Are cartoons from the past necessary in the text books of the present?

Anyone who has been following the news in India will be familiar with the row that has been raised by the incorporation of a cartoon in a newspaper by Shankar from the year 1949 into a class XII NCERT text book of today.  The row led to the vandalizing of the offices of one of the members of the NCERT committee and resignation of the two people involved in the creating of the guidelines for the said textbook.  Both the persons are fairly well known academicians with reasonable credentials.  The politicians have a raised a ruckus over the cartoon since it depicts the impatience of Jawaharlal Nehru with the slow progress of the draft committee headed by B R Ambedkar. Since then there have been many articles and interviews with eminent academicians who have contended against the perceptions of politicians that young adults are incapable of understanding the true meaning of things and therefore can be misled into believing the wrong things and therefore the offending cartoon must go.  In retaliation the academia has said that young adults are fully capable of judging things for themselves and that it is necessary to inculcate a sense of humour in all concerned. Some have even said that a picture speaks more than a thousand words and therefore there is nothing wrong with cartoons in text books and in fact they were much required.

Of the two people who resigned over this issue, Prof. Suhas Palshikar (it was his office that was vandalized) wrote a piece in the Hindu a few days ago defending the insertion of the said cartoon into the lesson.  I read the article a couple of times and I was completely disappointed with the content of the article.  There was nothing in the article that read as a viable defence of the cartoon in the textbook.  In fact, Prof. Palshikar, circumlocuted around how Ambedkar was also a critic of Buddhism and how he cannot be reduced to only one thing which is the defence of the rights of the dalits alone.  In my opinion this had very little to do with the hue and cry that were talking about the denigration of a leader (by some) and of both leaders involved (by a few others).  This circumlocution did not add to any clarity of any kind about the issue.  Dr. Yogendra Yadav the other person who resigned has maintained a stoic silence. 

Today's Hindu carried a piece on the subject by Prof. Prabhat Patnaik a well known economist of the country.  Well I do not share the ideological vantage point that Prof. Patnaik uses for his understanding of things, I have always had great respect for his scholarship and learning.  In fact while studying at the JNU I made it a point to attend his classes whenever I could even though I was not a student of Economics.  His perspectives have always been crystal clear and they are reflected in his writing as well.  And today's article was no different.  The ability of Prof. Patnaik to separate the wheat from the chaff has laid bare some of the issues that actually constitute the noise around the issue.  Prof. Patnaik is very right in saying that things such as creativity, necessity of cartoons in textbooks, freedom of the academia are all issues that skirt the main issue. In his true and mature style Prof. Patnaik has asked the question of how freedom of academia (consisting of people not directly accountable to the people) can be prioritised over that of the Members of Parliament who are elected by the people on the basis one person/one vote (I mention this for a reason which will become evident in the subsequent lines of this post) and are therefore accountable to those who have voted for them. He also questioned, and very rightly, the objectivity of academicians who more often than not carry all the prejudices that their positions in society carry.  He also pointed out rather starkly but in an extremely dignified manner the fact that circa 1949 dalit voices in the country were not yet in a position to be made themselves heard and that in 2012 all that has changed.  This is the actual point.  Those supporting the academicians and those opposing them are all actually talking about B R Ambedkar's position as a dalit leader and Nehru as an upper caste politician criticising him and Shankar drawing a cartoon around this.  So circumlocution has been happening because nobody seems to be willing to take the bull by the horns.  

At this point I would like to say that by making Ambedkar an icon of the dalits his status has also become that of a holy cow that is beyond and above all criticism.  But that is not and need not be contended against. What is more important is why should this controversy become a part of education? What purpose do cartoons serve in textbooks?  I went to school and there never were any cartoons in books and I do not believe that my education is deficient in anyway.  And as very correctly pointed out by Prof. Patnaik what purpose does sense humour serve in education?  Is that an integral part of the curriculum or more importantly should it be a part of the curriculum and if so why?

But I do have a small bone to pick with Prof. Patnaik. And that concerns the issue of accountability.  In theory, elected representatives are accountable to their constituents, but in reality in India as in most parts of the world they are not.  So Prof. Patnaik's observations about a "political class" are not entirely accurate.  Whether he likes it or not, politicians cutting across all lines watch out for each other, irrespective of their public proclamations.  I would say Prof. Patnaik's observations pitting the ideal scenario against the actual situation and that for me is unsustainable.  In his glorifying the idea of one person/one vote Prof. Patnaik has conveniently ignored the problems of the simple majority system that is followed in India and in most democracies of the world. I do not need to tell you this but I will put up a simple example here.  The size of the constituency (imaginary) is 100 people and there are two candidates A and B contesting an election from this constituency.  Let us say candidate A gets 51 votes while B gets 49 votes.  In a simple majority system A represents the whole constituency despite being opposed by a number of people who almost equal those who supported him.  A look at the data available in India about elections shows that parties have come into power rarely with the support of even 50% of voters and sometimes the figure is as low as 34%.  Prof. Patnaik has by drawing the analogy of Babu Rao Hazare's movement and the support it garnered from the middle classes has indicted the middle classes as the cause behind the controversy.  I myself am against the movement of Hazare and his cronies and I believe that they are methodically undermining institutions.  But this situation is not analogous to Hazare's movement and its agenda.  I personally think Prof. Patnaik could have made his points without getting dragged into bigger issues that only confuse people more than clarify.

I believe that the middle class and the rich class in India have been most irresponsible towards the society in which they live and therefore have successfully undermined a solidarity that should be the backbone of the society in which we all live.  And however much we criticize this deliberate and wanton abandoning of their social responsibilities by the rich and middle classes it is not enough.  But the question here is not about the perceptions of the middle class and therefore I believe that while doing the right thing Prof. Patnaik has undermined his own argument by trying to support it with issues of class.  In India the middle class is not a monolith nor is it homogeneous.  In a country where caste matters more than anything it is not possible to talk about a class.  The membership to the middle class as an economic entity has been rising and there are people from the not so upper castes and some lower castes who do belong to the middle class in terms of their incomes and their aspirations.  They would not support the vilification of Ambedkar so this is not a category to be brought out at all.  I request you to read the piece written by Prof. Patnaik (despite my criticism about a couple of aspects) since it is an excellent a lucid piece of writing and make your opinions on it and the issue it addresses.  For the record, I believe that there is no need for cartoons in textbooks, especially at a time when caste identities have become important (sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly).

