Friends, no matter how hard you try to separate suffering from justice, it won’t happen. That is one reason why it is so difficult to secularize justice. Democracy promises to do that, and that’s why we come here to discuss democracy in various contexts. This time it is justice. About 20 years ago, I was in Firozabad for a whole day. This is where bangles come from—in India, Pakistan, across South Asia. It is known for its glass bangles. I was accompanied by 25 of my students who were all going to become teachers. We spent the entire day visiting different glass factories where bangles are made. By that time, UNICEF had already managed to get the children removed from glass factories. So, our day was relatively better than it might have been 10 years prior to that date. But as the afternoon advanced into the evening, we were taken to people’s homes, and inside those homes there were children—children as young as five, or four, joining the two ends of the bangles using a candle flame as the source of heat. They were sitting in large halls on the floor and were making these bangles to be packed away for distribution across the country.
And from there we went to an established centre of non-formal education which has been designed to accommodate children who can’t go to school. My students and I were here for about an hour. There were about 60 children sitting on the floor and learning from two teachers writing on the blackboard. Since my students are going to become teachers, they thought we might as well engage these children a little bit. One of these students asked a question and the question was: If you meet God, what would you ask him? I thought this wasn’t a great question to put across in that setting. But children did start responding to this question. The reason I remembered this morning about that day, that afternoon, was because of a girl, who was about eight or nine at that time. When her turn came, she said in Hindi, ‘I would ask, why did you make me so poor’ and as she spoke, tears started falling from her eyes—big tears. It was a difficult moment to live through as she cried silently.
Her question to God reminds us that if you are born poor, your search for justice through education is going to be proven as long, difficult and not particularly successful. Various kinds of calamities can hit such children—illness, hunger or simply a misfortune that their parents go through, like the Partition of India, or a man-made disaster like the construction of a dam, because of which villages drown. It can also be something like the construction of a road, during which their childhood or infancy is spent with their mothers working, while the child is lying under a nearby tree or even in a mobile crèche. What the state does to bring justice to such children is evident. Here, I am not talking about a specific country, but the idea of the state. Although the state provides equal rights to all citizens, it categorizes people into different groups to address their specific needs for equality, justice, and fair treatment.
This is how the state manages to deal with a vast society in which everybody has several rights. Such rights are handled in group settings. You are entitled to those rights because you belong to that group. In our country, being in the General Caste is also a group. There are minority groups—Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes—and if none of them apply to you, you learn to say that you belong to the General category. Each group has a certain probability of seeking the attention of the state, especially in the context of education, government representation and so on. But essentially, it is your identity as belonging to that particular group that helps the state to dispense various aspects of the democratic system, including rights. The state deals with children in the same way as it deals with these groups. These groups are flat, even though within the group there may be lots of differences and various subgroups as well. In the context of children, childhood is flattened out as a stage of life—starts at birth, ends when you are 18. The consequence of this flattening of childhood is that misfortunes that come your way by way of illness, hunger and construction of dams are seen as something that has happened to you when you were a child.
That is a very difficult starting point for any discussion on justice in the context of children.
The consequences of facing either your own or your parents’ misfortunes in life depends on how old you were at that time. If you were an infant, its consequences are far more difficult, long lasting and grave than it might be if you were a teenager. And in case of the latter, the consequences would have been different—perhaps equally grave if you watched your school get submerged in dam water. You are forced to leave your home village and adjust to a slum in a big city. Consequences can be very serious if you have reached puberty. Consequences would differ based on your gender, age and other aspects.
Childhood cannot be treated as a flat category if we are to leave some scope for justice for a child. That is also difficult because justice takes time, sometimes a very long time. Childhood is a fairly fast-moving stage. By the time justice comes, it is too late. Say you get admission to a school after some NGO intervenes on your behalf. It goes to court and the Right to Education that was given to you is finally restored, and you are enrolled in a school. By that time you have already missed three or four grades, then the restoration of that right will not be much of a restoration. Similar problems arise in the context of assertion of rights. We know that the notion of rights for children is essentially only a word because children are not in a position to either know properly what that means, or to fight for it if it is violated. Small children can hardly assert their rights. Somebody else has to assert the rights on the child’s behalf. If not the parents, it will be some organization, or it may be the state itself, or a lawyer etc. So, these are all situations which make the child dependent on others and in that sense, the word ‘rights’ actually doesn’t fully apply in the context of a child.
