|
September
5, 2001
|
|
Power
as an end in itself
|
The
crisis of our times
In
1953, Encounter’s first issue carried an article on India
that concluded on the following note: ‘‘Between a past reduced to
practical impotence but offering a resistance to depth, and a future
only skin-deep, India’s present seems to lack substance.’’ Today,
almost all rank-and-file Indian politicians will disagree, for there
is no limit to their imagined triumphs. The stark reality illustrated
by the country’s appalling state of affairs is that the shadows
of doubts and uncertainties move among us; almost too many to count
and sometimes even hard to name.
The
BJP-led regime, its life span extended by unprincipled alliances
in the shadowy world of politics has lost credibility in the eyes
of the people as well as amongst its erstwhile supporters in the
print media. Change is the crying need of the hour but this may
not happen at the Centre simply because the NDA partners, having
lost the public trust they enjoyed, are unprepared to face the electorate.
They will even swallow the bitter pill administered by the prime
minister in last week’s cabinet reshuffle.
A
series of events during the last fortnight, including the shameful
conduct of the Shiv Sainiks in Thane, must alert us to the fact
that the crisis of our times is apparent in all their fullness,
their concreteness, and their reality. The prime minister must be
aware of the intolerableness of hunger, starvation and degradation
in a country that seems to have the resources to remove them. He
should know that, close on the heels of the Tehelka expose, his
party’s image has been irreparably damaged by the UTI scandal. And
yet the finance minister stays put, while Jagmohan, a man of integrity
and efficiency, is ousted ostensibly under pressure from the land
mafia and its BJP patrons. The prime minister is, surely, informed
of the indictment of the BJP government in Gujarat by the CAG report
and the steady erosion of public institutions in UP where his party
holds the reins of office.
Love
of power (as opposed to lust), in various limited forms, is almost
universal. There is, however, a great difference between power desired
as a means and power desired as an end in itself. The BJP’s crisis
of political and moral legitimacy is partly the result of opportunist
politics, but mainly the consequence of its own contradictions.
Failure to evolve a national agenda is its major weakness; hence
the widening chasm between the posturing of leaders and their narrow
and sectarian goals. What had contributed to the BJP’s electoral
success was its ability to convince the electorate that it stood
for certain principles. Even if one does not scan those principles
sceptically, the fact is that they have been willy-nilly consigned
to the dustbin of history. Again, this is illustrated by the cabinet
reshuffle.
If
democracy is to be workable, our ministers must respond to public
opinion even when it goes against them. Hence my appeal to the HRD
minister to consider the mounting criticism of his pet projects.
He is free to use the sangh parivar platform to disseminate his
novel ideas, but not from Shastri Bhawan where he heads the country’s
ministry of human resource development. He shoulders a huge responsibility
preparing a blueprint for this millennium and, at the same
time, preserving the rich legacy he has inherited from his predecessors,
the most distinguished being Maulana Azad, free India’s first education
minister.
Our
system of education should seek to promote rationality, independent
thinking, somewhat sceptical and wholly scientific, and preserve
the composite values of this society. This, wrote Bertrand Russell
long ago, was the task of modern liberal education: to give a sense
of the value of things other than domination, to help to create
wise citizens of a free community, and through the combination of
citizenship with liberty in individual creativeness to enable men
to give to human life that splendour which some few have shown that
it can achieve.
Doubtless,
the educational system is deficient in many ways. Doubtless, history
textbooks should be updated. But this task should have been assigned
to historians themselves and not to those who will, I suspect, produce
works to further the Hindutva agenda. Yes, reform and restructure,
but not without wide-ranging consultations at various levels. The
lead should have been taken by school, college and university teachers
and not by bureaucrats. This is the essential difference between
the liberal outlook and that of the totalitarian state. There is
no mechanism to tame bureaucrats, except for the boards of studies
and the academic council to assert their autonomy. So far, they
have abjectly capitulated without insisting on their own right to
be heard. Their empowerment alone is the sole guarantor of our educational
centre’s independence and freedom.
We
recognise the need to update the curriculum, introduce new courses,
and improve methods of instruction. And yet we are not attuned to
the revival of antiquated notions, obsolete ideas and irrational
beliefs. The issue is not whether or not Vedic astrology or mathematics
is the current rage in overseas universities (why, at any rate,
should a fervent proponent of ‘indigenism’ imitate overseas universities?),
but its value for a society pregnant with new ideas of change and
innovation. Leading scientists have spoken in unison against the
introduction of Vedic ‘sciences’. So have scores of social scientists
and parliamentarians cutting across party lines. The HRD minister
will do well to pay heed to their views.
Design
education to breakdown caste and communal barriers, create a liberal
ethos, and nurture a sense of togetherness in an already fractured
nation. Conduct the teaching of history in a similar spirit. Saffronisation,
the mantra of the HRD ministry, is the antithesis of what constitutes
liberal education, for it seeks to instill a set of beliefs into
the minds of the young before they are capable of thinking and exercising
their independent judgement.
And
when two opposite groups are taught in this fashion, they produce
two armies which clash, not two parties that can discuss.
Saffronisation breeds fanaticism, heightens caste and communal consciousness,
and stifles the natural inclination of a student to cultivate a
balanced and cautious judgement. This is bad news for a country
trying to rewrite the colonial agenda. This is ominously alarming
for a country endeavouring to link up with the global economy.
Is
there a breath of fresh air drifting through the pollution that
we have been accustomed to take from our normal atmosphere? In 1953,
the Encounter editorial struck the right note: ‘‘After the apocalypse
— come another day. Just another day. But our own.” I wish one could
conclude with the same optimism in the year 2001.
|