P.S: Not proof read, please excuse errors of syntax and spelling.

Education in India is not only illiberal but also completely meaningless

I hope to keep this post really short.  However, the key word there is hope and not promise.  My arguments about Indian society and its educational system becoming illiberal have been vindicated by some unbelievable developments concerning the publication in an NCERT text book of a cartoon from 1948 in which the cartoonist has depicted the movement towards creating a new constitution as the slow movement of a snail.  In that particular cartoon there are references to Ambedkar and Nehru. And now that Ambedkar has been elevated to the status of a God, there has been a furore about it and some of the members of the text book committee have resigned and have been attacked by various lumpen elements of Indian society.  Educational institutions and their functioning has been disrupted and academicians who normally lead non-descript lives have started making headlines of newspapers.  What kind of a society are we if we cannot poke a little fun at ourselves and have a good laugh?  The abhorrent caste system has now been inverted, with those at the bottom in the past now at the top and those at the top now at the bottom.  What kind of emancipation is this? Instead of doing away the terrible system that has stratified society and humiliated generations we have only succeeded in iterating a newer version of the same.  

Another development that I would like to comment on is that the topper of the Union Public Service Commission's recruitment is a woman, which is very good.  But she is a qualified MBBS doctor from no less an institution that AIIMS in New Delhi which is very bad.  For those of you still trying to understand what I am saying here is the explanation.  Education in India, especially higher education is very subsidized.  Every student who goes through the educational process for professional courses in higher education is subsidized to the tune of millions of rupees.  Now the top ranker of the said exam studied medicine in arguably the best medical education providing institution in India.  By quitting medicine and become a general administrator the lady in question apart from wasting the nation's money (which was used for subsidizing her education) has also made sure that there is one less qualified medical practitioner.  That means that someone who could have studied to become a doctor and may have become a good doctor probably was deprived of that medical education which would have been of use to the country. 

This yet again vindicates what I have been saying about the Indian education system.  It just trains students to crack entrance examinations without gaining any substantial knowledge.  So if you take the case of this AIIMS student who has spurned her medical education, you can see the story of a person who had no interest in medicine being forced to study it by her parents or whoever and when she gets an opportunity to dump it, she does so without too much of a problem (I assume).  If she was confident about her ability as a doctor and enjoyed being one, she would not have thought about the Civil Services examinations at all.  So now let us take this story one more step forward.  What if the said person is only good at cracking entrance exams?  She could very well have cracked the Civil Services exam but just as she did not have confidence or attitude towards practicing medicine she suddenly finds that she has no attitude for administration either.  Then what?  You take your own thoughts forward from there.

However, I would like all of you to ponder upon this question?  Do we need so many engineering graduates and people unfit for medicine becoming doctors?  Ultimately all of them are writing the civil services exams.  The third ranked person this year is an engineer.  And when some journalist asked him what his plan B was if he did not crack the civil services exams, he said he was focussed singularly on the civil services exams and therefore there was no plan B.  So what was this person doing studying engineering?  Professional courses attract greater subsidies from the government and at the end of them engineers, doctors, lawyers take the UPSC examination with Sociology, Public Administration, Anthropology as their subjects why did they study these professional courses at all?  Why could they not have done a BA which would have cost the tax payer less money to pay for subsidies and helped the government bring more deprived and needy children into the education system.  So I end by reiterating what I have always been saying.  The government should take over education from the Primary to the PhD level.  It should provide it free of cost to all citizens.  It should cut engineering seats by 90% and it should take undertakings from those who pursue professional courses that they will take up research and teaching in their professions.  Look at what happened to the IITs.  They have become graduate shops.  Where is research happening in engineering and medicine?  In the medical field sundry doctors are simply following the protocols laid down by the WHO which is controlled by medical research that is happening mainly in America and to an extent in Europe.  Most of the big contracts for engineering go to foreign companies because Indian companies do not have the knowledge base to take up challenging projects.  Our doctors and engineers are nothing but glorified technicians who are following protocols laid down in other countries and perpetrated across the world through world bodies.  Think about it, especially the young people among you who think the world would shut down without your services in call centres and BPOs. Those who think along those lines are suffering from a delusional and completely false sense of entitlement.

Time to reform the illiberal education system in India

Through the medium of this blog  I have been critiquing the education system that India follows many a time.  My main complaint has been that the system is primarily there now to serve commercial purposes and nothing more.  If some people are fortunate, they may get educated; but most are not and therefore all they get is a degree without the supporting knowledge.  I have been saying that India is producing a horde of graduates and post-graduates none of whom are ultimately employable.  And that is a sad thing since for all the claims that India is the second fastest growing economy in the world behind China and that India is one of the drivers of the global economy, one of the realities of India is that a vast majority of people are still untouched by any form of development and that even for the middle classes of the country, education is ultimately a tool for employment.  And today's education system by not providing any kind of education to the people who require it, is actually nothing more than a white elephant on the economy of the country.

