Beginning with the more than four hundred page Subramanium Committee[2] report, which was neither accepted nor released to the public by the Union government, the government of India (GOI) suddenly released its own 68-page document.  Soon after, the then Rajya Sabha MP from the CPI (M) Sitaram Yechury publicly exposed the fact that this was a verbatim extract or version from an RSS document. Thereafter, the then Human Resources Development Minister (HRD) Prakash Javedekar immediately withdrew the document stating that it had been released `by mistake’!  Another. almost two years later the Prof. Kasturirangan Committee’s report came out. However, during the Covid pandemic a National Education Policy (NEP 2020) was passed by the Cabinet without being presented in Parliament or being sent to a select committee.  With no transparent debate among academicians or reference to the states as was constitutionally required since education comes under the concurrent list of subjects, the NEP 2020 began to be implemented in a haphazard manner through executive decisions and through central institutions including the University Grants Commission (UGC), the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the National Testing Agency (NTA) and the like.

There were strong critical objections to the policy, to the manner of its implementation and the unseemly haste to push it through come what may. Institutions were threatened with withdrawal of central funds if it was not implemented by the next academic session. Teachers at both school level and higher education were intimidated and bullied not to speak out against the policy and responses by unions were sought to be suppressed. In spite of continuing opposition, institutional administrations were literally forced to implement the policy even if it meant their having to resort to using emergency powers to do so.

Chaos was created at all levels of the education system with structural, pedagogical and curriculum changes being pushed through without preparation, planning or resources. A system already in crisis with 50% to 60% shortage of faculty and lacking physical infrastructure was being pushed over the brink. Teaching was to be done through hybrid modes of online and offline functioning irrespective of the lack of access to devices and connectivity. Anganwadi workers were to receive online `training’ for taking on Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) responsibilities! Merger and closure of schools was happening across the country so that `school complexes’ could be made to `share’ what were in fact non-existent `resources’ resulting in  a further dropping out of children who were losing neighbouring schools or being crammed into `merged’ schools.

Although there is now much talk of lessening the burden of learning and breaking away from methods of `rote’ learning, there will now be all-India exams at Class 3, 5 and 8 as well as board exams at Class 10 and 12. The former will decide whose `education’ stops at `numeracy and literacy’, who goes on to `vocational training’ (these two categories would cover approximately 85 to 90 percent bahujan children[3]) while the latter will determine who completes higher secondary. But to get to higher education even the less than 10% `elite’ students will have to sit for a centralised entrance exam (currently compulsory only for central universities, it is proposed to be extended across the country). Coaching classes are booming, 97% of Delhi University admissions are from CBSE schools this time and the number of women students have dropped alarmingly.

Why is the education system being systematically destroyed and learning being kept out of reach for the vast majority of India’s children? Why is it not being reformed to facilitate universalisation of compulsory education for all? What does the government hope to gain from this worsening of the existing crisis in education?

The answer lies in the NEP 2020 inspired position paper on “Knowledge of India” (KI) (January 2022) including `Indian Knowledge Systems’ (IKS). Several `Guidelines’ have since been issued for the introduction of such courses in schools and higher educational institutions and also for training teachers to impart instruction.  Centrally selected and well-funded research projects are already underway to discover `scientific’ support for ancient ritual practices. The focus is on what are termed `Vedic’ achievements in ancient India in all spheres of knowledge from the sciences, mathematics, astronomy (including `astrology’), medical sciences, social organization and governance, art, aesthetics, architecture etc., and on the Sanskrit language in which these are accessible.  Ancient texts, such as the Puranas, Smrttis, the epics, Vedas and Upanishads are the core source materials. Gurukuls and temple schools are venerated as the proper institutions in which this knowledge was transmitted (apparently without caste exclusions) and preserved.

