If ideology has crept into Indian education, it is not something new. Union Minister of State Nirmala Sitharaman, drew from experiences studying at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, to state that ‘persons who wore a certain colour on their hands’ had always been given an unfair advantage in the leftist bastion.
The Minister was hitting back at the barely veiled opinions of CPI MP Ritabrata Banerjee. Banerjee had begun by speaking about how successive governments at the centre had long been apathetic towards cultivating Indian education and its current status.
But he went one step further by questioning the logic of appointing a person who had expressed publically his belief in the caste system and ‘ancient myths’ as head of the Indian Council of Historical Research. “The government in power has to keep in mind that intolerance should not creep into education. Even renowned histo-rians like Romila Thapar have questioned who he is,” he said.
Sitharaman hit back with her experiences at JNU. “… for a society known for its maturity as a knowledge culture, through my own experiences, either because of neglect or benign overlooking, intolerance was seen a little in views that were not socialist or communist,” she said.
“There have been situations where professors who could not get their papers published because they did not wear a particular colour on their hands,” she added. Sitharaman then added that as long as education should not be commercialized, there would be government. “There is a very fine balance and we have to make sure that it doesn’t get skewed,” she said.
Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani, who was also on the panel chaired by Prabhu Chawla, stated unequivocally that the government was correcting the course of the last half a decade but those were not making the headline. “But I am not here for affixing blame but to set a course for the future,” she said talking about the centre’s measures.
Salman Khurshid, Congress leader, took a different view and said that he did not agree with the statements that Indian education was dismal. “India is too large for generalizations. The person you say is dead is alive and kicking. It is doing great things,” he said.
But former minister Arif Mohammad khan took the counterpoint. “From worshipers of Saraswati, we have become ‘Saraswati kal’ (villains),” he concluded while saying that the solution was to achieve the education of the masses.