It has been my consistent argument that education in India should have been the sole responsibility of the State right from the primary level to the highest level and that it should have been provided free of cost. I have argued that students should go to the same government run schools, wear uniform and grow up without elitism creeping in.  I have also been arguing that as long as private schools and colleges are allowed to run, they would concentrate on their primary motive which is to make profit and in order to do so they have been creating stupid agendas which do not pay any attention to the all round development of a child.  Schools and colleges that are run out of commercial complexes with no playgrounds and other spaces in which co-curricular activities can take place and widen the horizons of students, are creating students who are atrophied in their mental growth.  In the southern part of India and especially in the State of Andhra Pradesh, one sees that students are "oriented" into IIT or medicine and modus operandi of these schools that provide this orientation is to make a student a target of consistent and long hours of bombarding with questions and answers.  This process usually starts in the morning at 6 AM and goes on till 9 PM.  The student is not left with any time for any other activity so these students do not get to read any news and nor do they understand its importance, they do not play any games or participate in any sporting activity and are only used to robotic automaton conformity.  They are incapable of thinking on their own and have to be spoon fed information which they will re-produce in conditions that are pre-determined.  By pre-determined conditions I mean tests and the environment in which they are held.  You change the conditions and you will find the student is not really able cope up with the changed environment.

It is here that the illiberalism of Indian education comes into being and is perpetuated by three parties.  The disinterested State is the first, the private providers of education who tries to make their institutions look the most desirable for admission projecting to parents that they dedicate all their efforts for securing the future of the child (though in reality it is profitability of their own institution that is the only criterion) and the third is the parents themselves.  Most often parents thrust their ambitions onto their children without consideration for the children's aptitude, interest and inclination.  That there are hordes of engineers today who cannot find employment in anything other than information technology companies (if at all they can find employment that is) and medical doctors who if at all find employment, have to work as duty doctors in corporate hospitals for paltry salaries of Rs. 10,000 per month, is indication that all this brain washing of students does not work and therefore the aspirations of parents are not fulfilled.  Yet there is no change in the thinking of parents, all of whom operate on the assumption that failure of the child and the consequent dashing of the aspirations of the parents is a phenomenon that is reserved for others and not them. This idiotic belief is akin to the idea that death shall come only to others and not to me.  This lack of enlightenment among parents is what leads to this unfortunate illiberalism in education, one which is opportunistically used by the capitalist-educator who feeds of the parents' unenlightened system of beliefs.

One of the good points of the traditional Indian social system has been that it teaches the young to respect their elders.  This good point has now been converted by stupid parents to impose their views and aspirations on their offspring without considering the idea that they the offspring are also organic entities possessing certain qualities, which if allowed to come out would shine and if stifled would fail.  To see the child as an extension of the self is violation of the rights and entitlements of a person.  And that is illiberalism at its highest.  One of the most striking features of illiberalism can be found in the community of social science teachers.  In my own experience, with the exception of one or two social science teachers all others uniformly expect their children to become engineers or doctors just like every other parent.  In this part of the country there are certain teachers who are strong supporters of the idea that students should have a right to participate in democratic agitations and encourage students to participate in political movements.  But these very same teachers are keen to protect their students from such democracy, and look for colleges and universities outside of Andhra  Pradesh to educate their students so that they do not get disturbed by these democratic agitations.  This selective application of rules for us as against the others is to me the highest form of selfishness where people are selectively discriminated against.

Apart from this type of teacher there is also the other type; one who is so convinced about one's own enlightenment that he or she believes that he or she should decide what is good for the student.  This self-aggrandized teacher believes that the student will come up in life only if guidance is given to them.  So there are those who will decide what goes into curriculum and how it should be taught.  While I do not contest the right of the teachers to prepare curriculum, I certainly question things such as incorporation of mathematics and physical sciences into social sciences courses and drastic things such as a course should be taught only from one ideological point of view and not from any other since all other ideologies are wrong (according to the teacher).  This is nothing less than indoctrination and not giving the student to make an informed choice about the world view or the vantage from which they would choose to view the world.  There is nothing wrong in instructing students on the shortcomings of particular ideologies but to decide that they do not need to know anything about those ideologies is morally unsustainable.  The University Grants Commission of India, according to hearsay (and therefore this should not be taken as true) is considering the idea that there should be blurring of lines between social sciences, mathematics, physical sciences and biological sciences so that a student gets to learn all.  In my view, if this is indeed true, this will be stupidity of a monumental kind which will destroy education in India completely.

What I have in my own mind is something radically different from this.  I believe that schooling is the most important stage in the life of a person and if one finds education repugnant at this level then they will carry these memories with them for the rest of the life and therefore could become educationally challenged which in India means that a lack of fitness for employment.  My own experience with myself and with a lot of students has been that some kinds of minds are suited to some kinds of disciplines and these are obvious from the time that they get into their teens. I therefore believe that all early schooling should be devoid of specific curriculum and they should be allowed to experiment with various things pertaining to the various walks of life.  Specialized curriculum with syllabus made up of disciplinary content should come into being only at the junior college level.  This will spare the students the agony of learning things that they will never use in their life and forget that information the day after they take their examination.  I have in my life done simple equations, simultaneous equations, integral and differential calculus, I have studied the innards of frogs, earthworms and cockroaches and today none of that is useful to me in what I do.  So why make students agonize over something that they cannot do, if in the end, that is not going to impact on their lives in anyway?  To most people mathematics that includes additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions would be fine to live life.  Teach that maths to those who have no aptitude for engineering or the pursuit of mathematics at a higher level.  Similarly with the biological sciences and the social sciences.  An introduction to those aspects of social sciences and biological sciences that have some significance to daily lives would be adequate, for those students who do not have an aptitude for these courses.  Such education in my opinion would allow the student to concentrate upon things that they like and enjoy studying, and when people pursue what they enjoy, then they usually do well.  And here I rest my case.

Living in an illiberal Indian Society

There have been a number of reasons that have directed me into the line of thinking that is indicated by the title of the post.  Some of the most recent concerns have stemmed out of the fact that Indian society is increasingly showing two contradictory tendencies; indifference to others lives at one level and intrusion into the lives of others, unnecessarily, at another level.  It seems somehow that every individual is somehow trying to influence society into thinking in his/her way and this desire to influence is based in a delusional belief that the system of beliefs that he/she holds are universally and morally superior to those whose systems of belief may not correspond with his/hers.  Urban areas are concrete jungles, with open spaces and small houses that housed a handful of people being replaced by gargantuan apartment blocks that are not only an eyesore but also impediments to healthy and convenient living.  I shall not talk about this aspect in this post because that is not the concern of the post.  Nevertheless the reason why I invoke this category is that apartments are congested spaces where hundreds and in some instances thousands of people living in extremely close proximity without knowing who their neighbours are or caring for the problems that the other people in the building maybe facing and in the process requiring some help.  We have learnt to live by conveniently ignoring other people's problems and by dissolving social solidarity at the inter-personal and inter-family levels.

