Snakes alive!

The good news is, Joshi-baiters needn8217;t despair. Even if the prime minister holds Union Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manoh...

The good news is, Joshi-baiters needn8217;t despair. Even if the prime minister holds Union Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi to his proffered resignation, they will still be in business: The minister of state HRD, Sanjay Paswan, shows all the signs of being just as unbearably provocative as his boss. Just look at him photographed by this paper in Patna a few days ago, cobra coiled languorously around his neck, still hot from his barefoot exertions on burning embers, with glistening swords and such like, before or after honouring an array of village exorcists, shamans, charmers, sorcerers. The bad news, of course, is that the ministry of human resource development, which includes education, should appear destined to swing from a Joshi to a Paswan. And that public discourse on education and school curricula, which has been steered to stunning lows in recent years, should now be coaxed to plumb further depths: Paswan has suggested that we all debate what he calls faith healing and what bears a striking resemblance to superstition.

Paswan is free, of course, to be superstitious, obscurantist, regressive, or just plain adventurous 8212; within the confines of his own home. He has the right to fraternise with magicians and witchdoctors and to flirt with their allegedly miraculous powers. But a line needs to be drawn. In public, Minister Paswan must behave with the responsibility and decorum his high office vests in him. And he must never, never allow his personal festishes and enthusiasms anywhere near school curricula. We8217;ve had enough 8212; no, more than enough 8212; of tinkering with curricula in recent years. Ever since Murli Manohar Joshi took charge of education, the crucial portfolio has been reduced to its caricature. The HRD minister8217;s interventions have ensured that the national conversation on education is only preoccupied with its ideological colours, to the exclusion of all other issues. Like, say, the quality of education on offer.

Education needs rescuing. The entire behemoth of the HRD ministry needs to be saved, in fact, from ministers who run amok and insist on taking their ministry with them.