Educating the education minister

As I watched his goon squads unleash their violence against poor, defenceless people in the streets of Mumbai and Nashik, I wondered if he would have achieved his ends had his goons been properly educated. It is easier to mould semi-literate, unemployable youths into thugs than it is to persuade those with a semblance of education. It is semi-literate, unemployable youth that fill the ranks of the Bajrang Dal, the Naxalite movement, the Shiv Sena and the various Islamist organisations that grow and spread.

Any idiot can tell you that if these thugs had gone to decent schools and learned about literature and poetry, music and history, they would not be drawn to lives of violence and hatred. What makes the present situation worse is that the section of India that is enjoying the benefits of economic liberalisation is in desperate need of employable people. The civil aviation industry needs pilots so badly airlines currently hire foreigners. The IT industry needs young people with an understanding of computers, the construction industry cries out for skilled masons, carpenters, electricians and plumbers, and the hospitality industry needs every possible kind of person from chefs to maids. In hospitals the shortage of nurses is so serious that major hospitals in Mumbai and Delhi are lucky if they can hang on to them for three months before they vanish to jobs abroad.

The solution stares us in the face. India needs an education minister who understands the urgent need for building thousands and thousands of schools, colleges, medical colleges and technical training institutes. If governments do not have the money, then let rich Indians invest. They are queuing up to do so but are stopped because of policies that subject them to an inspector raj. The HRD minister is of the old, license-quota school of Indian politics and believes in controls that can be manipulated for political purposes.

So after stirring up the caste cauldron by announcing 27 per cent reservations in government schools and colleges for lesser castes, he now wants to stir things up further by investing taxpayers8217; money on improving madrassas. Young Muslims need good schools 8212; of this there is no doubt. They need schools that teach children about the greatness of India8217;s civilisation and the immense contribution of Muslims to it. They need schools that allow children to read the stories of Saadat Hasan Manto and the poetry of Ghalib and Meer. They do not need more schools that teach them that Islam is all there is.

Only a man with a perverted sense of logic could think of wasting time on such things when there is so much that needs to be done. A study by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences that covered 593 districts across India revealed last week that one in every three young Indians is illiterate. This speaks of the failure of the vaunted Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. Clearly it is not working, and even where it works, it succeeds only in making children functionally literate.

They learn nothing about India8217;s great writers and poets or about ancient texts so profound that philosophers all over the world turn to them for guidance and understanding. In India we dismiss them as 8216;Hindu8217;. And, colonised, secular Indians like me have been brought up to believe that Hindu is a dirty word. Such a dirty word that one of the first tasks our central Indian fossil set himself when he got his job was to 8216;detoxify8217; Indian education because a Hindu-minded minister had 8216;toxified8217; it by omitting references in history books to brahmins eating beef in ancient times.

What an opportunity Murli Manohar Joshi threw away to really make a difference. But if he did little good, he did little damage. The damage my least favourite minister is doing in the name of secularism is something we will pay for long after this government ends up in history8217;s garbage bin.