Identity Politics, Globalisation, and Social Conflict: Social Discourses and Cultural Texts
(Delhi Workshop: March 26-28, 2002)
XIII.
Re-Schooling Society: A Study of the Education Policy of the BJP-led Indian Government (1998- )Tapan Basu
Hindu College
University of DelhiWhen the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) assumed the office of the Government of India in March 1998, educated observers noted that, amidst the bonhomie of a "common minimum programme" and "principled collaboration" between coalition partners within the alliance, the BJP unobtrusively appropriated for itself the two senior-most positions in the human resource development (read education) portfolio in the new cabinet—that of Union Minister and Minister of State. Significantly too, these two positions were allotted by the BJP Prime Minister, Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to two known 'hardliners' among his party comrades, Shri Murli Manohar Joshi and Kumari Uma Bharti. Both these persons had played a prominent part in the so-called Ramjanambhoomi agitation during the late 1980s and the early 1990s, sponsored by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the 'mother' organization of the BJP, and supported by the BJP itself.
Clearly, education was to be an all-important priority issue on the right-wing BJP's agenda of governance—more important than it had ever been for the centrist formations of different flavours that had governed India during the first half-a-century of its existence as an independent nation-state. This should not surprise, considering that the centrist formations concerned were invariably offshoots of the Indian National Congress movement which had evolved out of efforts at broad-based mass mobilization towards the telos of national liberation from colonial absolutism, eliding, as far as possible, all ideological insularities; the BJP, on the other hand, has emerged out of an insistently ideological inspiration which harks back at least to the 1920s.
The enterprise inaugurated itself formally with the founding of the RSS in Nagpur, Maharashtra, on the festive occasion of Vijaya Dashami in 1925. Interestingly, the backdrop for this event was neither an upsurge of anti-colonial sentiments among Indians against their subordination to the British, nor even any episode of Hindu-Muslim antagonism, but rather assorted acts of assertion on the part of oppressed lower castes against oppressive upper castes among Hindus themselves. It was in fact an anti-Brahmin animosity, articulated from the 1870s onwards when Jyotiba Phule had founded his Satyashodak Samaj, and continuing into the 1920s under the leadership of Babasaheb Ambedkar, the Dalit ideogogue, that provided the context for the establishment of an organization such as the RSS.
Since then, the RSS has traveled a long way, attempting to extend its hegemony beyond Maharashtra into other territories of India by advocating aggressively a cultural nationalism based on Hindutva, a militant and muscular pan-Hindu identification. The essence of the RSS enterprise—to rid the Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation) of the 'blemishes' of foreign rule of the Mughal as well as the British periods of its history—is equally to draw away attention from its own upper-caste character and constituency.
The RSS has always regarded itself as a "class organization" committed to the cultivation of a cadre of swayamsevaks (volunteers) in the service of Hindutva. It is the responsibility of its offspring organizations in the various spheres of public life, of which the BJP is only one, to advance its agenda among the masses. A 'mass organisation' like the BJP, which operates within the province of parliamentary politics, thus seeks to utilize its political privileges to radically re-mould civil society in line with RSS ideology.
After appropriating state power in New Delhi, therefore, the BJP has unabashedly undertaken to work through the apparatus of the state to instill RSS ideology into the institution of education itself by intervening in the induction of infrastructure, faculty and curriculum in any and every organ of the educational system under state purview. The BJP purpose was apparent as early as the Conference of State Education Ministers and Secretaries held in New Delhi between 22nd to 24th October 1998. Attached to the agenda documents circulated among delegates well before the conference was a report by a "group of experts" headed by P.D. Chitalangia, an industrialist from Calcutta, who also held an important position within the Vidya Bharati, the educational chain exclusively controlled by the RSS. Among the many recommendations made by the Chitalangia group was one that the orientation of education from the primary stage to the higher education level should be "Indianised, nationalized and spiritualised," and that courses at all levels, including vocational training courses, should incorporate the "essentials of Indian culture." This recommendation seemed premised upon an understanding that the approach in education today is operatively un-Indian. It showed the familiar facility of the RSS' insidious imputation that the Indian state has habitually jettisoned indigenous ideals in favour of imported ideas.
Although this recommendation, along with others made by the "group of experts," was repudiated at the conference due to pressure from representative of the non-BJP-ruled states, the BJP has not given up its endeavour to engineer education in India. The Ministry of Human Resource Development and subsidiary bodies in charge of education, including the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), are being deployed boldly to alter the educational policies of the country. The NCERT for instance, has recently formulated a National Curriculum Framework for School Education which by and large, accommodates the thinking of the RSS about education. Needless to say, such policy changes are rendered possible only by changing personnel within these bodies in accordance with the interests of Hindutva.
As mentioned earlier, the Hindutva model of the teaching/learning process is already realized in the shishu mandirs (temples for children) run by the Vidya Bharati chain. As of today, this chain manages about 14,000 schools at the primary, middle and secondary strata and has over 18 lakh pupils under its tutelage. The total aggregate of teachers in these schools is about 80,000. These schools exist in every Indian state, except Mizoram. The Vidya Bharati chain also controls 60 colleges, which offer graduate and post-graduate degrees, and 25 other centers of higher learning/teaching, of which two are educator-training institutes, in Jaipur and in Ahmednagar.
The aim of all Vidya Bharati institutions is to impart a nationalist (read Hindu) education to its students. In the schools of this network, apart from the mandatory syllabi for mainstream subjects set up by the respective state education boards to which they are affiliated, there is a uniform "core curriculum" for all students, comprising six disciplines: yoga, physical education, music, Sanskrit, sanskriti gyan (knowledge of culture) and moral and spiritual education. It is through this core curriculum that the Hindutva viewpoint is primarily pushed.
Curiously, however, for all its concern for a nationalist education, in the realm of state educational policy, the BJP government has been slowly and steadily allowing the market-forces in a globalising economy to impinge upon education. In at least two key programmatic papers prepared and presented for the perusal of the Government of India during the year 2000, one by the Prime Minister's Council on Trade and Industry and the other by the Department of Elementary Education and Literacy, Ministry of Human Resource Development—Report on a Policy Framework for Reforms in Education and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. Framework for Implementation respectively—it is made amply clear that the burden of the funding for education ought not to tax the state overmuch. Instead, capital should be derived more and more from corporate sources which in turn must consider educational funding a worthwhile and a profitable investment. The fact that is ignored is that the corporatisation of education, apart from taking education out of the reach of the under-privileged sections of society, threatens to transform education into a commodity whose value is to be determined by the needs of the market rather than by the mores of the nation which (according to the BJP perspective) education promises to protect.
My contribution to the workshop on "Identity Politics Globalisation and Social Conflict: Social Discourses and Cultural Texts" investigates this ambivalence in the education policy of the current BJP-led Indian government by examining some important policy documents on education that have emanated out of state sources over the past couple of years. Through a thorough critique of these documents, I reveal that behind their dualism lies a deliberate doublespeak which, I feel, is symptomatic of RSS attitude towards the relationship between globalisation and national culture.