Similarly, your stray remarks about alternatives to quotas suggest that you would like the state to play less and less of a role in affirmative action. I am surprised at this suggestion coming from a careful student of history like you. You know better than I do the lesson of the history of struggles for social justice all over the world: more often than not radical measures of social justice result from state intervention, that too from the top.

Initially I was baffled at your remarks about ‘politicisation of the educational process’. I thought this loose expression was not available to professional students of politics like you and me who know that democracy is and should be a political process, that politics is as much a source of good as that of evil. On second thought I have come to appreciate your point better. I think you meant to point to a deep malady in our educational institutions, namely their vulnerability to political masters with their narrow-minded agenda. But surely the Ministry of HRD formulating guidelines for implementation of a national policy on social justice does not fall in this category.

There was no doubt a good deal of ‘politicking’ involved in what the ministry was doing. No doubt, the ‘clever’ political move by Arjun Singh violated an institutional norm of parliamentary government and reduced the space for fine-tuned policy on this matter. But the same can be said about the ill-timed, hastily executed and unfortunately publicised move by the National Knowledge Commission. Far from tempering the debate and facilitating a solution, the NKC’s intervention added fuel to the fire, appeared as a partisan intervention and accentuated the artificial urgency that reduced the space for thinking afresh. To outsiders like me it appeared that instead of becoming a vital link in a possible solution, the NKC became part of the problem.

... contd.