This fanciful picture is placed in the framework of what is identified as the proper historical `narrative’, one which is not tainted by the ideology of `invaders and colonisers’, so that Bharatiyata is to be rediscovered and IKS are to take their rightful place above and prior to the rise of modern science, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. The historical narrative must display “steadfastness in protecting the civilization”.  The role of Hindu kingdoms and dynasties has to be emphasized instead of elaborating the achievements of the invaders and colonisers. And so we are told, in flagrant violation of historical evidence, that “Buddhism started declining” as a “direct result of these invasions”!

The document claims that being colonised “for a thousand years” has apparently confused a “group of our intellectuals” who make ancient civilization “responsible” for social wrongs by “misinterpreting” ancient texts (like Manusmrtti) thereby leading to a loss of “traditional” patterns of employment. So we must see caste divisions and oppression as a form of societal harmony and stability! This blatant support for Brahmanical principles of social organization and its ideological propagation of caste hierarchies in daily life is seen as the foundational Bharatiya Dharma which is to be glorified and strengthened by the new historical narrative.

The IKS/KI is nothing else but the promotion of the ideology of the RSS shakha in the entire education system. It will be a compulsory add-on to the curriculum for which time has to be allocated although it will not be examined and graded along with other subjects. Every school and educational institution will have a `cell’ to organize the instruction of IKS/KI  and its other activities, including displays, debates, quizzes, etc., and physical training and yoga. Every school library will have a special section on IKS/KI with books and other reading material.

Of course the teachers imparting such instruction cannot be expected to be drawn from the existing colonially inspired education system. So they will have to be drawn from RSS/Sangh Parivar organisations[4], from the `community’ and from the `family’, that are compatible with IKS ideology. Frequent workshops will require to be held to `sensitise’ them to the needs of the NEP 2020.

Even the very idea of re-vamping education on this basis would require a well-researched account of ancient Sanskrit texts. This is a massive intellectual task and hardly one that can be achieved without `burdening’ researchers, teachers and students! It is particularly problematic because Brahmanical ideology itself grew out of sharp conflicts with the Lokayata Charvaka materialism, and the Sankhya Yoga and Naya Visheshika realisms. The anti-caste and anti-ritualist Buddhist and Jain philosophies of social organization were frankly anti-Brahmanical.  The rich body of Prakrits and Pali literatures are a recognized tradition distinct from and at variance with the Brahmanical Sanskrit literature.

Thus the attempt to glorify Brahminism by portraying India’s ancient civilizational history as a homogeneous continuum, until the advent of the `invaders’, is itself a deeply biased and prejudicial account that is hardly conducive to being the basis for a modern critical system of education.

In fact the position paper itself, while it seems unaware of the irony of its stand, states that recovering Bharatiyata requires the Indian presence of a Joseph Needham who produced an extensive study of the civilizational achievements of Chinese science and technology! However, far from following in his footsteps, IKS/KI moves in the opposite direction.

In the absence of serious research on the actual achievements of early civilizational philosophers and thinkers, not to mention the completely neglected medieval philosophical monotheisms and their sociological and linguistic impact in the spread and development of Prakrits, the ideologically motivated and unsubstantiated `shakha propaganda’ about a `golden age’ of Brahmanical achievement remains just that – propaganda.

It is this shakha-based propaganda to which the mass of India’s children will be subjected as the public system of education is crippled without resources and the constitutional commitment to providing quality education on the part of the Government is simply brushed aside.

The privileged elite, of course, will increasingly buy their education abroad or at foreign campuses located in India with the unregulated freedom to profit and repatriate.

(The author, previously an academic with the Delhi University is presently with the All India Forum for the Right to Education)

[1] Neighbourhood Branches of the RSS

[2] By 2017, May the Modi government had decided to junk the TSR Subramanian committee report on education reform terming it as a “mere compilation” of older reports. In 2015, the TSR Subramanian was set up to outline a new education policy, which submitted its report in May, 2016.

[3] In a modern context, it refers to the combined population of the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, Muslims, and minorities, who together constitute the demographic majority of India.

