The Gujarat High Court order fining Arvind Kejriwal while setting aside the Central Information Commissioner’s directive to make public details about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s educational degrees, is heavy-handed and raises questions over due process and institutional autonomy. Having said that, however, the Delhi Chief Minister’s campaign calling the PM “illiterate… less educated” is not politics — or not politics that can mount the high ground, certainly. In fact, the campaign itself suffers from a striking form of illiteracy. In a country where the spread of literacy is a work in progress, and where inequalities of educational access and opportunity are often entangled with other inequalities of caste, class and gender, the educational qualification would have been, it would still be, highly exclusionary. A representative democracy is the rule of, by and for the people — it is not a rule by the so-called most-competent, or by a class of elites or experts. Surely, Kejriwal’s IIT degree is a coveted one for many young women and men. But it’s ironic that his AAP, which has made the “aam aadmi” its motif, should propagate a notion of representativeness that belies the enormous gains made in terms of democratic deepening and levelling of the field in India by its politics.
But the AAP must know that by calling the PM “illiterate” and not qualified to govern, it strikes a low note. Such a campaign does not behove a party that has actually engaged with the issue of education on the ground with high seriousness — one of its calling cards is its work on turning around the sarkari school in Delhi. It also threatens to bring into disrepute the push-back against the Modi-BJP by the larger Opposition that the AAP is a prominent part of. Fighting against an opponent like the BJP, whose will to win respects few boundaries, is hard. But the onus of coming up with an imaginative politics that does not stoop to counter is on Kejriwal’s party. A party that can teach a thing or two about education politics should know better.
