Ministry from Hell

In fact, the HRD ministry is not even a ministry. It’s actually a gigantic coalition of ministries which includes five departments — education, culture, arts, youth affairs and sports and women and child welfare. How Stalinist can you get! Imagine women and child welfare being clubbed together with arts. And why isn’t every democratically-minded citizen outraged at the ugly word “human resource”? Such a Soviet, clinical, official-sounding monstrosity! When you begin to describe a sportsman or a talented child as a “human resource” you are taking a one-way ticket to an Orwellian bureaucratic hell, where humanism has ceased to exist.

Manning the posts of the HRD ministry are legions of IAS officers. There are IAS officers heading museums and cultural and liberal arts institutes. Government appointees are controlling bodies like NCERT. Some small mercy that art and vocal music have acquired commercial value and enabled practitioners to exist without IAS officers, otherwise most athletes, academics and artistes have to queue up outside secretary sahib’s door for sustenance. Indian national culture, far from being created by the public, is in fact created by some joint secretary. This is a serious disservice to future generations of talented Indians.

Instead of rule by IAS officers, there is an urgent need to create a trained body of professional managers of textbooks. Or, in the sphere of culture, a cadre of autonomous cultural impresarios or “artocrats”. These professional managers should manage education, culture and sport. Indian educationists are valued all over the world for their expertise. Many like professor Yash Pal have done extremely beneficial work in the field of education. Instead of simply sending these highly skilled educationists to UNESCO conferences, why does the government not disinvest from textbooks and instead harness the talents of these educationists? Why does the government not cede its powers to an autonomous panel of textbook managers or textbook professionals who could assess rationally what students should or should not learn? Instead, all the HRD minister has done is appoint a “detoxification” committee of historians in a political chess game. In an increasingly open information-based society, an HRD ministry, which seeks to control young Indian minds, is a terrifying anachronism.

No less terrifying are the two recent HRD ministers, both apparatchiks of scary ideologies. The earlier incumbent, the physicist Dr Murli Manohar Joshi, commissar of that sinister force known as Hindutva, and the present incumbent Arjun Singh, warlord of that equally sinister force known as “official secularism”.

The havoc unleashed by Joshi on the education system, his bizarre battle against “the English-speaking elite class”, his “packing” of the ICHR with saffron historians and his serious damage to textbooks stemmed from the fact that he alone among his NDA colleagues was unable to reinvent himself as a modern politician. He remained hostage to a caricature of “bharatiya sanskriti”, never mind that all that bharatiya sanskriti seemed to mean to him was hosting NRI conferences and attacking management institutes.

Similarly, the equally disastrous meddling of Arjun Singh shows how tragically Singh has distorted the magnificent legacy of Nehru. Singh, who has found that his base in Madhya Pradesh is being increasingly swept away by new caste groups, who reportedly wept when the Babri Masjid was demolished (but didn’t resign from government, mind you), has become a caricature of “official secularism”. This secularism may be described as a political dogma that sees religion as evil. Singh believes this is his USP, but it is precisely this elitist mechanical “secularism” inspired by Left ideologues that has driven droves of Hindus into the arms of the Sangh. It is precisely this short-sighted secularism married to extreme sycophancy to The Family that has disgusted traditional Congress supporters. To insist, like the Congress, that Akbar was a 16th century Nehru is idiotic. Just as idiotic as trying to prove, like the BJP, that the Aryans didn’t eat beef. Nowhere in the world is the discipline of History so hostage to governmental ideology. No where else in the world are Chandragupta Maurya or Babur (or their equivalents) pressed into service as contemporary vote-gatherers.

But the larger question is this: just as the government is disinvesting from sick PSUs, it must disinvest from that other sick PSU known as Indian culture and education. NCERT, ICHR et al make up the social public sector, similar to the economic public sector. It should no longer be the business of the government to declare Nationally Acceptable Textbooks or Nationally Acceptable Historians. The HRD ministry is failing to fulfill its objectives simply because it is just too large, it is a patronage machine handing out jobs for the boys, it is stifling culture by making it a servant of an additional secretary. Sportsmen have long complained over government interference. Artists have lamented bureaucratic diktats. Textbooks have become political footballs. As a solution, the HRD ministry should be shut down, its funds diverted to boards consisting of representatives of each discipline which are managed by a professional cadre of managers. By being a ministry, HRD is destroying the very thing it is supposed to create.