On the other hand however there is this phenomenon of moral posturing and policing where usually the lumpen elements of society make the most intimate of a person's concerns their own and interfere in ways which are not only embarrassing and irritating but criminally reprehensible as well.  This is a fascist tendency that has crept into Indian society with various self proclaimed individuals and groups taking up cudgels on behalf of a "perceived" culture and trying to protect it from its enemies.  The enemy is the cultural other who is defined by the religious community that s/he belongs to.  While I have consistently held the belief that in India there is no such thing as Hinduism (for me various cosmologies that have some points of intersection based in concurrence have been clubbed together to create a neologism called Hinduism) culturally speaking, political developments in the country have used this neologism to try and satisfy some political expediencies that relate to the capture and retention of power.  What is important is that here power is not a means to an end but an end in itself.  The attempt to create a fache out of a synecdoche has unleashed the illiberalism that has now become the norm of Indian society.  Despite there being many disadvantages with the cosmology based system of life which was manipulated by the Brahmins to their advantage there is still was a possibility of people living some aspects of their lives, mainly the intimate ones, by determining them the way they wanted to.  This is what Gandhi called individual autonomy in a system of social solidarity and the cosmologies that have been brought together to create a fache today have become monstrosities that destroy not only individual autonomy but social solidarity as well.

This neologism called Hinduism which manifests itself as this fache is always trying to control members of its own denomination by "protecting" them from the perceived other which is the other religious groupings.  Here in lies a tragedy of epic proportions.  While what have been designated as "Abrahamic Religions" have always tried to create a monolithic structure with an unambiguous and singular God and therefore qualify to be classified as religions because of this monotheistic aspect, what was caste cosmology did not have this feature of monotheism.  In fact, with good reason the Adi Shankaracharya has been called an atheist simply because for him there is no entity that is singular and different from the human spirit. One could argue that caste cosmologies if at all they are theistic, are either pan-theistic or poly theistic, an aspect of Indian society that has amused Westerners so much that they have lampooned the existence of so many Gods.  The ideal course of action would have been to ignore these illiterate comments and concentrated on reform in the caste system.  Instead of doing that, the neologism called Hinduism became a fache which became reactionary and revivalist and in doing so unleashed newer forms of discrimination and illiberalism while maintaining the other  traditional schisms that have been part of Indian society for centuries.  While more people from the discriminated sections fight to break the fache, the reactionary elements meet those attempts with bigotry that tries to strengthen the fache.  So reform and revival clash, not in the rational and deliberative phase, but in the actual physical realm.  This clash does not involve the majority of people, it is among the lumpen elements of that claim to side reform or revival that the clash takes place.

A reactionary and belligerent fache is kept alive despite the internal clash between reform and revival by always taking attentions to other easily available options of exclusion from the fache.  The other is members of other religions and to show the differences between religious practices is a fairly simple and straightforward process.  But the highlighting of differences in religious practices is not sufficient enough in strength to keep the fache tight and unified.  It is for that reason that religious practices spill out into the open, into the cultural space which at one level is a physical space that has people who are engaged in various forms of social transaction.  It is by disturbing this transaction by highlighting difference that what should otherwise be a matter of individual preference becomes the concern of many.  The best example of spilling over into real time cultural space is taking religious practices onto the street where they are bound to disturb normal life.  Bal Gangadhar Tilak may have created the now infamous Ganesh processions that dote Mumbai, Pune and Hyderabad to bring together members from various castes onto one platform to unite against the British. His choice of Ganesh or Ganapati as the God had to do with the fact that this God figured in all the various pantheons of Gods that different castes had.  By making Ganesh Chaturthi a festival that would be celebrated in public over a period of nine days, Tilak was trying to bring some unity in the area that was under the hegemony of the very orthodox Chitpavan Brahmins. Nearly a century after the practice was begun by Tilak it is impossible for me to actually evaluate if this particular practice contributed to any nationalism and unity but it is very clear that this practice has now entered the space of social disharmony.  The festival is controlled by the politicians and their henchmen who ensure that even those who do not want to be a part of this process at best can spectate silently.

These attempts from one fache are countered by others by adopting similar tactics.  Since religion is sacred anything done in its name cannot be questioned.  So in cities like Hyderabad newer processions were created by those in charge of the Islamic fache and one of them is a "pankha juloos" or procession of fans.  Ceiling fans are used in this procession for reasons that are completely incomprehensible to me.  Now the Christians have started an Easter procession carrying flags saying "Run for Jesus" while they are actually riding motorcycles or driving cars.  Newer processions have come into being in the Hindu fache where people now celebrate Hanuman Jayanti, the birthday of God Hanuman.  Interestingly the choice of Hanuman has everything to do with the fact that he too figures in all the pantheons of Gods that exist among various caste groupings. Interestingly enough another procession that is now a regular phenomenon is the Dussehra procession involving the female deity Durga.  I say this is interesting because in all pantheons of Gods there are various female deities who are generically called "Amma" or "Ma" which simply means mother.  Durga is Ma Durga and therefore involving everyone.  Islam has countered this with various processions on Milad un Nabi the birthday of Prophet Mohammed, where Muslim youth drive around on motorcycles with green flags in hand.  

