State must fund, not rule, education

Much has already been said on the Jawaharlal Nehru University row. Many have rightly pointed out the significant contribution JNU has made to academic scholarship and nation-building. Nationalism and sedition have also been debated ad nauseam. However, the real issue is neither JNU nor nationalism or sedition. Saffronisation of education, though an important issue, is also not the real matter. In fact, limiting the debate to just saffronisation of education or to shrinking academic space in universities due to “Right-wing” forces occupying power is an oversimplified and reductionist narrative. The real issue is whether what we see around us is once again an attempt by the state to control education and universities through a perilous cocktail of academic cronyism and patronising thought This issue is deeper and systemic and transcends different political regimes in India’s history since Independence.

To understand this, one has to go back in time. Controlling education and policing thought is something that governments with strong ideologies have often done. Hitler did this in Germany. In Hitler’s Germany, students were constantly made aware of their “racial duties” towards the state. Books reflecting the Nazi ideology were championed. In Stalin’s Russia, education was strictly controlled by the state and books were severely censored. The ideological indoctrination of students was a hallmark of Stalin’s education policy.

The history of education in Independent India is unquestionably not as dark as in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia. However, there have been several instances where state-controlled education, patronised a particular thought, unduly interfered in universities, and often appointed people either close to the ruling establishment or pliant individuals to run universities. Noted historian Ramachandra Guha wrote in an article that one of the principal reasons why Marxist historians occupied a prominent place in India’s best institutions of historical research in 1980s was because these scholars had access to state patronage.

Dr Guha points out that Saiyid Nurul Hasan, who was the education minister in Indira Gandhi’s government, supported by communists, created the Indian Council of Historical Research in 1972, which was promoted and run by scholars who were close to Hasan, both personally and ideologically.

Dr Guha also observes that the government of the day in 1991, in order to counter Ram Janmabhoomi campaign (obviously for political reasons) awarded research projects to select academicians. Another public intellectual, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, while discussing the rot in higher education, recalls that the Left Front government in West Bengal systematically assaulted higher education and created party control over universities.

Similarly, during the Vajpayee government from 1998-2004, the government sponsored revision of history textbooks by especially selecting non-Leftist scholars for the job. This was followed by United Progressive Alliance-1 putting in place its own bunch of history writers to reverse the narrative. The entire controversy surrounding the hurried introduction of the four-year undergraduate programme at Delhi University in 2013, during UPA-2, with the support of the University Grants Commission, and its equally hurried retreat in 2014, under the regime of the current government, again with the support of the UGC, is a textbook case of how governments/regulatory bodies unduly interfere in universities based on political expediency. The DU case also demonstrated how academicians, who otherwise swear by university autonomy, support or oppose such interventions based on what suits their ideological leanings and politics.

This history tells us that what we are seeing today is indeed ugly, but surely not happening for the first time. Successive governments, in the name of funding education, have often tried to push their own political programmes in universities and outside using their preferred academic cronies as the instrument. Over the years, such patronisation has bred nepotism within the academic community. This has created “patronised-networks” that operate within and across institutions and universities. Such networks play a role in recruitments and promotions of faculty members, awarding of research grants, fellowships, etc., at the cost of academic merit. Another major academic distortion closely linked to patronisation is “academic inbreeding”: the practice of having Ph.D.s employed by the university that trained them. Often Ph.D. supervisors sit on interview panels to appoint their own students as faculty members. The National Knowledge Commission in 2009 warned us against the danger of “academic inbreeding”.

This patronisation has also sown seeds of intolerance in our universities where alternative views that challenge the dominant narrative are not welcomed. Recently, Bibek Debroy, member Niti Aayog, recalled that Jagdish Bhagwati, the distinguished economist, had to leave Delhi School of Economics in late 1960s because his life was made uncomfortable since he bucked the “prevailing climate of opinion”. Just few days back, Makarand Paranjape, poet and professor of English at JNU, delivering the 15th lecture of the much-talked-about nationalism lecture series at JNU, asked whether JNU is a Left hegemonic space where those who disagree are silenced, boycotted or browbeaten.

Therefore, we need a national debate on the role of state in education without looking at these issues through the strict binaries of Left/Right. It is critical to distinguish between state funding education and state controlling education. India surely needs the state to fund education, but certainly not control education and universities. We consciously need to make our campuses plural, not just in terms of caste, religion and (trans)gender but also in terms of thought and ideology. Else the same old script will continue to play out each time, with varying degrees, despite which party is in power.

The writer is an assistant professor of law at the South Asian University, New Delhi. Views are strictly personal.