Degrees of Education
The BJP's complicated relationship with education and elections.
The Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) governments of Rajasthan and Haryana have recently passed laws that disenfranchise large numbers of people who have not been able to finish school from contesting for elections to local bodies. The lofty argument given by the governments was that those who were elected to head panchayats and gram sabhas should be educated, otherwise they will fail to discharge their duties properly. Given the social conditions of these two states —with social indicators yet to reach the level of many of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa—what this anti-democratic law meant was that millions of women, Dalits, tribals and members of the minority communities were barred from holding elected office. In one fell swoop, these two governments undercut two decades of empowerment that the 73rd amendment of the Constitution, and the subsequent reservations for women, had achieved in rural areas.
Education has for long been the road to empowerment and upward mobility for those who had traditionally been marginalised and discriminated in our social structures. From the earliest of radicals, whether of Young Bengal, Phule and Agarkar, to Ambedkar and Gandhi have stressed the importance of education to emancipation and self-rule (or democracy). However, it took the innate reactionary genius of the BJP leaders to turn education into a lever for protecting the power of the local strongman from the challenges of the dispossessed and deprived even at the lowest levels of the panchayati raj system. Many of the dominant and upper castes in the rural areas, particularly their more domineering patriarchs who want to control the panchayats, may also not have cleared school or gone to college. But they have the wherewithal to “manage” school certificates and college degrees, as much else. After all, the powerful and resourceful in India have “managed” to get democracy to deliver for them for close to seven decades. They have even “managed” merit through the old-boy networks, caste connections and capitation fees. The meritorious and educated, and the Indian state they control, have managed to deny education to the millions of poor and are now saying that since they have no education, they cannot have political power.
Therefore, the irony of the education degrees of the most powerful political office of the country—that of the Prime Minister—being questioned by his political opponents may be lost on many of his supporters. Narendra Modi has claimed on sworn affidavits submitted before the elections he has contested (and won so handsomely) that he received his BA degree from the University of Delhi in 1978 and his MA degree from Gujarat University in 1983. Yet, till a few days ago Prime Minister Modi’s educational degrees were one of the best kept secrets in the country. It took the second most powerful man in the union cabinet, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, and the all-powerful President of India’s ruling party, Amit Shah, to finally show copies of the degrees to the people of India through replicas on newspapers and social media. The two universities followed meekly, issuing statements that the degrees are genuine and not fake. The troll army of the BJP took over, accusing those who were asking about whether Prime Minister Modi’s educational qualifications are genuine, of elitism and snobbery; after all he was not contesting to be the sarpanch of a panchayat that he would need to prove his educational qualifications! And now that both universities have vouched for the authenticity of these degrees, what is there for people to question?
Unfortunately for the Prime Minister and his supporters, the public release of these degrees has not answered some of the questions that were raised. They have, in fact, raised a number of new questions. The most important question which has remained unanswered is, why were these educational degrees of the Prime Minister hidden from public view for so long? Why did it take an application under the Right to Information Act by a chief minister to make these public? Even if we discount the “clerical errors” and “discrepancies”, of which there are too many for comfort, what explains the fact that both universities went to extraordinary lengths to not disclose the Prime Minister’s degrees. This is remarkable, as many commentators have pointed out, since most universities and classmates will be more than happy to claim association with the Prime Minister of a country.
And even after the disclosure by Jaitley and Shah, and the attestation of those claims by the two universities, we still have not seen the original documents, nor has anyone got access to them. The most corrosive question that this entire episode raises is one which few have asked, has the Prime Minister lied on oath? This is not the first criminal charge that Modi has faced. But the question remains, will he be as successful this time too? Will the head of a party which has used education to deny political power to the poor and uneducated be felled because he could not “manage” his own education?
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