The contradiction here is that the sacred is invoked in order to perpetuate most unsacred and politically divisive agendas.  However, what concerns me here is the fact that this tendency of illiberalism is growing and restricting the freedoms and autonomy that various people are entitled to constitutionally and civilisationally.  An illiberal society that is tending to become fascist is also uncivil and unconstitutional apart from being an affront on the sensibilities of rational and sensible people. While it is not really possible to predict the exact consequences of this illiberalism, what can definitely be prognosticated is a society and nation that will be increasingly burdened with violence and lack of peace.

I will now conclude this piece by grinding one of my favourite axes. People who designate themselves as intellectuals and teaching professionals talk of the ills of Indian society as being a result of liberalism.  In doing so they are unwittingly strengthening the hands of the conservative fascists who use the idea of liberalism as being an enemy of the people.  I am not defending liberalism here, but the critique of society cannot just concentrate on the economic damages brought out by a liberalized economy, but should penetrate into those socio-cultural spaces that have started harbouring anti social elements who want to create religion based faches.  If intellectuals and teachers subscribe to the minimal doctrine of being "politically right" and therefore not engage in discourse about the illiberalism of Indian society, then their conversations are very much in the domain of the imaginary and they will be conversations that have no bearing on society and therefore just another drain on the country's resources.

The prognosis of India's democracy based on its electoral and social politics-II

What I intended to write yesterday had become too long and therefore I broke the piece into two.  This post is a continuation of the arguments that I had begun yesterday, the substance of which is that Indian democracy is definitely in a crisis thanks to the nature of politics which are prevalent in society and also due to the nature of leadership of political parties.  Indian society which has always been stratified is now witnessing a kind of politics that is very much akin to marketing where there are clearly defined target-market strategies and any agenda of development is now just for lip service while the real agenda is the perpetuation of personal gain by politicians who have primarily started using caste as the variable for targetting electorates.  With the absence of any viable party or politician who can see beyond immediate gains, Indian politics and along with Indian democracy have reached a precipice which in my opinion is already a point from which there is no turning back.  Since politics are more or less the exclusive prerogative of those who have the two Ms, meaning money and muscle it is absolutely impossible that anybody sensible can enter Indian politics and make a difference to the country. Therefore there are large scale systemic changes, Indian democracy could become the greatest enemy of its people.

It is for this reason that I have been advocating the idea of supplementing electoral democracy with discursive or deliberative democracy.  I would like to bring to your attention that it was not just writing that I was doing but also trying to create discussion groups in colonies where citizens from all walks of life would meet without their paying heed to their economic status and their professions.  I must confess that the upper caste and upper classes are completely against this idea saying indirectly that it would be an affront to their social position and perceived self image to give the same weightage to the arguments of someone who was a sweeper, janitor or a maid servant.  Most, actually all uniformly believed that the problem with Indian democracy or democracy for that matter is that it involves the illiterate, uneducated and senseless hoi polloi and that they are responsible for the kind of leaders that we have in India today.  It is therefore not very surprising that they believe that there can be no such thing as a deliberative democracy that aims for the common good of all through the use of what Immanuel Kant had called the Good Will.  Some of the upper caste groupings which have actually become upper castes (they like to refer to themselves as forward castes) through a process of Sanskritisation that the sociologist MN Srinivas talked about, like to believe that for Indian democracy to be meaningful there should be the presence of upper caste leaders who take token support from the backward and lower caste leaders (by co-opting the latter into the money making process) and rule the country.  Again to believe that all upper castes are unified is absolutely nonsensical so each upper caste wants to have its own members in the charmed ruling circles so that their caste groupings benefit the most.

It is pertinent to point out here that I was once at a seminar where two scholars from two different castes in the Scheduled Castes list fought over the necessity for categorizing scheduled castes differently and providing them reservations in accordance with the numbers.  While one professor argued that this kind of categorization would lead to the dispensation of social justice the other believed that this would lead to the scheduled castes being divided and dominated by OBCs and upper castes.  The argument went on for sometime when I intervened and said that it perhaps time for the SCs and OBCs to ask for reservations even for the upper castes depending upon their population percentage in the entire country and people should apply for seats in schools, colleges and also for jobs competing with members of their own castes, be they upper or lower.  This was anyway the agenda of Periyar and the Justice Party who argued that two percent of the population of the Madras Presidency comprised of Brahmins but they were taking 98% of the jobs.  Nearly a century later the country seems to be still stuck in the same morass that it was once stuck in.  And things will continue to the same if the agenda of creating vote banks on the basis of castes and religious communities is not somehow countered.  It is indeed very disheartening to see that castes have crept into Islam and Christianity.  I was shocked to see a classification among Muslims which says Ansari surname holders are weavers, Qureishis are butchers etc.  The real meaning of those terms is very different but now it is being argued that people who converted from Hinduism to Islam started using certain surnames that now identify them as a certain caste.  The same is true of Christianity with an increasing crescendo among Christians claiming to be dalit Christians.  It is therefore wrong to assume that caste stratification is only among the Hindus.

But to return to the point I am making, the politicians create vote banks along caste lines irrespective or religion and in some cases use religion itself and these vote banks will remain alive only if they are kept backward.  The nature of this realpolitik has seen cracks in Indian society widening into crevasses into which the people of this country will fall.  The exceedingly disheartening and sad aspect of Indian society today is that people irrespective of their social and economic status are uniformly unenlightened.  I have many times said that the rich and the middle classes in India which coincide with upper castes sometimes have been irresponsible towards their own society and therefore schisms are becoming chasms.  However, the upwardly mobile from the backward sections of society (I refuse to use the term caste here because in this context it is meaningless and if you read on you will understand why I say it is meaningless) do precious little for people of their own once their upward mobility starts.  It is like the Indians who go to the USA believing that they have left behind their useless brethren in filth and squalor so will try to identify with the white Anglo-Saxon protestant population of that country.  Those people who have taken benefits meant for the backward sections for two generations should voluntarily give up their using of those privileges so that the benefits that come with them should percolate to people who after 65 years of independence are living in conditions which are for them not at all different from the pre-independence days.  That is why I was aghast when I learnt the Indian government is also collecting caste data along with census data.  Needless to say this data will be used by politicians and political parties for further dividing the people of the country for their own purposes.