Given these limitations, the state has certain responsibilities in the context of democracy—and even otherwise. Even monarchies feel somewhat responsible for doing their best for children, because children also have some symbolic value—they represent the future. To every adult, a child symbolizes life after their death. Therefore, even a monarch feels concerned about children to some extent. And hence the idea that the state will fulfil whatever responsibilities it accepts, as the Constitution says, ‘to the best of its capacity’. That capacity is not something that children can define. Those capacities are defined in the context of many other priorities which a state has, a society has, a country has. But the capacity might be quite limited in the sense that the needs of childhood—as any parent or teacher would know—are so many, so demanding and pressing that if the state’s capacity is to be used for fulfilling and enhancing them, the capacity might seem limited even in the richest of states. The state does what it can in order to fulfil these responsibilities in the context of the citizen’s rights it assumes.
It permits education to develop in society by the best means possible. Now, these means include the rise of a system. Education for us—those who are educated—is of course an experience, and we associate that experience with enlightenment, a sense of awakening and understanding of many things. But education is also the name of a system which has a history. That history makes that system behave in a certain way. It shares its primary character. In our context, if we see that primary character, I think the word that best suits it—though it doesn’t fully describe it—would be the word ‘divided’. Ours is a divided system of education. And in a very broad sense we divide between the state schools and private schools, and we are used to this idea. We can spend a lot of time critiquing state schools and some people can spend a lot of time critiquing private schools, but that is not the issue. The point is to understand and acknowledge the implications of a divided system, for a society that aspires to govern in a democratic matter so that equality—a modicum of equality at least—nourishes the hope and desire for justice in the time one has in this world.
Many descriptions exist of these divisions. During my lifetime as a teacher, I have tried to understand this divided system and describe it. Some descriptions are useful while others are not. In order to absorb the differences, we need to go to a different level. Let’s start with something as basic as the building. When a government begins to say that we have improved our school buildings, that statement itself suggests that something has happened. It is like a male member of the family saying, ‘Now I will wash my socks’. This idea that buildings have improved is seen as a great achievement and the middle-class newspaper readers or consumers of television news feel somewhat happy. They believe that now even state schools will have somewhat better buildings. But that is not the idea that matters in this context in which we are trying to recall this. Visit a government school building and keep your eyes open as you enter. You notice that this building is painted with not just good paint outside—the whitewash and all—but also certain messages and slogans about the good life, doing your duty, this is the best performance of a citizen and so on. They write these slogans on the walls outside and inside the school. When you go further in, you will notice that government schools are supposed to have a bulletin board or painting on the wall to display the total number of children enrolled, the kind of categories they come from—Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, number of girl children etc.
A state school is supposed to keep these statistics updated. Sometimes you feel quite satisfied and pleased that it is so. Especially, if you visit a place like China, you realize the value of such statistics. Once I had asked the rural school headmaster, ‘How many girls do you have in your school’? I was talking through translation and he took a second to say—‘I don’t know’. It was a small rural school with hardly 150 children. I expressed my surprise and he said, ‘No, I can find out how many girls there are’. The matter had to pass.
Later, when I was returning to Beijing from this village, my translator, with whom I had become a bit friendly, told me why the headmaster wouldn’t say how many girls there were—of course he knew as the headmaster. She informed me that the government has dictated a rule that one cannot part with statistics around a foreigner. That is the first time I felt that it was a good thing that the Indian government insists that the number of girls be painted on the walls. Private schools don’t need this. A private school may not reveal all aspects of its life, but certainly wouldn’t take any pride in saying that we teach so many girls, so many Scheduled Castes, etc. State schools supposedly take pride in these things. The slogans sometimes involve a thali with the midday meal painted on the walls, showing a katori of dal, sabzi, roti. When you have absorbed these icons of what the state has done for these children, you begin to register that these children are actually advertisements of the state. The state has given them all this, and this is the state’s statement of having done its duty.
