HRD Minister Smriti Irani’s commitment to
the Constitution is absolutely commendable. We are supposed to understand that
the decision to stop the teaching of German in Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV) schools
has nothing to do with the influence exercised by the Sanskrit Shikshak Sangh
to replace the third optional language taught to children in school with
Sanskrit and everything to do with the Constitution.
While the Constitution is silent on the
three language formula, Article 21 A explicitly mandates education as a fundamental
right. Yet, not only do large numbers of children continue to remain out of
school, but the basic building block of the Right to Education – a neighborhood
school teaching in the mother tongue at
primary stage (Article 350-A) is something that many students across the
country still don’t have. Indeed, some of the worst offenders are BJP state governments.
In Chhattisgarh, schools continue to be occupied by the security forces despite
a Supreme Court order. Rather than restoring the primary schools that were shut
down when the Salwa Judum began, the government has abandoned all pretence of
village based primary education in favour of bringing children to semi-urban
clusters instead. In Rajasthan, the Vasundhara Raje government has shut down
17,000 so-called smaller schools and merged them with bigger ones, forcing the
children to take to private education instead. It is quite likely that the
biggest beneficiary of this will be the network of RSS-run Saraswati Shishu
Mandirs. And that shining model, Gujarat, ranks 33 out of 35 in terms of access
to education at the primary level according to a 2014 National University of
Educational Planning and Administration report. Surely a Minister for Human
Resource Development who is so conscious of her constitutional obligations
should make RTE her priority rather than whether KV schools are teaching
Sanskrit compulsorily or not.
The Constitution, which not just the HRD
Minister but also the Prime Minister is bound to uphold, also notes that one of
the fundamental duties of an Indian citizen is to “develop the scientific
temper, humanism and the spirit of enquiry and reform.” Surely describing
Ganeshji’s elephant head and Karna’s conception as products of plastic surgery
and genetic science known in ancient India, as Mr. Modi did, cannot be deemed
to be evidence of a scientific temper. If everything was already known in
ancient India, and everything is available in Sanskrit, what then accounts for
its disappearance, long before the “800 years of slavery” that Modi has spoken
about in an obvious reference to the period when India had Muslim rulers.
Sudden changes of policy, with little
regard for pedagogical need, appear to be the HRD Minister’s style – for
instance Delhi University’s FYUP was overturned barely days before the academic
session began. Even in the KV case, it is not clear why the Ministry could not
wait for the exams to make changes. While allowing every child the option to learn
an Indian language of their choice sounds grand, in practice, schools can offer
only a limited basket, and inevitably dispensing with German has meant imposing
Sanskrit.
But a more insidious part of the style is
the willingness of the BJP to accommodate Hindutva views on education– from distributing
Dina Nath Batra’s weird fantasies to all Gujarat schools and appointing him an
educational advisor to the Haryana Government, to the selection of Yellapragada
Sudershan Rao as ICHR chairman. The latter clearly has no genuine appreciation
for the imagination and philosophical insight of the Mahabharat and regards it
as a mere historical reflection of the times.
Why are all those who wrote so strongly
about the role of the NAC as the ‘remote control’ in the UPA government, so
silent when it comes to the unconstitutional power exercised by the RSS? At
least Sonia Gandhi was the face that won an election for her party and was
morally obliged to ensure that her government met some of its poll promises. The
RSS has never stood for elections on its own, let alone won any. Can we trust India’s
future, educational or otherwise – to an organization which has praised Hitler,
wants Muslims and Christians to be second-class citizens and was criticized by
Sardar Patel for having distributed sweets on Gandhi’s death? Above all, can we
trust Hinduism to them?
It is ironic that the controversy should
have developed around German, for surely this is a language the RSS would have
us learn, not to read Marx, Goethe or advanced engineering of course, but to read
Mein Kampf in the original. The RSS Guru,
Golwalkar argued in “We or our Nationhood
defined”: “To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany
shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races – the Jews.
Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how
well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to
the root, to be assimiliated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in
Hindusthan to learn and profit by.” The
RSS has never repudiated Golwalkar. The real danger in the icon wars is not
that the BJP wants to appropriate Patel or Gandhi, but that it wants to normalise
Golwalkar and what he stood for.
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/445236/increasing-shades-hindutva-education.html