Education should be provided only by the State in schools that it runs.  Any kind of private players should be forbidden from entering the education sector at any level.  Every child in India should go to a school which makes uniform mandatory and does not recognize the social and economic status of parents.  Only such a beginning can change things in this country.  The honourable Supreme Court of India has upheld the Right to Education and has said that even private schools should reserve 25% of seats for the underprivileged sections of society.  Immediately private school managements have said that the government will not reimburse fees and therefore they will look at legal options to challenge the judgement.  As long as there are private players in the field they will work only for profit even though their schools are registered as non-profit making educational societies.  Private schools mirror the divisions in society and promote elitism and therefore education should be provided by the State alone without asking questions of caste, creed and religion.  The State must provide free education till the doctoral level because that is the only way in which the privileged will learn to live with the underprivileged and treat them as their equals. 

But this is something that can only happen in the long term.  In the short term electoral reforms must be enacted to ensure that the executive is free from the legislature.  One need not go the American way, there is also the French way where the President is directly elected by the people.  Coalition politics can make scoundrels out of gentlemen since the expediences of realpolitik make it mandatory to make moral compromises in order to continue in power.  From where I stand, and from what I wrote it will appear that I am despondent, which I am.  It may also appear that I have a sense of hopelessness, which I don't.  What is the reason for my optimism?  I believe that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and in that truth has a way of triumphing.  Ask yourselves how many people have successfully hidden lies from all for all the time.  You will see that there is not one such example.  Indian society has thrown up great human beings when it seemed that things were hopeless.  Mohandas Gandhi, Bheem Rao Ambedkar, Joti Rao Phule, Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri et al have done good for the country when it was needed.  The future too will throw up equally great people and that is the root of my optimism. Truth cannot be suppressed and therefore it will triumph.  Jai Hind. 

The prognosis of India's democracy based on its electoral and social politics-I

There have been many people who have asked me as to why I did not write blog piece on the elections that brought the Samajwadi Party to power in UP and Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal.  Some also said that I did not express any opinions on the by polls in Andhra Pradesh and some close friends have even asked me if I ignored the results simply because the TRS has done well and I stand for leaving Andhra Pradesh as it is.  I ignored these comments for a long while since they had nothing to do with why I was not writing about these developments.  But the number of questioners has increased and I therefore decided to respond to them with this post.  If someone were to know why I did not write before the answer for me is a no brainer.  There is absolutely no need to write about them since they do not represent anything positive in Indian politics.  But off late I am being forced to think about governance in this country because the nature of coalition politics has become such that two bit political parties who have less than a handful members in the Parliament are dictating what should be done and what should not be done.  While opposition and checks and balances are an absolute necessity for a vibrant and functional democracy, too much of interference and unnecessary opposition to things become obstacles to governance and that is what is happening now in India.  I therefore decided that I will break my silence over this and actually get down to writing something about what we can expect in the future of India.

First of all let us take the election results.  What to do they indicate?  The futility of electoral politics.  Look at the case of Tamil Nadu.  Jayalalitha and the AIADMK have snatched victory from the DMK who had previously snatched victory from the AIADMK.  In effect, what we are seeing there is a phenomenon of people voting against a party rather than for a party.  After more than three and half decades of control over politics of West Bengal the CPI(M) finally succumbed to the agenda of voting against and therefore Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress have come to power.  To the average Bengali that has made no difference.  The only difference if at all seems to be that Mamata Banerjee is more dictatorial than anyone else thus far in the politics of West Bengal.  Her fascist tendencies can be seen behind the arrest and beating up of a Professor of the Jadhavpur University for simply having forwarded a cartoon which involved her.  A legal case has been slapped against the man, on the grounds that he had outraged the modesty of a woman. In UP previously the Samajwadi Party was defeated by the BSP or the Bahujan Samaj Party of the equally dictatorial and self-aggrandizing Mayawati.  This time around it was her turn to get defeated.  Obviously this was bound to happen, when the resources of the UP state are used for erecting statues of Mayawati there is not much to show in terms of development of the people.  The media of course is going gaga over this because it has thrown up a "suave and well educated young leader" in the form of Akhilesh Yadav, while the so called youth icon of Indian Politics Rahul Gandhi could not make a difference in UP once the bastion of the Congress party. You can safely put a bet that five years hence the Bahujan Samaj Party will come back to power and erect even more statues of Mayawati.

At this point it is relevant to ask oneself the question of why national parties such as the BJP and the Congress are unable to make an impact in the politics of cow belt states.  The answer lies in the complex social equations that are now driving the politics of states such as UP and Bihar.  The complex social equations that I mention pertain to caste alignments and their echo in the politics of the two states.  For long, the Yadavs and the Khurmis have wielded substantial power in these two states, power that equalled that of the Brahmin Bhoomihars (zamindars) and the Rajputs. It was VP Singh's act of dusting and bringing out the Mandal Commission report and implementing reservations for OBCs that has started the trend of caste based regional parties becoming powerful.  Technically speaking OBC stands for Other Backward Classes and we all know that a class is more of an economic stratification based in wealth rather than in birth which is what caste is.  The Mandal Commission identified some castes as backward and this was based in the caste census of 1931.  VP Singh's electoral gambit was that through the unification of castes along the lines of OBC and Dalits along with Muslims it would be possible to neutralize the growing power of Devi Lal who was rallying farmers around himself in order to become Prime Minister of the country instead of remaining Deputy Prime Minister to VP Singh.  This particular move saw the incorporation of the powerful Yadavs and Khurmis into the roster of OBCs in the states of UP and Bihar in the north just as one saw the powerful Vokkaligas and the Lingayats being in the list of OBCs in Karnataka.  VP Singh's gambit failed spectacularly and produced effects that he was not ready for.  By clubbing OBCs (who were being called Bahujans since Jotirao Phule who coined the phrase Bahujan Samaj belonged to a caste that post independence came to be incorporated into the list of OBCs in Maharashtra) and Dalits (a description that B.R. Ambedkar used to describe the untouchables of Hindu society and the OBCs actually were trying to create a rival icon in Phule) and the Muslims VP Singh unintentionally strengthened the BJP which was till then just a fringe party.  The BJP found it easy to convince people belonging to the "Hindu religion" that they were all one and should fight against the Muslims who were invaders in the country.

