Statement on Education

One of the most welcome changes in the Union cabinet this time is the jettisoning of Arjun Singh as HRD minister after a very long and unproductive innings at the top. During his long stint as Union HRD minister he worked overtime to establish his own cardinal principle about education: there is nothing at all worthwhile in Indian pedagogic traditions, and therefore, if India were to make progress, the nation would do well to stick with Macaulay and to borrow everything from the West even if it meant making an unholy kedgeree of higher education. In about four decades of the stranglehold that he maintained on education, he took away much of the Indians’ legitimate pride in their academic heritage. Not content with that, he encouraged the distortion of Indian history in the textbooks for school children on the plea of making even history ‘secular’ according to the Congress definition of the word. Most people in the groves of Academe would probably be happy to see Kapil Sibal as the Union HRD minister, since he is keenly aware of the need for constant change in the education sector. However, one cannot help worrying about his statement of Friday that the education programmes initiated by Arjun Singh would not be scrapped. What adds poignancy to the overall fear is Kapil Sibal’s statement: “I respect my predecessor who is a respectable Congress leader.” Whatever Arjun Singh might have been as a Congress leader, as HRD minister he was an unmitigated disaster for the country. Whatever academic excellence there might have been at the level of higher education in India during the last four decades (and there has been so little) has not been because of Arjun Singh’s initiatives, but rather in spite of them. THE SENTINEL