Karnataka is the experimental zone today where students face a timorous wait for the outcome of the clash of educations
Students at a government school.(iStock)
Karnataka, the first state to adopt the New Education Policy (NEP) 2020, has now rejected it.
The vacillating stands over education — one of the fundamentals of a country’s development — because of ideological whims is noted.
When it comes to the Congress, which rules Karnataka today, setting aside the NEP and overhauling the state’s education policy has as much to do with its quirky decisions in the past as with opposing the ideological shenanigans of the BJP.
Here is how it goes. Many states have opposed the NEP, seeing in it the Union government’s attempt to homogenise education by introducing the Hindutva ideology to the exclusion of others.
The Union government and most states are in a face-off over the former influencing deletions and additions from school curricula purely to promote the ideology of the Sangh Parivar.
Education is on the Concurrent List in the Constitution. That means the Union government and the states can independently legislate education policies.
The states need not follow central laws, but they are caught in a bind because they depend on the Union government for annual budgetary allocations, grants, subsidies and scholarships.
This situation came about thanks to the Congress. In 1976, at the height of the Emergency, then-prime minister Indira Gandhi brought in the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act 1976.
Under Clause 57 (c) (iv) (25), the following entry was substituted: “Education, including technical education, medical education and universities, subject to the provisions of entries 63, 64, 65 and 66 of List I; vocational and technical training of labour.”
By this stroke, education, hitherto in the State List of the Constitution, was brought to the Concurrent List, allowing the Union government to bring in its laws on education, with or without resonance with state legislation.
The 42nd Amendment brought in so many constitutional changes that lawmakers sarcastically called it the mini-Constitution. Incidentally, this Amendment also changed the Preamble (by inserting the words socialist and secular), diluted the powers of the Supreme Court, gave sweeping powers to Parliament to amend the Constitution, and made the PMO an all-powerful body.
The statement of objects and reasons was lofty and common to all clauses, from the Preamble to Education.
Try this for size: “The democratic institutions provided in the Constitution are basically sound, and the path to progress does not lie in denigrating any of these institutions. However, there could be no denying that these institutions have been subjected to considerable stresses and strains and that vested interests have been trying to promote their selfish ends to the great detriment of public good.”
The Janata Party government that came to power after the 1977 elections tried its best to bring back the status quo.
The 43rd and 44th constitutional amendments came in, but the government did not last long to complete the task.
The Supreme Court did strike down a couple of clauses as unconstitutional, but strangely, education remained where the 42nd Amendment sent it to the Concurrent List.
Let us see how the BJP and the Congress have reached a confrontation stage over the NEP. In August 2021, CN Ashwath Narayan went to work when he got the higher education ministry portfolio.
One of his first actions was to issue an order implementing the NEP in the 2021-2022 academic year.
In September 2021, then president of Karnataka Congress DK Shivakumar said the NEP stood for “Nagpur Education Policy” — an allusion to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in the Maharashtra city.
The BJP lost power in the subsequent Assembly elections. In the same month, two years later, Congress Chief Minister Siddaramaiah announced the NEP’s eventual withdrawal and replacement by a state education policy. It was one of his party’s poll promises as well.
The Congress government began a serious exercise to overhaul textbooks for classes 1 to 10. It set up a committee to re-design the education policy with a former history professor, Manjunath Hegde, as chief coordinator.
On Thursday, 12 October, the government passed an order formalising all these changes.
The BJP is naturally grieved. It has made its displeasure known to the Congress government and will wait for the proposed changes in the fresh curriculum to take the fight further.
The differences are, as already known, ideological. Look at how they take shape at the level of the curriculum. Should it be Nijavada Adarsha Purusha Yaragabeku of KB Hedgewar, the RSS founder, or should the students read Sukumara Swamiya Kathe by Shivakotyacharya?
Is it T Gatti’s book on right-wing ideologue VD Savarkar, Kalavannu Geddavaru? Or, Magalige Bareda Patra, a translation of Jawaharlal Nehru’s letter to Indira Gandhi?
The works of Muslim authors and poets were dropped, like the chapter on Central Islamic Lands dealing with Islamic empires in Asia and Africa, or the socio-cultural and religious history of the Mughal courts. A chapter on the Non-Aligned Movement was deemed not worth studying.
The works of many popular Kannada writers were dropped as well. As protests against these changes grew over the “saffronisation” of education, some authors wrote to the government not to publish their works.
Is the fight only about ideology? No. It is much more than that. It is about an attempt by a political section to erase the history and cultural relics of other sections it detests. Give the exercise any name, and this is what it means.
There cannot be a viler intrusion into a student’s sphere of education than denying them the right to know or allowing them only a selective right to know. The right to compromised education is a negative right.
Ironically, the “inclusion” of one ideology in education is fought by the “exclusion” of another ideology — either amounts to the same, whether it is a secular or a fundamentalist intervention.
The states have a genuine point: They are so diverse historically, geographically, culturally, and socially, and the curricula must reflect that diversity. How else would the students know?
Such is the magnitude of diversity that an umbrella curriculum cannot be thrust upon the states. That is homogenisation by another name, which the Union government does and can do, using its powers drawn from the Concurrent List.
The states have two kinds of education set-ups. The state government fosters one through state boards, government schools, and state-sponsored universities.
The Union government monitors the other through central boards, through Kendriya Vidyalayas, central universities, and aided institutes of higher education. That is a simple way to bridge the rural-urban and state-Centre gaps in education.
There is no way to impart education productively if the Union government and the states are determined to push their separate curricula. They must reach a compromise.
Passing off mediated ideological rhetoric as national education policy and thrusting it on the states does not favour the spirit of federalism.
It demands that the states be seen as equals, with the Union government as the moderator, not as vassals and the inquisitor.
At the same time, both have equally critical roles to play in ensuring holistic education. How? The states should manage the curricula in the formative years, teaching students about their environment and local cultures, and languages.
Regarding specialised higher education with universally-accepted curricula recognised worldwide, the Union government must monitor what is taught in national institutes.
Education is much more than the number of schools, subjects, enrolments, and teachers. It is about what is being taught to whom and at what age.
How can any teacher explain the importance of the Grant Trunk Road or the Ancient Silk Route without referring to the Islamic empires? Or make students understand the early years of nation-building post-independence by not discussing Jawaharlal Nehru?
At the same time, it does not mean excluding an understanding of ancient India’s theological and dialectical ages, how Indian philosophy advanced through them, or the arcane linkages of the Vedic period to modern-day patriarchal practices just because some perceive it as not being secularly kosher.
If education is meant to discuss Indian society, it must incorporate the social, historical, and religious distortions, differences and deviations that influenced society over the centuries. Selfish ideological interventions only end up portraying a damaged picture of society.
The curriculum must have strong democratic moorings to evaluate our society critically, and not merely project a lop-sided, ideologically-tainted version.
The system should capture the zeitgeist of each age of society, allowing for studying it separately and as part of a cultural continuum, rather than present Indian society as an eternal “victim” of cruel “outsiders” and use this constant buzz to rake up new divisiveness.
The proponents of Hindutva have shown how they can soil education to achieve their political agenda. It is now the turn of the non-Hindutva elements to prove that students’ interest, not a nationalist or soft-nationalist interest, drives them.
For the time being, the ball is in the court of the Siddaramaiah government in Karnataka.
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