It is also partly an ideological statement from the state when it displays slogans about being a good citizen, the necessity of discipline for a successful life or asserts any other ideas necessary for moral value. They are written in almost every classroom and outside, as messages on the environment on a tree, or where to throw the garbage and so on. If you put all these messages together and try to make sense of the state’s way of talking to these children, then you realize that the state actually wants to transform and improve these children, and under that agenda lies the feeling that if they are not transformed, something will be lacking in their right to citizenship. The state is trying to project that they are bringing these children up because parents are not a sufficient resource for them to learn about various moral ideas—like speaking the truth, leading a regular, disciplined life or looking after the environment. Unless these are conveyed, the state seems to assume that the children may not do all this.
So, you absorb the idea that it is not as if these children are supposed to grow up, and education will help them to reach their best potential. They have to be transformed and their quality as human beings have to be improved. And that is what the state is doing. And once that mission has moved to a certain point, or has succeeded in some cases, then those children will become true advertisements of the states and its capacities. That is why it becomes news when, let’s say, a washerman’s daughter gets highest marks in a grade ten exam. Every newspaper will have that story because the state has succeeded through that girl. You find something worthwhile in a father’s struggle, mother’s struggle. And through the state’s support she has achieved something she otherwise may not have.
But then there are many other aspects—we were just dwelling on the building. Let us look at a bit of contrast in the context of the teachers. There was a time when government schoolteachers were called ‘behenjis’ whereas private school or higher-end schoolteachers were called ‘ma’am’. That phenomenon has become a bit dated and ma’am has begun to be used in at least the higher end government schools—which is in itself somewhat an oxymoron. A central school or the Navodaya schools are higher end government schools. They are supposed to be better. They are higher end not because they pay higher fees, but because the state invests more in those schools, itself practicing inequality in terms of how it looks after a vast number of schools. The word ‘teacher’ applies to the best of public schools, higher-end public schools and established, old, prestigious public schools, and as well as government schools—everybody is a teacher. But once you get inside the school and absorb the ethos of schools, then you begin to notice the differences. I am not talking about shortage of teachers, which is a chronic issue. The state schools are almost always facing a shortage. Various issues arise, such as a transfer system—teachers may be transferred right at the helm of the examination preparation time and then suddenly there is a vacuum. Or the government schoolteacher may have election duties and elections can seriously disrupt government schools’ annual schedules. These are, sort of expected aspects of school life.
No, I am not talking about those procedural aspects of the teachers’ life. You need to compare these two worlds by sitting in the staffroom of a government school and the staffroom of an established, good public school. You will begin to notice certain things. You will begin to see the habitus—the way in which the body absorbs status, in which the body conveys status by its body movement, by language, by clothes, by certain slouch, by doing things in a certain way. The life of government schoolteachers is weighed down from inside the body by a certain sense of authority that is not invested in that body. The government schoolteacher has no authority. The authority flows from the higher functionary of the state, the Directorate of Education, could be the Secretary of Education and so on—it flows through the principal, and finally a bit of that authority, an inconsequential bit—is left for the teacher to enjoy when she takes the class.
But spend the entire day—one day may not be enough, maybe a few days—and notice how much of the day is spent without purpose by the teachers and the students. If you contrast this with the lives in high-end public schools, you will notice that there is a sense of focus and remaining busy, moving from one activity to the next. Quite a few teachers seem to walk, stand and sit as if they have internalized a sense of loyalty and responsibility towards the school. They exercise their own authority even though the principal has greater authority. But this contrast is very interesting to grasp in the context of children themselves. Every school has a uniform—the high-end schools as well as government schools. In government schools, the government gives the uniforms especially to the poor and Scheduled Castes. It is supposed to distribute two pairs of free uniforms. And now, more is happening.