[4] Vidya Bharati (short for Vidya Bharati Akhil Bharatiya Shiksha Sansthan) is the educational wing of RSS. It runs one of the largest private network of schools in India, operating at a minimum 2,000 schools with over 3.2 Million students, as of 2016. Since this government came to power it has set up some universities too. https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/india-news-saffronisation-of-education-rss-says-its-schools-imbibe-indian-values-in-students/305071; there is also the Ekal Vidyalaya the one teacher school run by a parallel foundation affiliated to the Viswa Hindu Parshad (VHP) and RSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekal_Vidyalaya

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Image Courtesy: The Hindu

The draft National Education Policy 2019 systematically evades the Constitution’s focus on social justice in educational institutions. It seeks to have power concentrated in an overpowering authority in order to keep the deception of having generated a level playing field within a fundamentally unequal, unjust and discriminatory social system.Can one hope that “the Draft National Education Policy 2019” will be the foundation on which the education policy of the Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance government would be conceived, articulated and comprehended? Will it provide justification for some of the sweeping strides already taken by the Government of India (GOI)—the massive cuts in budgetary allocations for both school and higher education with corresponding schemes for “rationalisation” of government schools through merger/closure of well over one lakh schools across the country, and the slashing of seats in public-funded higher education institutions while declaring at the same time that a non-existent “initiative” by a private corporate be recognised as an “institution of eminence”? Or will it be yet another smokescreen behind which different agendas are being furthered?

Dr K. Kasturirangan, chairperson of the “Committee for Drafting the National Education Policy”, is hardly reassuring in his Preamble to the Draft. Assuming that he would only have to build on the report submitted by T.S.R. Subramanian, who had chaired the “Committee for Evolution of the New Education Policy”, and the Ministry’s subsequent “Some Inputs for the Draft National Education Policy 2016” from the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry, he had agreed to submit it within six months (emphasis added, throughout). However, as he began to get “a sense of the members… with their rich and unique insights into our society and its implications for education”, he realised that “this Committee was going to be ‘out-of-the-box’ in its thinking”. Hence the two-year delay in preparing the draft.

The “completely new and far-sighted policy” to change the “educational landscape” and prepare the youth to meet “present and future challenges” is said to be guided by the goals of “access, equity, quality, affordability, and accountability” and will look at education as a “single organic continuum from pre-school to higher education”. Ensuring universal access to education of “high quality” is stated to be the draft’s topmost priority, as quality and equity are “considered central to sustainable development, achieving success in the emerging knowledge economy and society…and for building an equitable, just and humane society”.

The following recommendations are welcome: renaming the HRD Ministry as the Ministry of Education; the emphasis on teacher education; extension of coverage of the Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009, and the mid-day meal scheme to include pre-primary on the one hand, and up to Class XII on the other; review of the amendment to the RTE Act’s no-detention policy up to Class VIII and the conception of the education system as an organic continuum from pre-primary to higher education. Regrettably, providing an “exit” point from Class VIII itself without demanding a complete ban on child labour is problematic as the current child labour laws allow children to work in “family” enterprises from 10 years onwards, reinforcing both caste-based occupations and economic exploitation. However, two fundamental contentions require to be probed as they apparently undermine the laudable objectives of the draft.

The first springs from a cavalier attitude to the Constitution using a selective quotation from Dr B.R. Ambedkar that the “working of a Constitution does not depend wholly on the nature of the Constitution….”

The second claims that what we have “so far not recognised is that there are a multiplicity of agencies and individuals in this country who will come forward willingly with their support if they are convinced that there is sincerity and honesty and an ethical approach to building a knowledge society”.

The republican Constitution of India is the outcome of a protracted and wide-ranging struggle against British imperialism. It was committed to the creation of a modern, independent nation and society in which the rights of all persons would be recognised and upheld. The nation-state is constitutionally obligated to defend and further people’s rights irrespective of caste, creed, region, language, gender and disability.

