THE DEVAATATING RAIN and floods which swept Jammu and Kashmir (pop. 12.5 million) last month, taking a toll of 280 lives, 5,000 injured and destroying property valued at Rs.6,000 crore, leaving an estimated 2 million households destitute and at the mercy of a thoroughly inept, callous and corrupt state government, has brought this troubled north Indian state squarely back into the national limelight. It’s pertinent to note that in addition to being periodically subject to nature’s fury, the people of J&K have also had to bear the burden of cross-border terrorism, political instability, law and order breakdown and government corruption, for over half a century.
The continuous troubles and travails of the long-suffering people of this state are rooted in its history, because no government of neighbouring Pakistan has accepted the legitimacy of the J&K state government and in particular, the accession of the erstwhile kingdom of Kashmir to India in 1948. Indeed, within months of India and Pakistan being declared separate sovereign countries in 1947, the two new nation states were at war with each other over the status of Muslim- majority Kashmir whose Hindu ruler signed a treaty acceding the kingdom to India. At that time following a UN-brokered ceasefire and the partition of Kashmir into Indian Kashmir — later reconstituted into the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir — and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru pledged a plebiscite in Kashmir once peace and normalcy was restored.
But two full-fledged wars between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and continuous Pakistan supported cross-border terrorism, have never permitted peace and normalcy to be restored in the region, and the promised plebiscite has not been held. On the contrary, the special status of Kashmir under Article 370 of the Constitution of India has been steadily diluted and now there’s a virtual political consensus that Kashmir is “an integral part of India”. Moreover, the misfortune of the people of J&K trapped in the crossfire between India and Pakistan, has been compounded by the state’s corrupt and self-serving politicians and establishment dominated by the Abdullah family who have pandered to Islamist elements while neglecting socio-economic development.
On the other hand, the commitment and solidarity of the Indian Union to the people of J&K has been amply demonstrated by the huge aid in the form of money and materials which has poured in for the flood-hit people of the state from across India, and the sustained effort of the Indian Army to rescue marooned people.
With Pakistan insisting that settlement of the status of Kashmir is the “core issue” for Indo-Pak peaceful co-existence, this is a good time for India to agree to the long-promised plebiscite in undivided Kashmir. If despite this ample demonstration of amity, support and solidarity, the people of this former kingdom don’t appreciate the advantages of being an integral part of the Indian Union, they are not worth the trouble of keeping.
Ill-informed media damaging education
THE CAUSE OF IMPROVING AND upgrading Indian education is being hurt by the volume of mis-information being published and aired in mainstream media. In particular, there’s a deluge of ill-informed comment about the poorly drafted and interpreted Right to Free and Compulsory Education (aka RTE) Act, 2009, which needs to be contested and corrected in the public interest. for enabling orderly school and higher education development.
A case in point is a cover story published by the mass-circulation, Delhi-based weekly Outlook (September 8) which indicts state governments of “conniving with rapacious private school managements to keep poor children out of elite classrooms”. The five-page cover story is notable for its venom against India’s private schools which despite their relatively small number (80,000) host over 50 percent of the country’s 230 million children in schools countrywide at the start of every academic year. It details a heart-rending story of a poor milkman whose daughter had been admitted under s.12 (1) (c) of the RTE Act — which obliges private school managements to admit children from poor households in their neighbourhood to the extent of 25 percent of capacity in class I free-of-charge, and retain them in school until class VIII — into an unidentified international school in Bangalore. Amazingly, the author doesn’t even once speculate why poor parents are desperate to admit their wards into rapacious private schools when they have the option of free-of-charge education with a free mid-day meal provided in the neighbourhood government school.
Moreover, the benighted author of the Outlook essay seems unaware that Article 30 (1) of the Constitution confers a fundamental right upon all linguistic and religious minorities to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice, a right extended to all citizens by the apex court’s landmark verdicts in the TMA Pai Foundation (2002) and the P.A. Inamdar (2005) cases. Nor does she mention the judgement of the apex court in Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan vs.
Union of India & Anr (2012) which upheld s. 12 (1) (c) by a wafer-thin 2-1 majority but exempted boarding and minority institutions — effectively exempting thousands of private, particularly convent schools — from admitting poor neighbourhood children. Nor does it question why the quality of education in government, especially state and local government schools — the natural destination of children from underprivileged households — is so pathetic.
The plain truth is that if it were not for the country’s 80,000 recognised private (and an estimated 300,000 unrecognised budget private) schools which tutor over 50 percent of in-school children, the already rock-bottom productivity of the Indian economy would be far worse than it is currently. Therefore private schools need to be encouraged rather than pilloried and ridiculed.