Many public schools today, like the higher-end public schools, central schools and so on have a belt. Navodaya children have shoes and even socks. They have badges and from time to time and in winter they may also have a bit of warm clothing. These are not things you will see in an ordinary government school which is not in any special category. The uniform is the same throughout the seasons. If you belong to an ordinary government school, your routine life will enter into your body movements—into your gaze, into your walk—in such a manner that you will convey a sense of not being a consequential person. At some point or the other you will learn that your status is far less than the status that a child in a higher end public school. There, the badge, the belt, the condition of the uniform may bring a sense of some loyalty and pride in belonging to that school. Whereas, in the context of a government school it is similar to having a ration card and getting your ration. Ration is free—free or cheaper grain given to a vast multitude as responsibility in a democratic order. And the school uniform is one of those things. Scholarships for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, or children who are Muslims and sometimes even children who are poor may get this or that benefit—like ration.
These children, then, are made to recognize that they are receivers of these benefits. In fact, the word ‘benefit’ itself has entered the discourse of education. The government school children learn that education will qualify them for certain kinds of careers and jobs. The learning aspect of education becomes far less important than the qualifying aspect as you grow up. If you do well in a government school then you may find yourself in high-end institutions when it comes to higher education. In the context of this phase of history, all of these little things that indicate a certain kind of equality or the idea that social justice is accessible to everybody, howsoever poor a person may be, matter. Mass culture now includes the use of such terms. And the word ‘mass culture’ itself thrives in times like ours, when capital intensifies its control. It is so acute that three or four of the biggest corporations of the world are now in one state of the United States—California. In the history of capitalism, no one has ever seen this degree of concentration of capital that is found in California itself.
In fact, the state contributes to that as well, but corporations manage it pretty well themselves. Today, the state distributes not merely a pair of uniform—shoes and socks in some cases—but even a smartphone. When the state distributes smartphones, it is photographed and filmed so that evidence can be established that the state doesn’t want to leave these children behind. And therefore, even an expensive item of possession and consumption, like a smartphone, will be made accessible.
This word ‘digital divide’ suggests that it can be bridged, and through it many other divides can be bridged, because somehow it is now accepted that the internet itself is the most democratic of all of the institutions. It permits knowledge and information to freely flow, and it can negate the meaning of inequality of cultural capital where literate and educated parents knew more and therefore the child had a greater advantage.
The mass culture that surrounds us today enables us to feel that what we are consuming is indicative of our status, rather than income and real-life circumstances, and the probabilities that arise from that. Consumption in mass culture becomes the indicator of status and so birthday cakes, invitations for birthdays printed on a card—little simple aspects of childhood—all become fodder for mass culture. Across the world of the poor, you see these kinds of imitation jewellery, and so on. In this context then, the word ‘justice’ and ‘equality’ too become a part of mass culture. Their conceptual purity shines through the cultural ethos that mass culture spreads in which little room is left, and less time is left to actually think about it. How can consumption of certain kinds of symbolic items become a substitute for real equality of opportunity? Imagine a flooded river whose water is severely polluted. And imagine large size plastic bottles of shining mineral water bobbing up and down in this river. That is what equality and justice are—like that pure water in a bottle in which, the seal is broken and the water is just bobbing up and down in a polluted, flooded river. You feel impressed by the fact that equality and justice are there, they shine—justice as an idea, as a word, as an experience, always shines. And its hope, its likelihood that it will happen in your lifetime also shines.
This kind of metaphor makes sense because it makes you forget about the world around those floating bottles. You forget the real water of the river. Mass culture makes us a little forgetful and then actually ignorant because mass culture surrounds us all and ultimately creates in our mind such heavy smoke that we forget to see—we don’t know how to see when something happens. 7 years ago something happened which for a moment woke everyone up. That was the moment when a reserved caste science student of the Central University of Hyderabad, who was doing very well in his studies, committed suicide.
The case became a sort of a heightened news that penetrated mass culture for a day, in some cases weeks in some parts of the country. This young man’s name was Rohith Vemula.