In particular, the state is obliged to ensure and safeguard the rights of those sections who, for centuries, have been traditionally relegated, often with strict religious sanctions, to a “depressed” status in the interest of dominant castes and communities. Consequently, in the education sector, special provision for “reservation” in post-secondary education and subsequent employment were made for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (S.C. and S.T.) and extended to cover Other Backward Classes (OBC) following the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations. Despite these measures, the educational status of these sections and that of the Muslim minority remains distressingly low. Between 6 and 10 per cent are able to complete Class XII and hence over 90 per cent do not even become eligible for reservation.

Silent on reservation

Yet, the draft, which also refers to relevant Unified District Information System for Education (U-DISE) data for 2016-17, is shockingly silent on the issue and systematically evades the Constitution’s focus on social justice in educational institutions. The issue of making provisions for challenging and countering caste-based discrimination and oppression is absent from the document. In fact, the word “caste” itself has been used perhaps only twice in the draft and that too in a perfunctory listing of categories. The “reservation” policy is not referred to even once and the draft consistently emphasises the so-called “merit-based” criteria for admissions at all levels of post-secondary education, including the mandatory BEd for teacher training; for scholarships, for financial and other forms of aid on the basis of “socio-economic backwardness”; for the selection and appointment of faculty and for promotions during their career. How such a “meritorious knowledge society” can be created without addressing the issues of centuries of exclusion and oppression of the lower castes, of gender discrimination, of communal hostilities and tribal marginalisation appears to be a matter of little concern.

Unfortunately, the draft neglects to quote Dr Ambedkar on this question. Speaking in the Bombay Legislative Council, he unambiguously stated that “if all these communities are to be brought to the level of equality, then the only remedy is to adopt the principle of inequality and to give favoured treatment to those who are below level”.

Although it is recognised that “under-represented groups”—a euphemism for the “excluded” categories of persons—constitute a major deprived section of Indian society and require attention, no specific provisions by the Central and State governments are envisaged for them in the draft. It merely states that giving complete autonomy to private institutions of higher education may “encourage” them to voluntarily make some provision “either within or outside of CSR [corporate social responsibility]”.

The draft’s approach is particularly provocative as it comes in the wake of the institutionalised “murder” of research scholar Rohith Vemula (University of Hyderabad) which led to widespread and angry protests from all democratic sections. The GOI brazened it out as two of its Union Ministers were directly implicated in goading university authorities to ignore the legitimate grievances of the Dalit scholars. This was followed by the suicide of a 17-year-old Dalit student, S. Anitha, from Tamil Nadu after her petition against imposing the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for admission to Tamil Nadu State government medical colleges was rejected by the Supreme Court. In her moving statement, Anitha had questioned the justice of expecting those who had been consistently denied equal opportunities to “compete” with the privileged for admission. Just recently, Dr Payal Tadvi, a second-year tribal student pursuing her postgraduate medical education, was driven to suicide because of constant harassment and persecution by upper-caste seniors at her Mumbai hospital.

These prominent cases are only the tip of the iceberg behind which lie the barely registered suicide deaths of several thousands of students from marginalised communities in higher education institutions as the combined result of socially discriminatory practices and insensitive responses from peers, faculty and administrators. One would have expected the draft to do a sustained analysis of this clearly problematic situation and offer recommendations appropriate to its urgency and gravity.

Instead, we have a sanitised assertion that students from “socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds require particular encouragement and support to make the transition to higher education successfully. …Universities and colleges must be required to set up high quality academic support to educationally disadvantaged groups and must be given adequate funds and academic resources to carry this out effectively” (page 241). This appears both exasperating and even offensive as there is a constant and self-conscious endorsement in the draft of “ancient” educational forms such as the caste-based gurukula, which is prominently eulogised among a list of “religious schools”.

