One really can't blame Smriti Irani, our Education Minister, for the mess in education - since she is really not much educated herself. Oh, she did pass her school-leaving exams, but can't quite remember what degree course she applied for or at which University, although she does remember spending five days at Yale - and has a certificate to prove it. But does that really matter? After all, Kamaraj did not need a University degree to prove himself an outstanding Chief Minister, and both Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi went to University abroad but returned without a degree.
No, an education is no more required to be an Education Minister than a flying qualification is indispensable to being a Civil Aviation Minister. And God help us if a General were to become Defence Minister - for that would make us Pakistan.
What surprises me is that a Minister of her personality and oratorical skills should be so mishandling the work entrusted to her. I suspect that has less to do with her own qualities of intellect and upbringing than with the forces that are attempting to control policy-making in her Ministry. The two forces I have been able to identify are the Sangh Parivar and the Prime Minister - the Parivar providing the Hindutva thrust and Modi the authoritarian mindset.
Of course, it cannot be gainsaid that most contemporary Indian historians who have earned the admiration of their peers world-wide have been to the left of centre, with little sympathy for the fantasies of Hindu or any other mythology. That can neither exclude the major role that right - and religiously-inclined Indian historians of high distinction have played in the past in the Rediscovery of Indian History from Imperial myth-making, nor the possibility of finding similarly inclined historians at present. It is not their leaning but their academic standing that is the moot point. After all, if two eminent economists like Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati can have such radically differing ideologies, or two great historian-novelists, such as VS Naipaul and Amitav Ghosh can belong to such diametrically opposed schools of thought, it should not be beyond the bounds of bureaucratic (or Ministerial) possibility to find a respectable right-wing Hindutva-inclined historian to match, say, Irfan Habib.
Similar outrages are in the process of being performed on school text books under the malevolent patronage of so-called historians like Dina Nath Batra, who is better suited to organize a crusade against Mohammad bin Qassim than teach genuine history to innocent young minds. The manipulation of syllabi, and the excising or inclusion of text books for ideological not academic reasons, apart from partisan packing of the Central Advisory Board for Education, is but the beginning of a process of twisting the Idea of India to fit a perverse ideological mindset. She might as well move the NCERT (National Centre for Educational Research and Training) from Delhi to Nagpur!
So is the manipulation of appointments and transfers of heads of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). The current rumpus over the draft Bill to regulate the Indian Institutes of Management to make them subserve the diktats of the Government is but the latest example of Modtiva in action. Centralization of authority, authoritarianism in decision-making, undermining of academic freedom in the administration of institutions of excellence is being prioritized.
If, of course, the courts decide that her affidavits regarding her educational qualifications (or, at any rate, her attempts to secure them) disqualify her from continuing as Minister, they might put her out of her misery before she can inflict more on the country.
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