Why his death by suicide made such a strong impact for a few days on the consciousness of a mass culture was not just because of his identity, but because he left a very potent note at his death. A note that he seems to have written shortly before killing himself. Many of you have probably read that note, many of you have kept it and maybe remember some of his words. But I would still like to read a short passage from that short note, so that we can bring this matter to a sense of immediate understanding. One-third down in that one-page note, Vemula says, ‘I love science. But then I loved people. Without knowing that people have long since divorced from nature. Our feelings are second-hand. Our love is constructed. Our beliefs coloured. Our originality valid through artificial art. It has become truly difficult to love without getting hurt’. And a few sentences later, Rohith Vemula writes, ‘The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility, to a vote, to a number, to a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of stardust’.
And then he writes these crucial words which became quite famous for a while before Rohith Vemula was forgotten. ‘My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover my childhood loneliness’. Interpreting Vemula is not particularly easy, but certain things you can observe and read can help.
Some years back I happened to be in a village school in the Allahabad district in Uttar Pradesh which has now been renamed Prayagraj. I was listening to a teacher in a grade five class in the mathematics period. He was doing reasonably well by the standards one expects in mathematics teaching. Suddenly somebody came from the headmaster’s office—he was also a teacher.
In the presence of the mathematics teacher this person said, ‘All the Scheduled Caste students stand up’. They stood up. ‘Now, all of you go to the headmaster’s office during the interval and get your scholarship, okay?’ And then the class continued. That is what Rohith Vemula is talking about—that we are all identities, never a person, never a mind, as he says. He was never treated as a mind. But what about his childhood loneliness? What helps us to understand that?
Quite often, upper-middle-class people believe that children of the poor have many problems in their lives but loneliness is not one of them. Then, what is Vemula talking about? If you read Ambedkar, he explains it.
Ambedkar, as you know was a student of John Dewey at Columbia University for some time. And Ambedkar in his letter as well as some of his writing, attributes some of his basic understanding of democracy to Dewey. Dewey is known for his 1916 book Democracy and Education. There is a metaphor that Dewey uses, that of endosmosis, which Ambedkar picked up and found very useful. Endosmosis is a biological process in which water, or blood, or any liquid has a certain restricted passage through a membrane which surrounds the nucleus. Dewey used that metaphor to talk about a basic requirement of a functioning democracy, is that that no matter what classes, status groups, backgrounds that different people have, so long there is endosmosis or the possibility of the flow of this lifeblood across, it will stay alive. And what Ambedkar picked up from that interpretation of Dewey was his critique that the caste system ensures that Indian society does not have endosmosis. Knowledge, crafts, experience remain confined to class rule. They don’t travel and because of that they don’t have this endosmosis process. When ideas don’t circulate, what happens to those who enjoy ideas?
Rohith Vemula was one such young man who talks about his childhood loneliness which ultimately became so intense that it ripped him apart. Yes, if you are invested in the word ‘motivation’—the police always say that we are investigating the motive of this murder or suicide. Well, Vemula’s note provides that as well, for those who feel satisfied when they find the motivation in somebody else’s action. Towards the end of his note, he says, ‘If you want to do something to help me, please try to get the scholarship that the university owes me for the last seven months and send it to my mother’. If you enquire from the Central University of Hyderabad about what happened to that scholarship, well, because of various little bureaucratic problems, it could not be given regularly to him. And after his suicide, they did release the scholarship and his last wish was fulfilled after some weeks.
We have come to the point of conclusion. If you belong to that section of the population which is very vast, where equality can only come to you through mass culture, then the probability is very low that education will lead to a feeling that justice was done, or that you had the opportunity to get from life what you thought you deserved. In all likelihood, you will struggle. At what point your struggle will be transferred to your children is the only continuation of the idea of justice in such life. In the sense that, I did not achieve or get what I thought I deserved, but I want to make sure my children will. You transfer this hope that democracy arouses in everybody, including the poor. That is why, as I told you in the beginning, it is very difficult to dissociate the idea of justice from suffering and in a sense, to secularize the idea. Therefore, a lot of people die saying that God will do them justice.