Further, the term “Indian” as it is used to describe culture, civilisation, educational institutions and principles and the “India centred” vision of the draft make it difficult to escape the conclusion that the “Hindutva”/“Manuvadi” identification is being propagated as fundamental to Indian identity and nationhood. For example, in order to give legal studies the “necessary social relevance and acceptability”, framers of the law curriculum are advised to “fall back upon the culture and traditions of people, the history of legal institutions and the victory of ‘dharma’ over ‘adharma’ writ large in Indian literature and mythology” (para 16.7.1).

Promotion of Hindi & Sanskrit

Although references are made to the universities of Nalanda and Takshashila, and the draft’s goal is proclaimed to be “inspired” by both Nalanda and the Ivy League Schools, the plurality of India’s diverse sociocultural forms, languages, practices and beliefs are consistently downgraded by being referred to as “local”, “regional” and “State-level” to distinguish them from what is asserted as the dominant “Indian” identity. Thus, the draft recommends that promotion of Hindi and Sanskrit will be the Central government’s responsibility because these languages are not “restricted” to one State or community. The other Indian languages of the Eighth Schedule will remain only within the jurisdiction of their respective State governments. Perhaps this explains why the voluminous draft has been made available only in Hindi and English. Given the limited time to respond to the draft, it would be difficult even to arrange for translations in any other Indian language.

The treatment reserved for Sanskrit makes the neglect even clearer. Stated to be an “important modern” and functioning Indian language so that it can be propagated under the three-language formula along with Hindi and English, it is further privileged by claiming it as the classical basis for most other Indian languages. Its pre-eminence is thereby asserted over other “regional” or “community”-specific classical languages whereas, in fact, it is Brahmin dominance and the “standardisation” of other Prakrit languages that have contributed to their “sanskritisation” over centuries.

Multiple Agencies

Consider next the proposed role of multiple agencies, including religious, private corporate and/or philanthropic ones, in making provision for education. The need to find funding and “to find it quickly” seems to be a primary motive, but the experience so far with high fee-charging private schools and private universities has been less than inspiring as an important means for furthering access to education. The public-private partnership (PPP) model has become associated with the commercialisation of education. The draft’s solution is to substitute “Public Philanthropic Partnership” for the earlier PPP, but no attempt at regulation is proposed as it is suggested that “autonomy” will allow space for private “partners” to voluntarily rationalise costs and fee structures imposed on students.

Even low-budget private schools that are depleting public funds through reimbursement for enrolling students from the economically weaker sections under the RTE Act have proved to be inadequate as the majority of them have failed to meet the standards laid down in the Act and are now engaged in demanding that conformity to these norms be dropped so that students are not denied education. Significantly, the draft proposes that there should be no rigidity in observing the “input” norms prescribed by the RTE Act. The emphasis in government schools, it is argued, should be more on “outcomes” in order to improve learning skills.

Other agendas can also be well-served. Multiple agencies can run seamlessly with total autonomy within the structure of the public-funded system, but in what is truly novel for India today, they can also run parallel to it. In a little-noticed move, in February 2019 the Central government gave sanction to a private “Bharatiya Shiksha Board” (BSB), which had earlier been cleared by the Maharshi Sandipani Rashtriya Vedavidya Pratishthan (MSRVP), a fully funded autonomous body under the HRD Ministry working on promotion of “ved vidya”. The BSB will be funded, designed and managed by Ramdev’s Patanjali Yogpeeth. Like any other school board it will draft the syllabus, conduct examinations and issue certificates. Once established, it is likely to benefit educational institutions such as Acharyakulam, Vidya Bharati schools (run by the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh) and gurukulas run by the Arya Samaj, allowing them to sustain their model of education up to Class XII, something which school boards like the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) did not permit so far.

Alongside these institutional channels, the draft also recommends inducting “volunteers”, non-governmental organisations and “social workers” through a National Tutors Programme (NTP) for retaining a close tutoring relationship with government school students on the one hand and adults in the literacy/continuing education programme of the Adult Education Centres (AEC) on the other.

