This piece from Business World of 19 February 2004 criticizes some ideas of Murli Manohar Joshi, the BJP government's most beautifully dressed and decorated minister of education. He was one of those in the party who ignore or resent this country's diversity and seek to convert it into a parochial Hindu fiefdom.
An idle mind lusting for power?
Soon after becoming minister of human resource development
– education to put it simply – Murli Manohar Joshi called together state
ministers of education, and opened the meeting with the singing of Saraswati
Pooja. The beauty of this prayer was lost on the ministers; some of them walked
out and the meeting collapsed. More recently, he ordained that donations to
Indian Institutes of Technology should be channeled through a fund Sarva
Shiksha Abhiyan. Since he chose to give it a Sanskrit name, most people missed
the point that it means a campaign to educate all. To educate all in Sanskrit,
he has made all universities set up departments of Sanskrit. But this nation is
so contrary that these departments do not attract enough students. And now he
has made the Indian Institutes of Management reduce their annual fees from Rs
150,000 to Rs 30,000. He wants to make them affordable for poorer students. But
all he has got is opprobrium.
Although Mr Joshi was once a
professor at Benares Hindu University, he has been a politician by profession.
It is therefore not surprising that his actions have invited political, and
generally cynical interpretation. The state ministers no doubt thought that he
was giving them a message – that education must in some sense be Hinduised.
When he centralized donations to IITs, it was assumed that he wanted the dirty
hand of the ministry to handle the money and dish it out to favourites.
Similarly, the reduction of IIM fees is widely read to mean that he wants them
to become financially dependent on the education ministry – that he wants the
directors of the IIMs to keep running to him, kowtowing to him, taking favours
and doing him favours.
Although Joshi’s ministry has a
long name, it does not have much to do. Education is a state subject; all that
the central minister of education can do is to hand out subventions. He can
attach some conditions to them; but the scope for patronage is limited. The
scientific establishment comes under him. But here too, government laboratories
have largely run themselves. Their directors have considerable autonomy. And if
the minister were inclined to interfere, he must find Dr Mashelkar a formidable
buffer. For Mashelkar is the paragon of objectivism; he has forced the public
scientific establishment to judge itself by external, objective standards and
measure up to the world. Joshi may be able to get someone appointed in the
ceramics laboratory or send someone abroad; but that is where his power ends.
While he may have other amusements in the political field, his civil servants
must find this lack of power, this absence of supplicants especially galling.
And where bureaucrats are unhappy, the minister cannot live happily.
This is how public discourse has
been shaped: motives are read into Mr Joshi’s actions almost before he takes
them. No one is prepared to concede for a moment that he may have
intellectually honest reasons for doing whatever he does.
To a certain extent this is
unavoidable. The luminaries of the BJP live in the past. They are obsessed with
the glories of the Hindu civilization. They resent the oblivion into which it
has receded. They want to bring it back to life. They think we will all be
better for the inspiration it can bring. And inevitably, most people with
intellectual pretensions in this country have no time for all this sentimental
historicism. They want to get on with C++ and Perl, genomes and bosons. The
future is waiting; why bother about the past?
But it is still necessary to
bridge the chasm of misunderstanding, to admit for a moment that Mr Joshi may
have genuine, honest reasons for reducing the fees of the IIMs, that he is
really worried that the high fees are barring bright but poor students from
applying. It does not matter that IIMs get a hundred times as many applications
as they need; maybe there is a hundred-and-first genius who is being left out.
It is no use asking IIM students about this, for they are in; they cannot know
who did not get in. It is no use asking IIM professors, for they are content
with teaching the students they select; they do not want to teach the unwashed
masses.
But even if we grant that Mr
Joshi’s objective is worthy, he should ask himself whether his means are
optimal. Forcing IIMs to reduce fees and making them come to his ministry for
money is a roundabout way of doing what he wants. All he needs to do is to give
the IIMs a sum equal to what they get just now from fees, without conditions,
and to ask them to make their education free. The reduced fee of Rs 30,000 is a
distraction; and free education is not necessarily incompatible with academic
freedom.
