On May 14 when the Supreme Court rejected a plea of the Kar-nataka state government to stay the July 2 verdict of the Karnataka high court striking down the state’s 1994 language policy mandating Kannada or mother tongue as the medium of instruction in all primary schools — government and private — in the state, Karnataka’s 11,954 unaided schools believed that their 14-year-old battle to teach primary students in the English medium was finally over. But they had not reckoned with the obstinate determination — driven by mysterious motivations — of the state government to impose vernacular medium education on all primary school children in Karnataka (pop. 57 million).
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Disregarding the apex court’s considered refusal to stay the Karnataka high court’s judgement of July 2 — which in effect means it agrees with its rationale — on May 19, the state’s education minister Vishweshwar Hegde Kageri told media persons that the BJP government is firm on adhering to the 1994 language policy. Typically unaware that he is liable to be hauled up for contempt of the Karnataka high court, he warned that if state-board affiliated schools taught class I-V students in English without permission, the government would promptly initiate “strict legal action” against them.
Open defiance of the Karnataka high court’s July 2 order by the minister, who despite the SC refusal to grant a stay has instructed education department officials not to accept and/or approve applications for promoting/recognising English medium schools, has prompted beleaguered school managements to initiate a contempt of court petition against him. M.S. Khan, president of Modern Education Society, Ejipura, whose application for state government recognition of the society’s English medium school is pending since October last year, has made an application to the state’s advocate general Uday Holla seeking permission to file a contempt petition against Kageri. The advocate general’s consent is mandatory under the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971 which stipulates that permission of the Central/state government is required to initiate criminal prosecution proceedings against all government employees.
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G.S. Sharma, president of the Karnataka Unaided Schools Management Association (KUSMA), an umbrella organisation of 1,500 unaided private schools which is supporting Khan’s petition, says that KUSMA schools are ready to “fight this battle to the bitter end”. “By refusing to grant permission to English medium schools, the education minister has committed contempt of the high court’s July 2 order. He believes by continu-ously litigating, the state government can maintain the status quo and continue to deny the fundamental right of parents and children to choose their medium of instruction. But we are not ready to give up and will fight this battle to the bitter end,” says Sharma.
Ever since a full bench of the Karnataka high court (KAMS vs. State of Karnataka & Ors, Writ Petition No. 14363/1994) held on July 2 that the state’s 1994 language policy was violative of the fundamental right of the promoters/owners of Karnataka’s 11,954 unaided or independent primary schools, to “establish and administer educational institutions of their choice” and of parents/students to choose the medium of instruction, the state’s education ministry has been in denial and adamantly refuses to grant permis-sion to promote new English medium primaries and/or ‘recognise’ existing ones. According to perceptive monitors of Karnataka’s education scene, behind this dogged refusal of state government educrats to sanction English language teaching is a murky mix of language chauvinism and commercial calculation.
Sanctioning English medium schools means a huge loss of customers for printer-publishers of slapdash verna-cular textbooks. For instance for the academic year 2009-10, the Karnataka government has printed 5.9 million textbooks (all in Kannada) to be sold to unaided institutions, in addition to the 66 million it purchases and distributes free of charge to 48,000 government primary schools. Hence given the big stakes in terms of “cuts and commis-sions”, state government educrats are hell-bent on pushing compulsory Kannada medium instruction for all primary school children.
In this melee, with the academic year commencing this month (June), at the receiving end of endless government-sponsored litigation are the state’s 20 million school children desperate for English medium education. But as usual their interests come last.
Debolina Sengupta (Bangalore)