It is clear that such an open-ended system will be almost impossible to monitor both for its adherence to the goals set by the draft for the education system or for the public funds and assets that it will become possible to assign to these diverse private players.

Rashtriya Shiksha Aayog

The draft’s crucial recommendation for setting up a supreme policymaking and oversight body for the entire education system, the Rashtriya Shiksha Aayog (RSA), is a singularly unimaginative and centralising solution to the problem of holding together a nationwide system of public/private school complexes—the “smallest unit of management”, and colleges and universities that are autonomous and empowered to combine curricular, administrative and financial elements within a single entity. This demands credible accountability procedures, and once again the draft resorts to the unimaginative but market-friendly one-size-fits-all remedy. All provision of education, regulation, standard setting, accreditation and funding will be undertaken by separate entities.

The deception of having so generated a level playing field within a fundamentally unequal, unjust and discriminatory social system is clearly in need of the “authority” rather than the “vision” of the Prime Minister as Chairperson of the RSA, and within the Prime Minister’s Office, that is, within the leadership of whichever regime is currently occupying the highest level of political office, to keep it all in place. All the bodies determining “accountability” are, of course, to be appointed by the RSA.

However, constitutional provisions are violated by this concentration of power. Education comes under the Concurrent List, and the Centre cannot override the powers of the States either in determining or in regulating education which are the prerogative of State governments and legislatures both of which are finally answerable to the people of the State concerned.

The impact on the education system itself is also extremely negative. The necessary autonomy and independence of the education system from direct political or bureaucratic control is seriously undermined by the proposed RSA. The report of India’s first Education Commission, the Kothari Commission, emphasised that teachers and students constituted a “learning society” with “shared” (but not uniform) “goals” which they must be left to pursue with as much academic freedom as possible, retaining their independence from interference by political and market forces, from pressures of governmental, administrative and financial intervention, and the prejudices of socio-religious ideologies.

Unfortunately, the draft fails to defend the learning society on every one of these counts.

(The author is Member Presidium, All India Forum for Right to Education (AIFRTE); the article first appeared here and is bein published here on the express request of the author)
 

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SC/ST and OBC students receive aid under the Government of India’s Post-Matric Scholarship Scheme. Without the aid from the institution they would be required to pay in full the fees and mess charges, both of which have also been steeply increased recently. Reimbursement would be made only if and when the central government releases funds to the institution.

Financial aid has been stopped for OBC students since 2015, leading to an approximately 9% drop in admissions from this category.

The behavior of the authorities is completely arbitrary and untenable. The 2016-18 class found aid abruptly withdrawn in 2017. The 2017-19 class found aid withdrawn at the time of admissions. The students union demanded that the illegal decision be immediately revoked. Further they demanded that TISS continue to make timely provision for aid as otherwise SC/ST and OBC students would be unable to bear the financial burden of paying full fees.

TISS authorities initially ignored the demand but four days into the boycott action students were even denied the breakfast which had been prepared for them.

The vindictive reaction of the authorities to protests against the decision to deny financial aid to students who have a constitutional right towards affirmative action is an alarming indication of the speed with which the current central and state governments are privatizing higher education. It is most unfortunate that authorities and administrators at educational institutions are not resisting such actions but falling into line with them at the expense of corrective measures to promote social justice.

Higher education has been chronically starved of funds and pushed towards marketization over the past 25 years under pressure from the World Bank and then by the central government’s refusal to pull-out of the ill-conceived commitment made in 2005 to offer Higher Education as a ‘tradeable service’  for regulation by the World Trade Organization- General Agreement on Trade in Services (WTO-GATS). However, since 2014 decisions taken by the central and state governments are,
 

• Slashing educational budgets, introducing a 30%-70% division of market contribution and government grants for higher education, and aggressively forcing institutions of higher education to resort to fee hikes, to replace scholarships/ grants with loans, and resort to privatization, commercialization and marketization of the entire higher education sector;
• Denying the majority of young people in the relevant age group (i.e. 18 – 24 years) from gaining access to higher education. The report of the National Sample Survey (NSS) 2014, shows as many as 44.81 million Indian students are too poor to pursue higher education. The private expenditure per student on education for general courses has increased by 175.8%, and that for technical/professional and vocational courses has almost doubled from the 2007-08 NSS report to the 2014 NSS report;
• Targeting, with clear Manuvadi intention, SC/ST and OBC students whose access to higher education is already less than 10% as more than 90% cannot complete Class XII due to privatization policies that have led to dismantling of the state-funded school system.

