Regular readers of EducationWorld might have noticed that only one of the directors of the country’s 13 IIMs deigned to speak with your editors for last month’s cover story which exposed the second hostile attempt made within a decade by a BJP government at the Centre to acquire control of the country’s premier B-schools, one of the few successful Nehruvian initiatives in education. This despite EW having established a reputation as a champion of academic freedom.
If institutional autonomy is as dear to them as they claim, IIM directors would have seized the opportunity to detail and explain the sly provisions of the BJP/NDA government’s Indian Institutes of Management Bill 2015. Therefore, the inference one can draw is that it was a combination of ignorance and arrogance which prompted the IIM boycott of this publication.
This conclusion is prompted by a case history. Last August, your editors staged a national conference on ways and means to upgrade K-12 education in Kozhikode, Kerala. As courtesy, since IIM-K was in the neighbourhood of the conference venue, the director of IIM-Kozhikode was invited as a panelist in a discussion forum chaired by your correspondent. The institute’s director — one Mukherjee — took great exception to the invitation. According to this worthy, as director of an IIM, he should have been invited to deliver the keynote address, and that in any event Delhi was the more “natural neighbourhood” of IIM-K.
The purpose of recalling this incident is that it reveals the arrogant kiss-up-and-kick down mindset of the top brass of the IIMs, in sharp contrast to the ready willingness of the India-born deans of premier American B-schools who readily responded to EW. Unsolicited suggestion to IIM directors: (i) introduce a course on how to win friends and influence people; (ii) lead the way and sign up yourselves.
Rare achievement
Undoubtedly, maverick former Supreme Court judge Justice Markandey Katju has struck a resonant chord in the hearts of millions of citizens with his no-holds-barred exposé of the establishment in a recent issue of the best-selling newsweekly Outlook (August 17). In an essay titled ‘Lock Up the Doors, Time for them to Depart,’ Katju draws upon the famous injunction of revolutionary British republican Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), who dissolved Parliament and briefly abolished the Blighty monarchy some four centuries ago.
Letting loose both barrels at all establishment worthies, Katju doesn’t spare Parliament (“with its members shouting and screaming all the time — and hardly any meaningful debate held or business transacted”), politicians (“incorrigible rascals who have no genuine love for India, are bent on looting the country, squirrelling away its wealth to secret foreign banks and havens”), and the bureaucracy (“largely become corrupt”) and even his own fraternity (“alas so has a section of the judiciary, which anyway takes an inordinate time to decide cases”).
Shockingly this essay by a former Supreme Court judge is a blatant call for a violent French Revolution (1789), when members of the establishment and monarchy were guillotined after cursory trials.
No stranger to controversy — some two years ago when he was chairman of the Press Council of India, he had criticised the scribes’ fraternity as “positively anti-people”. Although conservatives and purists might dismiss him as a cranky old geezer, at another level it’s quite obvious that during his long career as a self-made Allahabad lawyer, high court and Supreme Court judge, he conducted himself with rare uprightness and probity. Quite obviously, this cantankerous but learned judge has no skeletons in his cupboard which the targets of his wrath can rattle. That’s a rare achievement in socialist post-independence India designed by Master Joe Nehru (as he was known in Harrow College) and his oppressive heirs.
Dante’s inferno
There’s something utterly rotten in the southern seaboard state of Karnataka from whose administrative capital Bangalore (now mangled into Bengaluru) this voice-in-the-wilderness magazine is published. Every day, three-four farmers in the neglected hinterland of the state end their lives by suicide. Over the past three months, 184 farmers driven by deep debts, failing crops, conspicuous absence of bankruptcy laws and unbridled usury, have taken this extreme step leaving behind weeping widows and orphaned children.
But in Bengaluru dubbed the IT city and Silicon Valley of India, there seems no awareness of the drought and famine conditions in rural Karnataka. Billions mysteriously vanish from the public treasury, politicians in menacing SUVs have right of way on traffic choked roads, high-end bars and restaurants which charge the equivalent of monthly incomes of rural citizens per drink/dish are chock-a-block. In the olde world clubs of the city, every member has a son or daughter fled abroad and youth discuss little else than gourmet restaurants and foreign holidays.
Corruption in latter-day Karnataka — ranked fifth on the Transparency India/Centre for Media Studies corruption index — under the rule of the previous BJP (2008-2013) and the incumbent Congress government, has evolved into a steel-frame art form. Within industry, commerce and society, it’s wearily accepted that not a single document is signed by government officials without an accompanying bribe. Meanwhile to keep farmland prices low, the rural landed castes which dominate the state legislative assembly, have passed a law (Karnataka Land Reforms Act, 1961) under which only farmland owners or individuals with incomes of less than Rs.2 lakh per annum (since amended to Rs.25 lakh) can purchase rural property.
With this once best-governed state having descended into Dante’s inferno, it’s hardly surprising that a rising number of the poor and downtrodden prefer to make their own quietus and escape to that country from whose bourn no traveller returns.