New leftism for old

The political slant of the HRD Ministry was subtle and understated till the BJP emerged as a force in Indian politics. Academic India was firmly in the control of the left, with blessings from the ruling Congress.

When the BJP came to power, undoing left influence in academia became a priority. NCF 2000 outlined that vision, and school textbooks written by academics to the left were replaced, in 2002. The controversy has been active since then.

NCF 2005 tried to steer clear of the ‘‘secular-communal’’ binary opposites that have defined Indian political life in the past decade. Keeping silent on this debate, NCF 2005 instead focused on reforming school education by reducing stress and making learning enjoyable. Ironically, this alleged lack of political conviction has become the main political issue about NCF 2005.

‘‘Reversing saffronisation should have been a priority of NCF 2005. They shied away from it,’’ says Arjun Dev, whose textbooks were among those replaced by the BJP government.

Dev and his fellow travellers believe the 2004 election was fought on the ‘‘issue of communalism, of which changes in school syllabus too was a part’’. ‘‘Instead of confronting communalism through school education, the document seeks to compromise with it,’’ says another critic.

It is just another irony that Professor Yash Pal, chair of the committee that drafted the NCF, and Krishna Kumar, NCERT director appointed by the UPA government, too were warriors alongside Dev in the ‘‘anti-saffronisation’’ agitation.

HOWEVER, Yashpal and Krishna Kumar have a different approach today. ‘‘I do not need to write in five places in a document to become secular. That is automatic in our educational policy and criticisms are often ill-informed,’’ says Yash Pal. NCERT officials say stress-reduction is the priority in this NCF and it will introduce new modes of teaching and learning so that children enjoy the learning experience.

Both the ‘‘approach’’ of and ‘‘specifics’’ in the NCF agitated left-leaning academics. NCF 2005 is ‘‘postmodernist’’ in its approach, they argued, and this could promote dangerous values in a society that had a substantial section living in pre-modern settings.

Critics then got specific. ‘‘Promotion of local knowledge’’, one suggestion in the NCF, created the maximum controversy. Local knowledge could also mean the caste system or gender biases, it was pointed out.

NCERT revised the NCF to qualify local knowledge. It now says, all dissemination of local knowledge ‘‘must be mediated through constitutional values and principles’’.

IRONICALLY the BJP-ruled states found, in the promotion of local knowledge and diversity, a Left conspiracy to undermine Indian nationalism. ‘‘It is the left’s old position that India is not a nation but a nation of nations. This emphasis on diversity is a veiled move to promote this ideology,’’ says Vasudev Devnani, eduction minister, Rajasthan.

The meaning lies, after all, with the reader. Now what could be more postmodernist than that?