The special rapporteur of the United Nation’s Human Rights Council on the right to education had clearly stated in a June 2015 report that “privatization negatively affects the right to education both as an entitlement and as empowerment” and “breeds exclusion and marginalization, with crippling effects on the fundamental principle of equality of opportunity in education.”

The latest decision of the central government accepting the UGC’s new formula for implementing SC/ST and OBC reservations in teaching posts, by calculating on a department-wise basis instead of on total posts in the university/ college, makes it clear that the TISS withholding of scholarship funds for SC/ST and OBC students is part of a strategy to significantly reduce the presence of these sections in higher education.

With SC faculty at a mere 7.22% and ST at only 2.2% of total faculty in India’s 716 universities and 38,056 colleges, it was expected that appointments to the currently 35% vacant faculty positions would play a major role in correcting this negative trend.

However, the new formula will significantly reduce representation of SC/ST and OBC faculty in all future recruitment drives. (Indian Express, 2 March 2018) AIFRTE strongly condemns these negative policy decisions which deny the SC/ST and OBC citizens their right to equality and social justice.

The government’s present strategy violates the Constitutional commitment to affirmative action and social justice. AIFRTE is forced to reach the unavoidable conclusion that this is calculated policy and is aimed at undoing even the limited attempts made earlier to prevent higher educational institutions from shutting their doors to those discriminated against on the basis of caste, creed, gender, tribal, and disability conditions.

AIFRTE therefore demands,
 

• That financial aid be immediately secured and provided to all SC/ST and OBC students at TISS;
• That scholarships be provided (without introducing discriminatory eligibility conditions such as NET) and enhanced for all students who are unable to afford the fees;
• That fees be strictly regulated in all higher educational institutions by including students union and faculty association representatives in all appropriate bodies so that no arbitrary decisions are implemented;
• That the Central Government immediately rejects the UGC’s `new’ formula. SC/ST and OBC reservation in faculty should continue to be calculated on the basis of the university/college taken as a whole.

—
*AIFRTE spokesperson
 

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Madhavargues that the Hindutva Right was truly representative of the anti-imperialist impulse, not because it did anything to contribute to the freedom struggle since its leaders openly collaborated with their colonial masters,but because “in a way India, like America,” is “essentially a nation with a conservative ethos”. Hence they must be accepted as natural heirs to the courageous struggle extending over more than a century in which other forces and sections of Indians sacrificed their lives for the cause andidea of freedom.

Madhav’s statements are like declarations made to a fawning shakha gathering where no one would contest or question his ill-informed and unsubstantiated pronouncements.He claims thateminent leaders of the `humble’ Indian, “from Swami Vivekananda to Annie Besant to Mahatma Gandhi”, (the latest, one presumes, would beNarendraModi), were always enamoured of the “genius of our country, which is rooted in its religio-social institutions like state, family, caste, guru and festival. . . .Naturally at the advent of independence we ought to have had a leadership that understood and appreciated the value of this Indian genius. . . .Unfortunatelyat the dawn of our independence”, we had Jawaharlal Nehru who represented “the colonisers view while Gandhi became the voice of native wisdom”.

After this claim one wonders why the Hindu Mahasabha’s V.D. Savarkar masterminded and organised, as then Home Minister Sardar Patel officially stated, a group including RSS cadre like Nathu Ram Godse, to systematically plan the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. They succeeded at the sixth attempt.The RSS is known to have distributed sweets to celebrate the silencing of this `voice of native wisdom’.