This was also the time when in Andhra Pradesh an important development was taking place.  The Telugu Desam Party (ostensibly under the leadership of Chandra Babu Naidu who operated from behind the scenes since his father in law NT Rama Rao was devoid of any political acumen) decided to inaugurate OBC reservations in the state and incorporate the powerful OBCs of Andhra Pradesh in the Telugu Desam party. In AP the powerful OBCs were the Yadavs and the Gouds whose power increased exponentially during the time that the TDP was in control.  This strategy was to break the stranglehold of the Reddy caste on the politics of AP and in doing so also rendering the Congress powerless.  The strategy worked till such time that Naidu's arrogance and his running of the state like a company led to his and his party's downfall.  But by now OBCs had gone into all parties operating in AP and became powerful so much so that without their support no party can win the elections in the state.  

These politics brought a new contradiction in the Indian society to the forefront.  As is usually what happens when an entire caste grouping experiences upward mobility, the new power centres become exactly that and see very little in common with the other oppressed groups.  So the unity of Dalit-Bahujan has only remained an aspiration because at the ground level things have been very different.  In the northern states of UP and Bihar the fight is between the SP which is essentially a Yadav party and the BSP despite claiming to be Bahujan Samaj Party is actually a Dalit party.  The interesting thing is that the BSP is not powerful on its own and therefore has co-opted the upper castes, especially the Brahmins into itself and started claiming that its goal was a Sarvajan Samaj and the media started calling this age old phenomenon a new thing by calling it new social engineering.  

For those who are wondering as to why a Dalit party would team up with Brahmins the perpetrators of all social atrocities originally, the answer ins simple.  The Dalits were fiercely controlled by the OBC sections of northern India and needed allies to help them step into politics.  The Brahmins were convenient because they were ready to team up with Dalits to wash the impression that they are still casteists.  I remember vividly in a programme called the Big Fight which is aired on NDTV 24X7 a Dalit leader joining issue with an OBC leader saying that in India there was consensus on reservations for the scheduled castes (dalits) and scheduled tribes and this consensus was broken by the introduction of reservations for the powerful castes who were actually the new perpetrators of casteism.  Needless to say that whole thing was a shouting match but the important thing is that it was for the first time that a well known Dalit leader said this in public.  In this process in the northern part of India the traditional leaders of the Congress and the BJP are still unwilling to hand over the reigns of their parties either to dalits or to OBCs and therefore in the caste ridden politics have become insignificant.  In the southern part of the country however, the story of Karnataka is interesting for both in the Congress and in the BJP leadership at the level of the state is firmly in the hands of the OBCs.  But since the BJP has been stronger in the more immediate past it has meant that there is no incorporation of Muslims into the agenda of that state's politics.  

One more reason why the BSP and the SP have become powerful in the northern states is the disenchantment with the Congress party that set in to the Muslim community who see it as having done nothing to protect the demolition of the Babri Masjid.  They also do not vote for the BJP because of the overtly communal ideology of the party.  With two of the biggest states taken out of the equation of the national parties coalition politics is the only way forward.  In the south AP presents a peculiar problem if different divisions at different levels.  One is now the overriding concern of all parties on the issue of Telangana and this has seen all parties saying that they agree to the formation of Telangana but nobody is coming forward to make that happen.  One OBC leader had once remarked that they are not interested in the Telangana that will be governed by the upper castes and as soon as he said that there were mutterings from the dalits and the tribal people that they wanted assurances that they would not be continued to be dominated.  While public utterances have said all the politically right things no leadership has convinced anyone of anything.  So politics in AP have taken an interesting twist.

Assuming that the Kiran Kumar Reddy led Congress government finishes its term in early 2014 it would be interesting to see what the outcome of the elections will be.  The Congress fearing reprisals from other parts of the country is remaining non-committal on the Telangana issue but more importantly is seeing a huge deficit in governance and therefore a legitimation deficit which makes it an unlikely candidate to come to power again.  If the pitch had not been queered by the Telangana issue one could have safely predicted that good times were ahead for the TDP, but Naidu's two eyes theory is not helping the party's cause.  It was interesting that after the results of the bye elections in AP were out and when in most parts of Telangana the TRS candidates emerged victors, a congratulatory message was sent to the party leader K Chandrashekhar Rao.  The congratulatory message came from the Forum for United Andhra Pradesh members in the coastal districts and it came with a twist.  It said that KCR should change his party to Telugu Rashtra Samithi from Telangana Rashtra Samithi and that people from Andhra and Rayalaseema would vote for his party and him. Most people tended to see this as a joke but I think there is a significantly serious message there.  People of AP are tired of the same two parties and now want a third alternative.  That KCR and the TRS will not be that is a foregone conclusion but it is definitely an expression of frustration with the two dominant parties in the state.

This basically shows that electoral arrangements are going to be primarily driven by leaders of parties on the lines of caste and that India is unlikely to see any one party have the strength to come to power.  Coalitions politics will be the way forward but what results will they bring to the country is the question.  That is a question that I will try to answer in part two of this because this post has already become too long and is bound to test your patience.  In the second part of this post which I shall post later I shall try and see not just the ramifications of the present politics for the future of the country but also explore if there are any better democratic alternatives to overcome these politics.

