Educating Congress

Rarity is the most remarkable aspect of Rahul Gandhi8217;s intervention in the HRD parliamentary standing committee discussion as reported in this newspaper on Wednesday. It is rare to hear Congress leaders talk of forward-looking ideas these days. With the exception of the prime minister and his finance and commerce ministers, most Congress leaders look towards and over their shoulders to the left. So the Congress boat goes round and round the same tired, old rhetoric. Rahul Gandhi8217;s firmly articulated position on the need for private investment in education, therefore, has the merit of reminding his party the value of intelligent intervention in crucial policy issues.

Nothing could be more crucial than higher education where decades of 8216;social control8217; 8212; to borrow the phrase Brinda Karat used with such conviction in the standing committee discussion 8212; have resulted in hundreds of dreadful state universities and some shady private initiatives. IITs, IIMs, a few other private management institutes, half a dozen medical colleges, the NIITs and some other IT education providers, a handful other institutions of excellence 8212; that8217;s an appallingly small list of places where good education is provided in a country of this size and needs. As many entrepreneurs in high-skill businesses are already saying, a skill shortage that is driving up salaries may become a binding constraint soon. What is needed is a radical policy of encouraging big, domestic and foreign investment in education, as our columnist argues today. What is not needed is the government8217;s paranoid bill on foreign universities. But even that bill has raised the hackles of the Left.

The national Left is the new Swadeshi Jagran Manch, with an extra-political economic twist; anything from America, which happens to have the world8217;s best university system, is especially bad. Of course, many Left leaders and their intellectual fellow travellers have been educated in Western universities. Evidently, what8217;s good for them isn8217;t good for the aam aadmi. How long will the Congress allow such obscurantist agendas to hijack national policy? Congressmen routinely deify Rahul Gandhi8217;s father. Do they remember Rajiv Gandhi got the Congress a massive mandate in part because voters had approved of his modernist agenda? Rajiv Gandhi would have been frightened by the Left8217;s ideas. He probably would have been more frightened by Arjun Singh, who happens to be a Congressman. Singh8217;s HRD has written modernity out of the education agenda. Reverse communalism, to be blunt, is Singh8217;s ministry8217;s driving force. We must once again ask the question: if there are young Congressmen like Rahul Gandhi who can articulate a vision for India, why is the cabinet full of ministers who only have a past, not a future?