Even in these days of “post-truth” and fake news, Ram Madhav’s version of the role oftwo leading figures of the nationalmovement is hard to swallow. Accusing Nehru of adhering to the `colonizers views’ isindeed astonishing.For Nehru, a prominent leader of thefreedom struggle, had a perspicacious understanding of the role of colonialism not just in the national arena in India but as an international system that was an instrument for the exploitation of the entire Asian and African region.His role in utilising the contradictions between international  capital, the erstwhile colonial powers, and the rising socialist states in order to forge ties with the latter and chart a path of relatively independent development in India, building up a public sector at the `commanding heights’ of the economy, is part of modern India’s history.  Ram Madhav’s attempt to divert from the significant influence exerted by this revolutionary ideology in determining the course and content of India’s freedom struggle, not just in Nehru’s conception of an independent India but in Gandhi’s perspective which was deeply inspired by Russian anarchist thinkers like Tolstoy, is a hopelessly prejudiced ideological construct.

With a select group of nationalist leaders from other countries, Nehru’s international contribution to uniting and strengthening the newly independent nation-states of Asia, Africa and parts of Europe in the non-aligned movement prevented their being absorbed in either the imperialist or the socialist camps,thereby allowing them to play an important progressive role in world affairs.The anti-colonial impact of this movement, initiatedand sustained by the political leadership of independent India, is too well-known to be dismissed by the canards now being spread by RSS functionaries.

Gandhi and Nehru often disagreed but had enormous respect and confidence in each other’s opinions and abilities to further the anti-colonial struggle. In fact, at crucial phases when the leadership question came to the forefront, Gandhi unequivocally expressed his support for Jawaharlal Nehru. This might seem incomprehensible toRam Madhavwhose entire experience of politics has been within the doctrinal confines of the `shakha’, and the non-transparent coterie functioning of Nagpur’s circle of RSS leaders, but it comes as no surprise to those who are familiar with the free exchanges between the plurality of views and ideologies united within the coalition of anti-colonial patriotic forces represented by the Indian National Congress at the time.

Ram Madhav prominently lists`caste’ as evidence of the` genius’ of the country. In that case, he  must certainly regard Dr. BhimRaoAmbedkar as being, in his opinion, yet another leader that we were `unfortunate’ enough to have at the `dawn’ of independence. Dr. Ambedkar views on caste are crystal clear and the Annihilation of Caste, the title of one of his major writings, was always his goal. Like Nehru, Ambedkar too rejected the village as the basic unit of India’s future democratic structure. A leading architect of the Indian Constitution he insisted that the individual must be the basic unit of Indian democracy, the true holder and recipient of its rights and benefits, as the village was itself the site of the worst form of oppression, caste oppression. Of course since the RSS-led Modi government is currently trying to appropriate BabasahebAmbedkar to attract a Dalit vote-bank, one cannot expect Madhav to embark on an honest expression of his fundamental conflict with Ambedkar’s ideas. Nothing along the lines of the open Gandhi-Nehru debates.

A post script on Ram Mahdav’s use of terms like `advent’ and `dawn’ for independence having `arrived’ like a natural phenomenon, justas day follows night. No doubt it happened that way for the RSS which only sought to obstruct but never to participate in the anti-colonial struggle against British rule.

However, those who fought for independence, risking life, limb and personal comforts; who spent years in British jails at the cost of their health; who were hanged at the infamous Kala Panicentral jail in the Andaman’s (unlike Savarkar who slavishly bowed before the foreign rulers and bought his freedom with servile letters of apology); the youthful Bhagat Singh, Raj Guru and Chandrashekhar Azad who went to the gallows with revolutionary slogans of `InquilabZindabad’ on their lips; they knew the price of the freedom they helped secure for their countrymen, women and children. Freedom from British imperialism demanded agency and they willingly sacrificed themselves to become catalysts of the struggles that brought about India’s independence.
 

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