Education in India has truly withered away

It has been a while since I have made my last post.  The truth is that I have gone on to a new job position and that has come with a great deal of responsibility and work.  I have been enjoying doing work since the satisfaction that comes with doing something useful really has no parallel.  I have been entrusted with, among many things, the task of creating concept notes and blue prints for the future schools and centres that would be established in the new campus of the university that I am now working having taken lien from my old position with my previous employer.  Thinking and working out new concepts that will probably have some effect on the new campus of my present employer has been like an elixir of life with plenty to look forward to.  The sun has been shining and not very hot.  So you are wondering why I am singing paeans of joy in the post while the title of the post itself is so gloomy.  I assure you I have not lost my mind or my senses, it is just that from the setting that I have just described I have rudely been brought back to a situation where I see dark clouds gathering around the silver lining that I had been seeing.  If you have to understand me better then you must know a story; one that is true in every single detail.

I have a niece who is now writing her Board Exams for the tenth standard, a significant point in a student's life in India.  The girl has a problem; she simply hates studies and anything to do with it.  Since it is the tenth standard her parents were concerned and with good reason about how her education would pan out.  Their concern and the girl's complete lack of it had become a source of perennial conflict between her and her parents which only made the parents desperate still.  It was into this situation that I was catapulted and somehow found myself telling the parents that she could come and stay with me since my mother is still actively a maths teacher and I myself am capable of some teaching in various subjects.

The whole thing has been a roller coaster ride for me since I found the girl to be quite stubborn, distracted and prone to throwing horrible temper tantrums.  I am not very good at handling this and after trying gamely to instill some discipline in the girl I lost the plot and told her that I would only help her if she had any specific doubts and I also conveyed my decision to the parents with the disclaimer that if they chose to keep her with me and if she failed in her exams that will not have anything to do with me.  Despite my issuing this disclaimer, for reasons best known to themselves the parents decided to leave the child under my care. Before I had conveyed my decision to her parents, I regularly felt all the symptoms of nervousness which vanished once I told them what I had to.  So for the past couple of months the attitude has been live and let live.

This arrangement suited the girl fine who would very occasionally approach me with some doubts, I suspect with the intention to just keep me happy.  But I did get to see how she studied.  Her text books looked brand new and untouched by anyone.  The only book that she referred to was this thing called "All in one". My curiosity piqued I once looked into the book and was horrified to find that it was nothing but a compilation of questions and answers to those questions.  The question compilation was apparently of various questions that have appeared in the past years and there was greater emphasis on those that appeared more frequently than others.  For sometime now I have been claiming that the schools in Andhra Pradesh have formed into a syndicate and that they provide question banks to the Board of Secondary Education and that every year questions are chosen from that bank.  The existence of this compendium is the proof of this conspiracy theory of mine being bang on the mark. For many days I lamented the fact that this level of rubbish was what school education was reduced to before the euphoria of my own work took me away from this.

The Board exams began on the 26th of March and my niece has shown no nervousness nor any determination to study.  In fact, she has been so relaxed that she has been reading Asterix comics and my Calvin and Hobbes collection even on the days that preceded an examination.  She has also been chatting on the phone with friends on the phone organizing picnics that they would go to after the exams, planning movies and how they could get tickets and reach the theatres and things of that nature. I was well and truly flummoxed when I noticed the perseverance of the same course of action by the girl before her bug bears, the maths and science exams. And everyday the girl comes home with a glint in the eye and face radiating happiness. Unable to contain my curiosity anymore I directly confronted the girl and asked her how she was doing in her exams. My interrogation was met with some mirth and merriment and the answer was that she was doing well and that 90% is guaranteed.  I know for a fact that she knows nothing and I also know that she has not been studying at all. So I asked her if she was copying to which her reply was a resounding 'yes'. Even though I was horrified I still persisted with questioning and asked her why she was so sure that the person she was copying from was writing the correct answers and what came as the reply shocked even cynic like me.  She said that her invigilators were dictating answers not just to her but the whole class!!!! And this in a school which is not even the one where she studies (to ensure that there will be no help from teachers during the exam the Board jumbles up students and sends them to other schools for writing the exams).  When I asked her if she was telling me the truth the girl was quite adamant that she was.

The question that kept bugging me endlessly is why would teachers who do not even know the students they are invigilating dictate answers to them?  I therefore decided to find out more and from other students who were taking the exams, I set about asking the sons, daughters, nephews and nieces if this was a universal practice.  Apparently it is and has been for a few years now.  All the parents are aware of this. Quite a few even had theories about why this was happening.  I will list out the theories:

1. Most schools in Hyderabad are run by managements from coastal Andhra and since the separate Telangana agitation is on, they fear reprisals and are therefore doing this.

2. Goons from various Telangana political outfits are threatening schools and invigilators with dire consequences since they (the outfits) would be held responsible since the academic years are getting disturbed for the past couple of years due to the agitations that they launch.

3. Parents have been demanding that their wards be helped in this way so that they do not get left behind in the race for marks and that this is a standard practice in Coastal Andhra and only now did the Telangana people realize the beauty of manipulating the system this way.

4. Schools have formed cartels.  The jumbling of students happens in a set area and the schools in order to maintain their 100% pass statistics have decided to come together and bail each other out.

5. Teachers take money from rich parents but since they cannot selectively help only some (then they would get caught out as having taken money from so and so) they have decided to extend their largesse to all students.

6. The Government in order to avoid a backlash from unhappy students and parents has issued instructions orally to perpetuate this practice.

There may have been a few more of these theories but I cannot seem to recollect them now.  To me it is not important why this practice is perpetuated.  It is more important that it is being perpetuated and through the perpetuation the education system and the values that it should stand for are being methodically dismantled. All these years I have lamented that students were only being trained to pass exams but now I have realized even that crutch was a false one in the first place. Now, even though, I am teacher, I have lost complete hope and interest in this thing called education.

"We don't know need no education,

We don't need no thought control,

No dark sarcasm in the class room,

Teacher leave them kids alone".

Those are lines of a lyric written by my favourite poet and musician Roger Waters.  He wrote them in a different context though.  But somehow they seem to be as applicable to this context, the one that I am referring to.  God bless our children and God save this country. Amen.