Centre is promoting culture of conformity

Mridula Mukherjee, noted academic and former director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, says the government is creating conditions to saffronise country’s education.

In an interview to Prakash Kumar of Deccan Herald, she feels the BJP-led NDA government is getting people in educational institutions into a habit of obeying orders to push their agenda of promoting “Hindutva and communal way of thinking”. Excerpts:

From dropping of German for Sanskrit to asking educational institutions to celebrate Governance Day on Christmas Day, the HRD Ministry has been in controversy ever since the NDA came to power. How do you look at them?

These were all attempts to control and direct the institutions what they should be doing. Why do we have to be told that we should celebrate Governance Day or celebrate Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s birth anniversary as Unity Day and send compliance reports? I see them as attempts to eat into autonomy of the educational institutions, which fundamentally is very grave. Because nowhere in the world can you talk about innovations and excellence unless people are free to think original ideas. The government is promoting a culture of conformity.

What are the reasons for the government to do this?
It’s because they want to implement their agenda. Through such measures, the government is basically first getting people into a mindset of conformity to a habit of obeying orders. This is not the way a mature democracy functions.

What is the agenda you are talking about?
Agenda, we know. We have it from our experience of the previous BJP government. Secondly we also have knowledge of their ideology. We have to recognise that the BJP is a party with a clear-cut ideological agenda which includes promotion of Hindutva, the communal way of thinking, the communal understanding of history. The BJP-led NDA government believes that the education system is one place where its agenda has to be pushed.

How do you view the BJP pushing the Sangh ideology in school education?
The purpose is political. The BJP is using religion to establish itself - let’s be clear about it. The country will suffer and I hope and believe that the party too, will. When religion comes into politics and politics takes the aid of religion to establish itself, nothing good will happen to the religion. Religion will be a loser as it is not meant for politics. Religion is meant for spiritual upliftment. But, here the BJP is using religious identity for very mundane purposes.

Why the Sangh wants history to be rewritten? Why RSS is keen on bringing change, especially in school curriculum?
This is because historically, their politics is based on the ideology of communalism. The entire ideology rests on a particular view of Indian history. The justification for the communal politics is always there in what happened in the past. The BJP is also justifying its politics in the glorious Indian past which was so great and then became “degraded” because of “Islamic invasion”, the so-called “oppression of Hindus” during Muslim rules, forced conversion, and all those old stories. So, for them, rewriting history which justifies their present day politics, is an absolute necessity. Without that history, they are nothing. There will be no difference between BJP and other political parties.

But HRD Minister Smrti Irani recently asserted in parliament that there were no attempts to saffronise education.
The government may talk about development. But that is the policy, not ideology. This is all the usual strategy of speaking in many voices. The BJP-led NDA government has so far done nothing compared to what Narashimha Rao or Manmohan Singh did in 1991. Saffronisation does not only mean from the word go you will start changing the chapters. You first create the conditions. Why IIT Delhi director R K Shevgaongar resigned? Why NCERT director Praveen Sinclair was forced out? Rajasthan university vice chancellor Dev Sawroop resigned last year citing difficulty in functioning. You have sent messages by making three heads of the institutions go. The other day, there was meeting of these people in Delhi and the Education Minister of Haryana only talked about Hindi and Sanskrit. He is an RSS man. Mind you, this will happen at the national level also.