Justice as an institution falters as much as education does in maintaining these basic norms of democracy. Democracy has no choice; as an idea, it promises justice within this lifespan, it also promises equality in a highly unequal and stratified society. And on top of everything else it promises that it can be achieved through education. Thank you.
Question and Answer
Audience Member 1: Sir, I am Meenakshi and I am a schoolteacher. I have been teaching for 18 years and sometimes I feel like I am thinking like the students in my class. So, forgive me if my question sounds to be of less value. Actually, each and every word from you matters to me. I do my job very enthusiastically and I look at children as potential resources. Bacche humare desh ke dharohar hai [Children are the heritage of our country]. And I heard a statement that children sometimes have a symbolic value—I am still balancing that they are desh ke dharohar [heritage of our country] and sometimes of symbolic value. Correct me if my understanding of your statement is wrong.
KK: A child is real and indicates the continuity of life. The moment a child becomes symbolic there remains nothing particularly important to say anymore. Childhood itself is a symbol and mass culture has picked it up in a big way. That is why the idea of rights, which is now a UN convention, has so little meaning. But we boast about it as a serious achievement of our civilization, which it is in some sense it is, no doubt about that.
AM 2: I am Dyuti and I am also a high schoolteacher. I have been a lawyer and have recently joined teaching. I don’t have much experience in teaching, but I am teaching in Modern High School for Girls, where students have the privileges that we were talking about that the large section don’t have. In that kind of a privileged space, how do we imbibe the many ideas of justice in high school children—they are not really children, they are 17–18 years old—so that they may not perpetrate this entire dichotomy further in their lives? There is a clear demarcation in their body language that they know they have it all, so how can we mitigate that line within these children, how do we imbibe the ideas of justice into them?
KK: When we reduce education, or a discussion of education, to ‘how to’ questions, we run into a serious problem. Education is also a matter of understanding, not just learning how to do this or that—although from anybody who talks about education, this is what one is expected to do these days. We have little scope for listening to a discussion on education without wanting to immediately implement it. As if it was a lesson in a vocational course where you were learning about how to repair a smartphone. No. Our discussion today was to understand the implication of being democratic as a country. If understanding this is our goal, then how it translates through your pedagogic practice into becoming something that the children will absorb and learn, need not be turned into a ‘how to’ lesson. Democracy is also partly a matter of faith—if you believe in it and proceed from that, to understand its body parts like equality and justice, then something will happen. And if it does happen to you, surely it will happen to your children. That is the fundamental aspect of education, that if the teacher has the thing in her, then the children will absorb it from her even if she doesn’t make a big statement about it. In fact, the smaller the statement, the greater the absorption and learning by children.
AM 3: Good morning, I am Shafaq and I am a high schoolteacher. Correct me if I am wrong. This privatization of education, has it not imparted this belief that education is the only path towards material development? Most of the students are going in for higher education in private institutions do so with the objective of getting more knowledge for purpose of getting a better, material opportunity in life. How do we overcome that?
KK: Perhaps you didn’t absorb my earlier answer, because this is another ‘how to’ question. Sitting in this hall, you and I can’t resolve the systemic problems of our times. If you think I want to mitigate privatization or if you think you can improve this division by this evening, perhaps noontime, we will learn this was a delusion. Best is to understand what is happening today. Privatization is an aspect of history today that the state is acknowledging in an implicit way. There is an opportunity for the state itself to forget its responsibilities—as it is, it is not performing those all that well—but in this phase of history even that degree of performance is diminishing. Higher education—if you want to be dramatic—you might say is a disastrous development that is going on. State universities are declining in front of you as if somebody is actually demolishing them with a bulldozer. And if that happens, some other institution will take over, which is what private universities are doing.
If you want more evidence, you can count the number of students who have moved from declining state universities to flourishing private universities. And if you were a journalist, you would say yes, this university has poached so many—like some of my colleagues at Delhi University today are at Ashoka University. It is pretty discourteous of me to say that Ashoka University has poached Delhi University, that is not the case. But yes, privatization is a phenomenon of our times. We wish them well, if they can safeguard the role of a university in democracy—all the best, one says. The recent history is not particularly happy. It doesn’t prove that private universities can’t perform the role that public universities were supposed to perform—and sacrifice themselves to perform.
