Clueless on the campus

Given the state of our academia, our system’s disdain for any original thinking and our obsession with politics, it is no surprise that our campuses have ceased to be centres of learning and creativity. We hate new ideas, we fear the intellect that brings change in its wake and hence the sorry state of our academia. The only new ideas come from a mad man like Osho, whodefies the system and creates a universe all his own.

We are a scripture-driven, conceited society that would rather be a patron of "intellect" rather than its consumer and, as with much else, it is tempting to argue that this too is rooted in caste.

It is possible that we lost our way somewhere around the time intellect came to be identified with Brahminism. To give Manu the benefit of the doubt, he probably saw the ruling and trading classes as the prospective market for the wisdom the Brahmin inherited and evolved. Wherever that ideal combination existed — as with Kautilya and Chandragupta — it changed the course of our history. But over the centuries the relationship changed as Brahminism degenerated from being the giver of wisdom to the giver of blessings. He blessed you, read out the shlokas that you didn’t understand and you gave away the tribute: a cow, a piece of land, even the last of your family silver in return. Exchange of wisdom, ideas, intellect had no place in this newrelationship.

Today, we do not treat our teachers any better. They are people we pay, what we think is a reasonable salary, so that they can prepare our children for a degree to qualify for a foreign university. The Ivy League, Oxford, Cambridge and the Sorbonne are the great ideas factories. Our universities only print degrees. Our teachers merely dictate notes on wisdom contained in the NCERT- and UGC-approved textbooks so our children can pass exams.

We wait for a Francis Fukuyama to pronounce the end of history or a Samuel Huntington to predict a clash of civilisations and then debate these for decades until something else more fashionable turns up, invariably from the West. Our social sciences no longer venture beyond the textbooks, our scientific institutions and the universities make headlines, mostly on page three, because of politics, strikes and litigation.

Today we lionise "Indian" economists based abroad who fled our institutions because their socialist colleagues blackballed them as"reactionary" just because they dared to differ.

At New Delhi’s India Habitat Centre, Jagdish Bhagwati last month drew a packed hall. "I feel bad a lot of economists, other than a few of us, were so religiously vetted to ideological positions that we let 30 years go by with low growth rates," he told India Today in an interview.

And what happened to "a few of us" who differed? They were condemned and banished to the West. For all their obsession with caste and Dalit assertion, the most liberal of our campuses failed to report even a whiff of the rise of the BSP.

So if you wish to know more about caste in politics, read Paul Brass, for electoral politics and the Left, refer to Myron Wiener, to understand the mind of the Indian Army, trust Steve Cohen and never mind that in their academic prime we had a great time condemning them as CIA agents and denying them visas.

Over three decades when any Indian academic worth his name and khadi jhola would only write a condemnation of the RSS,Walter Anderson and Craig Baxter produced the only impartial works on it displaying a degree of academic rigour. The juiciest factoid is, both happen to be US foreign service officers and one still runs the South Asia section in the State Department’s Intelligence and Research division.

The same intellectual infertility, contemptuous intolerance of any new thinking bedevils us in other areas as well. Take security and foreign affairs. The two-and-a-half alleged think tanks that exist work more or less as an extension of the South Block, providing "ex post facto" justification for any decision taken and rationalising the policy of the day.

Forget the nuclear policy. How many of these "experts" had the gall to differ with Mrs Gandhi’s policy on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? How many questioned the four-decade-old excommunication of Israel until Narasimha Rao showed the courage of his own intellectual convictions to throw it out of the window? Who is debating a solution to the Kashmir issue? Who isunravelling and analysing the emerging conflicts from energy economics, disputes over river waters and so on. This, when Western think tanks stretching from Vancouver to Vladivostok and in the wiser Asian cultures such as China and Japan are producing reams and reams of work on how the discovery of Caspian Sea oil and gas will rewrite strategic equations and redefine insecurities on the 21st century. This, when even the reporters of The Wall Street Journal have identified a gathering storm over the sharing of the Nile waters in Africa.

Intellect in our country is not seen as a preserve of the academia and hence the low status of teachers in our society. In the more developed world there is a professor coming up with a new idea every day. Just walk into the non-fiction section in a book store and see the evidence. Teachers earn fame and money by espousing new ideas on life and society, are wooed by the corporate sector and the government, also the media, for their expert opinion, and paid for it onissues ranging from O.J. Simpson’s legal defence to Bill Clinton’s phallic fallibilities and the crash of the Asian economies.

Our academics are far too preoccupied fighting for their selection grades and promotions. Would they ever dare to differ from the establishment and risk everything? Even a Jawaharlal Nehru banished Nirad Chaudhuri from India because he disagreed so strongly with his view of Indian culture and history. Arundhati Roy too, probably, would now be made to pay for defying the Holy Nuclear Consensus.

The thinking for the state is done by old politicians and the bureaucracy. Our intelligentsia, a collection of retired bureaucrats and bored journalists, is a stunning myth. Some teachers or serious analysts have flirted with policy. The odd one has even been rewarded, and how!

Clinton trusted Strobe Talbott, a journalist who wrote about strategy, and made him his point man in the State Department. The Israelis sent their foremost academician on the rise of militant Islam as theirambassador to India. Gujral respected JNU’s Professor S.D. Muni so much, he gave him an ambassadorship in reward. In Laos! If this isn’t the 20th century equivalent of the ruler presenting the Brahmin a cow, find me another description.