Opinion UGC Regulation on discrimination is a first in India. And it is welcome
That the rebirth of the 2012 regulations in its new 2026 avatar is indeed a significant shift is indicated by the fact that a regime which generally takes pride in undoing what its predecessor did is actually reiterating an earlier policy
Whatever be its sins of omission and/or commission, the new statute signals the end of the era of regrettable “backwardness” and virtuous “diversity” as euphemisms for social discrimination of various kinds. (Express photo by Praveen Khanna) The expression “the elephant in the room” has an interesting entry in Wikipedia that links it to (among others) the writers Fyodor Dostoevsky and Mark Twain. It is used to refer to “an obvious problem or difficult situation that people do not want to talk about”. Judging by the reports of widespread protests against it, the University Grants Commission’s “Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Regulations, 2026” seem to have ended the long agyaatvas (unknown existence) of the social discrimination “elephant”.
Until the 2010s — six decades after the Constitution gave all Indians the right to a life free from discrimination — no national policy document on education ever mentioned discrimination in the sense that the 2026 Regulation uses it. The Radhakrishnan Commission on university education (1948-49) uses it, but in a sense that would be called “reverse discrimination” today, to object to a reservation policy involving “the rationing of seats among members of different communities” in effect in the (then) Madras state (p 45). The Education Commission of 1964-66, better known as the Kothari Commission, only uses the word discrimination to speak about unfair treatment of different levels of teachers, or in the older sense of considered judgement. In these two documents, concern for social justice is expressed in a mostly economic sense as the imperative to address “poverty, disease, hunger and ignorance” (Radhakrishnan, p 39) or the need to “prevent social segregation of classes” (Kothari, p 257).
Though it came much later, the Yash Pal Committee (for the “Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education”) of 2009, too, uses “discrimination” only to speak of unfair distinctions made between different kinds of universities rather than social groups. The 1986 National Policy of Education does not use the word at all. In fact, it is only in 2012, in the UGC Regulations on equity in higher education (which the current Regulations replace) that social discrimination first finds official mention.
Though it is retrospectively striking, the absence of discrimination from early official policy documents is not surprising for two reasons. The first is that post-Independence policy focus was on enabling access to education for the vast majority of citizens. Discrimination within higher education was not an issue because (barring exceptions) it was confined to a tiny, socially homogenous, privileged minority. The vast majority of India’s newly created citizens — especially women, lower castes, tribals, the poor, the disabled, and even most upper caste men — were unable to access higher education in any meaningful sense.
The second, more complex, reason concerns the ideological strategies of the nationalist movement. Led almost entirely by affluent upper-caste Hindu men, Indian nationalism sought to downplay divisions and inequalities in the effort to unite the masses for nation building. Divisions were repositioned as “diversity” — something to be celebrated — and inequalities were renamed as “backwardness” — something that the “weaker sections of society” unfortunately suffered from. Like all nationalisms, Indian nationalism fashioned a hegemonic nation-building project that would inspire the masses and divert attention from the fact that some differences were used to justify discrimination, which in turn perpetuated the “backwardness” of most and promoted the advancement of some.
Though it was remarkably successful for the first two decades of Independence, this nationalist ideology lost credibility from the late 1960s onwards. By the 1970s, issues of caste, communal and gender discrimination and oppression began to become visible. Moreover, beginning in the 1990s and into the 2000s, higher education experienced a truly astonishing expansion of enrolment which, together with the extension of reservation to the OBCs, completely transformed its social composition. But it was not until the 2010s that discrimination in higher education received sustained attention.
In the space of less than two decades — half a generation — Indian higher education has gone from being a relatively small, homogenous space dominated by a privileged minority, to becoming a vast, socially-diverse mass of young adults who outnumber all but 40 countries in the world. Recent surveys suggest that as many as 80 per cent of students enrolled today are first generation entrants into higher education. Conflicts around discrimination are part of the spectrum of social frictions that such momentous and rapid changes inevitably bring.
The UGC’s new regulations must be welcomed — despite their being attacked from many opposing standpoints, and despite the revisions that will almost certainly follow. The new regulations must be welcomed not for what they do or don’t do but for the crucial shift they mark, perhaps unknowingly. That the rebirth of the 2012 regulations in its new 2026 avatar is indeed a significant shift is indicated by the fact that a regime which generally takes pride in undoing what its predecessor did is actually reiterating an earlier policy.
Whatever be its sins of omission and/or commission, the new statute signals the end of the era of regrettable “backwardness” and virtuous “diversity” as euphemisms for social discrimination of various kinds. These euphemisms either simply masked discrimination (diversity) or made it into an act of nature, a crime without a perpetrator (backwardness). This allowed for the deliberate misrecognition of policies aimed at redressing discrimination (like reservation) as welfare policies. More crucially, it made the agents, the do-ers of discrimination, vanish from view.
Making a complex and entrenched problem like social discrimination visible is a necessary step without which solutions — even partial ones — are impossible. It is a step certain to make our immediate future more contentious and fraught. The only thing worse than taking this step forward is to not take it. Despite its vexations a visible elephant is infinitely better than an invisible one.
The writer is an independent scholar based in Bengaluru
Share