Take the case of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). The grand project of democracy demolished it within the democratic process, through an ideological apparatus that cannot tolerate thinking, inquiry and freedom. A great institution has been brought to pieces in front of us within a few years. And those who now remember it or talk about the horrors that it has gone through, are themselves described as sympathizers of an India that JNU wanted to break up into pieces—the Tukde Tukde Gang. That is what JNU has been described as in recent times of our history. No wonder this is a time when private universities have a great role to play, but we also know that private universities have very serious constrains, that they cannot perform this micro-political role that universities as the epistemic arms of the democratic state were supposed to perform. The two have different spaces. That other space has been so emptied out—state universities have been hollowed out and then fully demolished, both in terms of their prestige and trustworthiness. These are not hidden political events of our times that someone will have to reveal through elaborate research. These are treated by many today as matters of satisfaction that this kind of dissent has been finished off and the idea of India is safer because it doesn’t allow dissent anymore.
AM 4: I was thinking about your statement about the flattening of existence, flattening of childhood and experiences and in the light of that, the differences it poses within the vast expanse of our country and that justice cannot be secularized. I was wondering if you had any thoughts about our New Education Policy, that seeks uniformity, and I was wondering if this uniformity translates into equality. Do you have any opinions on this?
KK: The discourse of policy is subject to our historical awareness—which policy was written when, so that the current policy doesn’t have to be decoded with artificial intelligence. In any case, our intelligence is not allowed to speak. We are in ways passing through a difficult period when it comes to a consensus of what is meant by terms like ‘development’, ‘nation building’ or ‘equality’ and so on. The mass culture that surrounds us has fully enveloped these nice shining words. The word ‘policy’ too is one of those words. Yes, a policy was needed and now there is a policy. And our complaint against older policies was that they were not implemented, so this time they are being coercively implemented. Watch out if you don’t implement it in your institution. If you are told to change the name of that department or that office, you better do it quickly, otherwise an inspection team will visit your institute and give you a low grade and so on. Policy implementation today is a different phase of the history of education. No policy was ever implemented with such forceful need as the present one. What is there that requires this force to implement it? Obviously the lack of consensus. The state of West Bengal declared that we were never consulted. The force of the policy is so great that even West Bengal has said that we will implement the four-year graduation system and the centralized admission tests, which are offshoots of this policy. These are aspects of the political life of our times that should make us aware that almost no term, including the word ‘policy’ is any more authentic or conceived through procedures or prophecies that were part and parcel of a functioning democracy.
AM 5: Sir, for a while, if we keep economic inequalities aside, all other kinds of equalities can be seen in private schools, like no scholarship announcement, no mention of children’s caste and religion on the walls or bulletin board. We hardly get to know the caste of the children until they start filling out forms for higher education in government institutions. I feel that private schools are better place than government schools in terms of justice.
KK: It is an interesting way to trap me. There was a narrow bridge created 13 years ago to create some possibility of a merger, which was known as the Right to Education, under which even high-end private schools were expected to put in 25 per cent of their children from an earlier age into a category for which they will not charge their regular fee. These are the Economically Weaker Section (EWS) children. You can measure the equality and justice-oriented aspect of your school by finding out how well the EWS children are doing, and more than that, how they feel in your school. If they feel happy and they are doing well all the way up to grade twelve, then I would agree with you. But even though 25 per cent of the school’s population is only a quarter, it is a symbol. But even as a symbol, it is a very important social engineering that the Right to Education Act attempted to do. A vast number of private schools found that very irksome and went to court to prove that it would be detrimental to the school’s ethos, and to those lucky children themselves who will get admission into that school through this Act. Luckily, the Supreme Court struck down all these petitions and maintained its correctness, as well as the state’s right to have that Act. Nearly 13 years have passed since it was promulgated and very few private schools have reported total satisfaction from how they have learned from the presence of these children and how they have worked towards the success of these children. If yours have, then I am very glad.
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