Feedback

"We want to create a weak and disunited India of the dunces, by the dunces, for the dunces." Author unknown (or could it be one of the the great politicians of India?) The Supreme Court has come out with a fair order abolishing government quotas and reservations in private professional colleges. All the political parties in India have joined together speaking with one voice against the verdict of the Supreme Court.

This kind of national unanimity was not noticed even in the days of the `Quit India Movement` in 1942. For example, the great Communists of India did not support the Congress party at that time because it was led by Mahatma Gandhi. Today their attitude is different of course (they are supporting the revolutionary (!) Congress - led by Sonia Gandhi)

We cannot expect our third-grade politicians to study Aristotle. Aristotle may have had Indian political scoundrels in view when he said: `Democratic education ought to mean, not the education (or more precisely noneducation!) which democrats like, but the education which will preserve democracy`. Until we have realized that these two things do not necessarily go together we cannot think clearly about education.

Rajaji spoke against the `Licence-Permit-Control-Quota Raj` in the 1950s and 1960s. If he had been in our midst today, he would have spoken against the `Licence-Permit-Control-Quota Raj` created by our politicians in the field of Professional, Higher and University Education. This `(a)Raj` has been created in the name of casteless society raised on a fraudulent superstructure of caste-based structure of quotas.

For example an education which gives the able and diligent boys (without any reference to their caste, colour, religion or creed) no advantage over the stupid and idle ones may be in one sense `democratic`. It would be egalitarian and democrats like equality.

The caucus-race in `Alice in Wonderland`, where all the competitors won and all got prizes, was a `democratic` race. This is the kind of race, which all the politicians in India want to create in India today. If this logic is accepted, there will be a growing demand that subjects which some boys do very much better than others should not be made compulsory.

On this basis, physics, chemistry and mathematics - the so-called difficult subjects - can be made democratically optional. English is slowly becoming an extinct language. There is no need for any elaborate discussion on this endangered specie.

There is going to be complete political unanimity in India on the question of abolition of all compulsory subjects and making the curriculum so wide that every boy will get a chance at something. Even the boy who can`t or won`t learn his alphabet can be praised and petted for `something`. Then no boy, and no boy`s parents need feel inferior. And Education on those lines will be pleasing to democratic feelings.

It will have repaired the inequalities of nature. But it is quite another question whether it will breed a democratic Indian nation which can survive, or even one whose survival is desirable at all. The impossibility or improbability that a nation thus educated could survive need not be laboured. Obviously it can escape destruction only if its enemies (like Pakistan or Bangladesh or China) are so obliging as to adopt the same system. A nation of dunces can be saved only in a global world of dunces. But the question of desirability is even more interesting.

The demand for equality arises from two sources. One of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of merit and superiority.

All the political parties in India today are pitted against any system founded on merit and superiority. There is in all men a tendency to resist the existence of what is stronger, subtler or better than themselves.

In uncorrected and brutal small men this hardens into an implacable and disinterested hatred for every kind of excellence. The kind of democratic education which is being advocated by all political parties in India today is bad because it endeavours to propitiate evil passions, to appease envy. Two reasons can be advanced against this mad approach or movement.

In the first place, you will not succeed. Envy is insatiable. The more you concede to it the more it will demand. No attitude of humility which you can possibly adopt will propitiate a man with an inferiority complex. In the second place, you are trying to introduce equality where equality is fatal.

Equality can exist precisely only in the field of mathematics. Outside the field of mathematics, equality is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind.

As C S Levis beautifully puts it: `Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless.

Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favours`.

In my view, political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual or aesthetic democracy is death.

A truly democratic education - one which will preserve democracy - must be, in its own field, ruthlessly aristocratic, shamelessly `highbrow`.

In drawing up its curriculum, it should always have chiefly in view the interests of the student who wants to know and who can know.

The stupid student, nearly always, is the student who does not want to know. It must, in a certain sense, subordinate the School to the University. Only thus can it be a nursery of those first class intellects without which neither a democracy nor any other State can thrive or survive - either against external enemies or internal foes.

Our democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it will die when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves. These small, short and wicked men sitting tall are collectively singing today the following Ode to Madame `Merit`:

Oh! You damned Madame Merit
How much we hate thee and
How do we hate thee? Let us count the ways.
We hate thee to the depth and breadth and height
Our souls can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of bestial being and democratic disgrace.
We hate thee freely, as men strive for democratic non-rights;
Demonically, secularly, stupidly, sadistically, uproariously,
And above all blasting forward for backward meritoriously.

Moral of the story: All the political parties seem to be unanimously of the view that a Bill should be brought up in the Lok Sabha for redesignating the Supreme Court of India as `The Apex Inferior Court of India` in the mud-spattered and bumptious interest of equality and self-respect of the deprived and dumb dunces of India, that is `not` Bharath.

V Sundaram IAS

       Send your views to author

---

Do you wish to reach our readers? submit your guest column

Copyright and Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and not of this website. The author is solely responsible for the contents of this article. This website does not represent or endorse the accuracy, completeness or reliability of any opinion, statement, appeal, advice or any other information in the article. Our readers are free to forward this page URL to anyone. This column may NOT be transmitted or distributed by others in any manner whatsoever (other than forwarding or weblisting page URL) without the prior permission from us and the author.

Dandi March and 15th August 2005 August 21, 2005

The fury of Congress fundamentalism-III August 08, 2005

The fury of Congress fundamentalism- II July 25, 2005

The fury of Congress fundamentalism - I July 24, 2005

India that is Bharath July 14, 2005

Bharatiya JINNAH Party June 26, 2005

The quintessence of Hindutva May 24, 2005

Autocracy in science education May 24, 2005

Jaya and Ramadoss! April 23, 2005

Admn Reforms Comm: Welcome move April 18, 2005

USA: With good will towards none March 27, 2005

Public Impeachment of Indian Nabobs March 17, 2005

The tragedy of Indian democracy March 03, 2005

The Dancing Dervish of Goa February 08, 2005

Benny Hinn - Symbol of Secular Adharma January 29, 2005

Beware of Nocturnal Raids January 14, 2005

Was Veer Savarkar ever a Freedom Fighter?  December 24, 2004

Our National Degradation December 13, 2004