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education for All scheme) for universalisation of elementary education an amount larger than the previous year. On paper it appeared that there was an increase. However this increase from Rs 1512.00 crore to Rs 1951.25 crore was fictitious, and was obtained by cancelling other schemes such as Operation Black Board (Rs 58.50 crore), Central Plan for North Eastern areas (388 crore) etc. If one takes into account the fact that prior to this, in November 2001, the government had introduced and passed in a great hurry and in the same session, the 93rd Constitution Amendment Bill (now 86th Constitution Amendment) to provide free and compulsory education to all children up to the age of 14 years, this reduction amounts to playing fraud on the nation and is actually a criminal neglect of people’s welfare. In fact this significant document itself leaves scope for millions of children being left outside the educational system --- certainly those below 6, but also those above 14 who are already left out or are drop outs, and the really destitute.

Needless to say all this is a far cry from the recommendations of all previous educational commissions, including the Tapas Majumdar Committee appointed by government in 1999, which had assessed the additional requirement for universalisation of elementary education as Rs  13,700 crore per year; or the Kothari Commission, which had stipulated that a minimum of 6 per cent of GDP should be spent on Education.

WITHDRAWAL OF THE STATE

There is a virtual reversal --- which Prabhat Patnaik has termed as ‘counter-revolution’ in the goals of education. There is a premium on irrationalism and conservatism in economic and political education, and subservience towards neo-liberal ideologies, whether in the form of justifications of globalisation or promotion of cultural difference. Mediated through the commercialisation drive and the majoritarianism of the RSS, we see its worst forms in the corruption rampant with regard to admissions and recognition of new institutions and of the emergence of the RSS as the biggest private player as the State withdraws from education at the school level.

On the one hand we have had news of the proliferation of thousands of private, low grade institutes, which demand lakhs of rupees for admission (Rs 28 lakh to 32 lakh being demanded for admission to private medical colleges in Bombay) and of the de-recognition of many such medical colleges in Tamilnadu; and on the other the proliferation of ekal vidyalayas of the RSS which preach hatred in the name of nationalism and ‘our culture’. All these are part of a process of subservience to imperialism and the RSS. They combine to produce a very potent right wing agenda in education.

The Model Act for Universities being pushed through will achieve all the desired aims of the government: to limit education to those who can pay, to utilise the government-public funded education for such courses as are needed by the globalised economy to create skilled workers for holding junior positions in multinational corporations, to open the doors for private players including foreign ones by creating an even field through withdrawal of state funding, and to create conditions for intellectual subservience.

When combined with the erosion of the autonomy of the statutory academic bodies and intimidation of elected teachers and student unions the large body of changes will mean not just the depolitisation of campuses and elimination of teachers and students from all decision making processes, but also the intellectual disarming of an entire society.

The entire educational edifice is being destroyed, the intellectual base of our society is being undermined and being made to shrink and, through its communalisation and commercialisation, education is being transformed into an instrument for creating consensus for a right wing fascist agenda of the Sangh Parivar.  If not for all other reasons people must vote out this government for what it is doing to education and to people’s capabilities in terms of building better lives for themselves.