Twilight
Constitutionalism in India: Wrong Rules of exclusion from Higher (Professional)
Education of deprived segment of majority of Indian Population
Where the mind is without fear and the head
is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not broken up into
fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of
truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms
towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not
lost its way
Onto the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let
my country awake
- Poet
Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore
History
says, Don't hope
On
this side of the grave,
But
then, once in a lifetime
The
longed-for tidal wave
Of
justice can rise up,
And
hope and history rhyme. [ii][i]
Education should be such that
it builds the inner strength of our people. It should bring our ancient
heritage to the new generation and make available our aesthetic treasures to
the young generation.
–Rajiv Gandhi, Late Prime Minister of India
“Education is a liberating
force, and in our age it is also a democratizing force, cutting across the
barriers of caste and class, smoothening out inequalities imposed by birth and
other circumstances”.
–Indra Gandhi, Late Prime Minister of India
Right to Access to Higher Education
(Professional Education):
The vexed
question of access to education has hounded India from times immemorial. The
futile pleadings of an Ekalavya for a
teacher, that could not even be suppressed in the recesses of our cultural
consciousness, to the modern day demands
for exclusion from portals of knowledge of the "others", deemed
to be unfit even if lip service of
acknowledgement is paid that such "unfitness"
may be due to no fault of theirs but is rather on account of their social,
economic and cultural circumstances, gouges
our very national soul.
Concept of merit:
Even as higher levels of knowledge becomes vital
for survival, and its technologies become capable of empowering those whom
belong to groups, that historically and in the present have been excluded from
the liberating prowess of knowledge,
this country seems to witness, as in the past, a resurgence in demands that knowledge be parceled out, through tight fisted notions of excellence, and
concepts of merit that pander to the
early advantages of already empowered
groups.
Historical mistakes:
For much of our
history, most of our people were told that they were excluded, for no fault of theirs in this and here, but on account of some past mistakes. Hope was restricted to the duty that was supposed to attach itself to station
ascribed by a cruel fate, cast as cosmic justice. This order that parceled knowledge, by grades of ascribed
status, chiefly of birth and of circumstances beyond the control of the young,
weakened this country.
How our country weakened?
It weakened our country because it reduced the pool of those who were to
receive higher levels of knowledge to only a small portion of the upper crust.
This in turn weakened our method of knowing and creating new knowledge -
knowledge of the deductive kind was extolled
primarily for its elegance, and its practical
significance derided, and soon enough turned
into metaphysics of mysticism that palliated
the deprived with paens of a next life.
How it weakened our practical ability?
[Practical Knowledge / Deductive Knowledge]
This weakened our ability to apply knowledge to
practical affairs of all segments of population, and effectively shut off the feed back loop that practice by users could have provided, so that new knowledge could be generated. Our practical knowledge ossified, and deductive knowledge became ever more ready to justify the worth of the
high and the mighty, for such justification brought
status to the peddlers of mysticism and enabled the high and the mighty to evade
questions of accountability to the masses.
What is truth about knowledge?
It was that truth that our national poet spoke about when he prayed that knowledge would be free. It was that truth that the makers of modern India, those great souls, who could see the causes for
past events, and foresee the
needs of the future, tried to inscribe
in our Constitution. It is not any
wonder that our first Prime Minister
in the excitement of the first seconds
of freedom from foreign rule spoke about our "tryst with destiny" to the Constituent Assembly, and yet
in the same breath also added "now
the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure,
but very substantially."
Views of Noble Laureate Amartya Sen:
As Amartya Sen points out those were heady times, of promises made and of hope kindled. [[ii]]
And we, as a nation, promised ourselves
that our huddled masses, condemned to
rot in squalor, ignorance and powerlessness
on account of the incessant
exploitation by the elites, and on
account of enforced hierarchies of
social stature and worth, will never
again acknowledge as a teacher,
a person who will say that he will teach
only members of this group, and not
that group. To each and every group, and to each and every individual in
those groups, we promised that never
again would we allow social circumstances of the groups they belonged to be a
factor in our assessment of their social worth. We gave our people the hope that we, the upper crust of India will change, and that their patience and tolerance of our inhumanity, over many millennia in the past and for a few decades more into the future,
will soon be rewarded by our
humanization.
What our (Indian) Constitution promises?
We formed our nation-state to make sure that hope and history, as an actuality of experience of our people -
all of our people, belonging to all of
the groups into which they belonged to - would indeed rhyme. That is what
our Constitution promises. And that is the motive force that informs
the basic structure of our Constitution. Our fealty to that motive force is as sacred a promise that we as
a nation have ever made to ourselves. Every other commitment can be assessed only on the touchstone of that motive force that balances hope and actuality of history, with hope progressively, and rapidly,
being transcribed into actuality of
real equality.
Strange interpretation of Indian
Constitution:
In contrast to
the above, a strange interpretation
has been pressed upon us in this instant matter (IMA vs. Union of India, 2011). On the one hand it is contended that the
State has to be denied the power to achieve an egalitarian social order and
promote social justice with respect to deprived
segments of the population, by imposing
reservations on private unaided educational institutions, on the ground
that this Court has held that private
non-minority unaided educational institutions cannot be compelled to select
students of lower merit as defined by
marks secured in an entrance test, notwithstanding the fact that the State may have come to a rational conclusion that such
underachievement is on account of social, economic or cultural deprivations and
consequent denial of admissions to
institutions of higher education deleterious to national interest and welfare. [[i]]
Twilight Constitutionalism in India:
On the other
hand it is contended that private unaided non-minority educational
institutions, established by virtue of citizens claimed right to the charitable occupation, "education", an essential
ingredient of which is the unfettered
right to choose who to admit, may define their own classes of students to
select, notwithstanding the fact
that there may be other students who have taken the same entrance test and
scored more marks.
It would appear
that we have now entered a strange
terrain of twilight constitutionalism,
wherein constitutionally mandated goals
of egalitarianism and social justice
are set aside, the State is eviscerated of its powers to
effectuate social transformation,
even though inequality is endemic
and human suffering is widely extant
particularly amongst traditionally deprived segments of the population, and
yet private educational institutions can
form their own exclusive communes for the imparting of knowledge to youngsters,
and exclude all others, despite the
recognized historical truth that it
is such rules of exclusion have undermined our national capacity in the past.
[iii] [2] Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy: A
Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes, (London Faber and Faber, 1991); cited in
Sen, Amartya, the Idea of Justice (Allen Lane, 2009).
