[SIZE=4][COLOR=red]Thinking the unthinkable on Kashmir[/COLOR] [/SIZE]
The cordial parleys between prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf and prime minister Mir Zafrullah Khan Jamali at the seven nation SAARC (South Asian Area Regional Conference) summit held in Islamabad (Pakistan) on January 4-5, has once again released the doves of peace into the airspace over the subcontinent. Within the youth of India and Pakistan — even if the obstinate elders who constitute the ruling establishments of the two neighbour nations continue to remain cynical — there’s a new surge of hope that a resolution of the 56-year-old Kashmir conflict which has bedevilled Indo-Pak relations ab initio and ruined the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions in both nations, is visible on the horizon.
Since 1947 both nations have fought three wars and several limited ‘armed conflicts’ in the vain hope of resolving the legal status of Kashmir (pop. 10 million) by force of arms. In the process the leaders of post-independence India and Pakistan have criminally neglected socio-economic development issues (particularly education and healthcare), triggered an arms race in the subcontinent and transformed the two high-potential subcontinental nations into arguably the most backward and under-developed societies of the contemporary world.
Now three wars and decades of lost development opportunities later with the cloud of a nuclear holocaust looming over the subcontinent, it’s clearly time for the leaders of the two nations to overrule their precedent-obsessed foreign service bureaucrats and begin to think the unthinkable to resolve the intractable, continuous Kashmir conflict.
The greater weight of public opinion seems to indicate that the people of the Kashmir Valley represented by the All India Hurriyat Conference would prefer azadi or independence from both India and Pakistan. This may well be the best solution. The establishment of an independent federal nation of Kashmir divided into four autonomous states (the Kashmir Valley, Jammu, Ladakh and PoK) with its independence and external relations jointly guaranteed by India and Pakistan would also be the ideal solution for preserving the cultural identity and local autonomy of Kashmir’s Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist districts.
This hitherto neglected proposal is not as far-fetched as it sounds on first hearing. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, small newly-independent nation states — Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia, Lithuania among others — have emerged on the world map and are registering record rates of socio-economic growth. An independent Kashmir jointly created and sponsored by India and Pakistan would not only prosper similarly, but also bind the two nations together freeing their leaderships to get on with the criminally neglected task of transforming their miserable rural interiors into promised lands.
[SIZE=4][COLOR=red]Institutes of excellence deserve greater autonomy[/COLOR] [/COLOR] [/SIZE]
Despite its commendable enthusiasm for economic deregulation and liberalisation as also prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s resolve to conclude a genuine peace with Pakistan, the NDA government’s record in education is characterised by regressive impulses. In particular the Union ministry of human resource development’s drive to expand the ambit of licence-permit raj is quite contrarian. In primary education, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) programme which guarantees compulsory education for all children between six-14 years of age following a constitutional amendment, has been diluted into a minimum literacy rather than a genuine education initiative. In secondary education the NDA government’s reputation has been muddied by a clumsy attempt to rewrite history and social science textbooks from the hindutva perspective.
And now as if to compound these follies, Union HRD minister Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi is making an overt effort to expand the regulatory power and influence of his ministry over post-independence India’s too few world class institutions of higher education — the six Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and the seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).
During the past few months, Dr. Joshi has been very vocal about ways and means in which the IIMs and IITs which have hitherto exercised a growing measure of administrative and financial autonomy, should become more accountable to his ministry and through it to Parliament, which admittedly funds them through handsome annual grants. Among his suggestions: that all alumni endowments to the IITs should be routed through the HRD ministry; that already heavily subsidised fees payable by the fortunate 1-2 percent of applicants who are admitted into these institutions should be further reduced; that the IIMs in particular surrender amounts in their corpuses exceeding Rs.25 crore to the ministry; and that these institutions which have enviably low teacher-pupil ratios admit a larger number of students.
There is undoubtedly some substance in Dr. Joshi’s suggestions, but the governing boards and managements of these institutes — rather than over-burdened parliamentarians — are the best judges of organisational development. Moreover the development experience of institutions of higher education the world over, particularly in parliamentary democracies, plainly indicates that the way forward is to incrementally expand the administrative and financial autonomy of colleges, universities and institutes of higher learning. Surely it is incontrovertible that IIM and IIT students who are readily absorbed into high-paying jobs immediately upon graduation are perfectly qualified to avail long-term bank finance to pay for their education. Equally, it is in the national interest that the faculties of the IIMs and IITs generate incrementally growing incomes for their employer institutions by offering research and consultancy services to industry in a fast-growing economy.
Quite clearly the interests of these institutions of academic excellence as well as the national interest demands that the autonomy of the IIMs and IITs is expanded rather than circumscribed. Quite simply, they don’t need to be fixed because they ain’t broke.