Dr Joshi and Mr Neta

Joshi8217;s academic credentials, actually, are neither a contradiction as far as this behaviour is concerned, nor a redeeming feature. I haven8217;t checked out the Parliament website lately but Joshi could, possibly, claim to be academically among the most accomplished in our political star cast studded with honorary PhDs. Dr Manmohan Singh may have a reasonable quibble on that and maybe Arun Shourie with his Syracuse PhD. But can any scholarship in mere economics rival anything in real physics? Don8217;t ask me, in any case, I never got more than 45 per cent in either.

I haven8217;t yet checked out Joshi8217;s record as a teacher and scholar either at Allahabad University but it is safe to say that his problem is not intellect or scholarship, but politics. You need to have a few open-ended conversations with him to understand where he is coming from.

At one level, he is fighting an increasingly lonely battle against what he sees as an entirely unfair and blundering Western, free market model of development. This, at a time when his party and ideological and political comrades much older than him namely Advani and Vajpayee are embracing it. At another level, he is fighting a 1950s class war against Anglicised Nehruvian elitism.

On both counts, he has got it all wrong, like a mofussil intellectual caught in a time warp. Of all the senior BJP politicians with an RSS background, he should have been the last to be so uncomfortable with English-speaking elites. But he has chosen to be that way, and the bureaucratic, ideological, academic 8212; and utterly marginalised 8212; sycophants who hang around him have told him, attaboy, way to go. Or, as the Hindi heartland8217;s famous intonation in street-politics would have it, 8216;8216;Joshi tum sangarsh karo, hum tumhare saath hain8217;8217;. In the process, Joshi even forgets the Nehru and Nehruvian elitism are long gone. That the battle against that fancy aberration is over, and that it has been won by Joshi8217;s own political peers and friends.

THROUGH these sometimes lonely and politically downhill six years in the government, Joshi, egged on by hangers-on, has psyched himself into becoming incapable of seeing this. If India is to become a knowledge superpower, its education minister cannot be so suspicious of the knowledge elite, its lexicon or its lifestyles. Knowledge economies dwell in the future. You can8217;t run them with minds living in the past, howsoever sharp they may be, and howsoever glorious that past.

It is easy to dismiss Joshi as some Anglophobe who refuses to grow out of his decaying Allahabad University milieu. But it would be entirely erroneous. Don8217;t, similarly, walk into the trap of the stereotype: the starched dhoti, bindi, the tuft, Sanskrit and so on. Joshi is no paan shop intellectual from eastern Uttar Pradesh. He is not some Laloo Yadav of the Brahmin elite. You need to spend just an hour with him, talking generally on his view of the world and not one of his recent bug-bears, and you will know he is smart, intelligent and fiercely patriotic with an unflinching faith in India8217;s future. Then why, and how, has he painted himself into such a hopeless corner? And can he extricate himself now?

Probably, at a time early on in this government, when he felt left out with several of his contemporaries beating him to more powerful positions, he fell back on ideology, and the chamchas seized the opportunity. A politician of his experience would have to kick his advisors for letting him get caught in so self-destructive a battle. At a time when Advani Joshi8217;s rivalry with him is the BJP8217;s worst-kept secret is building a huge national and international image as Vajpayee8217;s deputy and obvious successor, when Pramod Mahajan is emerging as the party8217;s smartest street-fighter, when the two Aruns are growing in stature, when Jaswant Singh is preening in his India Shining livery and when Yashwant Sinha can8217;t stop smiling, in the vanguard of a sunshine foreign policy, Joshi has invented his own windmills, the IITs and IIMs, and is tilting at them.

SO turbo-charged is he at the thought of slaying this imaginary devil that he forgets that far from being the preserve of anglicised elitism, his IITs and IIMs are actually the most magnificent levellers for us HMTs Hindi Medium Types, or at least for the brightest among us. It is because admission in these institutions is through sheer, brutal merit that those who can neither flaunt the CVs of their illustrious parents nor a Doon, Mayo, Sanawar or Lovedale on their schooling record, can still hope to make it, first to these institutions and then to the most elite corporate/private sector jobs. In the Nehruvian era, the only way to get there was usually through direct recruitment with the Tatas, Levers or ITC. Then who your parents were, or which schools and colleges you/they had gone to, was critical. Now it doesn8217;t matter one bit when you compete for the IITs and IIMs and, once you get there, all that matters in the job market is that you are a graduate from these meritocratically elite institutions.

Here is my take on how this might end. Unless the honourable Supreme Court decides to change the script, Minister Joshi will win. Corporate India simply does not have the muscle, time, stamina, spine or the skill to fight a politician as powerful and obdurate as he. But Politician Joshi will lose. The fight with these institutions, so central to his own party8217;s India Shining theme, will leave him deeply wounded. There is no premium in winning a battle of subsidy and controls in times when the drift is in the other direction. And where is the glory in vanquishing your own children, as these institutions are to the HRD minister? It would do him immense harm. His party colleagues may not be opposing him in public. But in private they are all sniggering and gloating, predicting some sizeable Raj Bhavan as a most logical final point in his political career. So it does finally boil down to this simple question: Minister Joshi will probably win his war against his own IIMs, but is Politician Joshi smart enough to know when to cut his losses?

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