The majoritarian Indian has replaced the argumentative Indian

Change can be looked at in two ways. One can look at it functionally like a piece of plumbing or change can be seen as a mentality, a framework of thought, combining theory and myth, creating certain rituals of action. Like any citizen, I want less violence and poverty, a childhood that does not succumb to Darwinian entry exams. I want better roads. But it is the second kind of change which I find intriguing. I am not too worried about the idea of India but I do want an India of ideas, where Indians think differently. I do not want a change marked by standard human indicators of economic development. I want a society where India thinks differently where that touch of difference adds to the creativity of democracy.

It is one of the ironies of the time that the argumentative Indian has been replaced by the majoritarian Indian. The argumentative Indian was the hero of Indian folklore and democracy. The majoritarian Indian was created out of elections in a society which equated elections to democracy, reducing a way of life to an idiot mechanism. The irony was that India proud of its myth of being a great democracy had to face the fact that democracy can threaten democracy. We had to understand that democracy in its populist variants can account for Brexit and the rise of Trump. Change in a democracy can be full of ironies and ambiguities.

For me change in India has to be anchored around three words, three worlds: Fraternity, diversity, plurality. I want an India where change is not a fetishism of progress as it eliminates alternatives. I want an India that understands that its strength, its creativity, and its sense of playfulness lies in the fact that India is a cosmos of defeated knowledges, a place where the last Victorian and the last tribal can rub shoulders with the last Marxist as each plan a revival of their worlds.

The change I am talking about must not erase people or the storyteller. When a storyteller dies, cost benefit analysis is born. Think of the recent death of a waterfall in Odisha. The tribals in Odisha complained that a myth, a religion, a cosmos had been destroyed. The economist dismissed it as so many cusecs of water. I want an India where the tribal wisdom finds a place in the economic calculus of our time.

Change must be such that it does not eliminate a people or their ideas. Change must not reduce living traditions to museums. I think this is why the Indian national movement wished to fight a guerrilla war against the museum, because memory was not a living tradition but smelt of death and formaldehyde, as AK Coomaraswamy observed. India has to be plural, allow for diversity, sustain 150,000 varieties of rice, a thousand languages and be simultaneously oral, textual and digital.

The change I hope to see is that a majoritarian intolerant India becomes plural, playful and loses the rigidity of official ideas like patriotism, development and nation-state. A syncretic India where religions talk to each other. For example, think of a Kashmir where Sufism provides voice against fundamentalism; or a Manipur which is not rigid about dissent, where as Irom Sharmila put it love and democracy sustain each other. My favourite example is the Indian National Movement, which was hospitable to the British, which sought to liberate India by rescuing it from the British and their repressive modernity. Nationalism was a theory of change where its advocates realised that nationalism was a rainbow of cultures while the nation-state was an oppressive entity which emasculated the imagination, where the official and the bureaucratic destroyed the diversity of culture.

India must have a unity which allows for the collage, the quilt patch, the oxymoron, where change adds to the infinity of diversity. Not a development that creates more refugees than the wars we have fought. Or an innovation which makes crafts obsolescent. Or an industry that creates a junkyard of wasted people. I want an India which is a commons between the tribal, peasant, craft and industrial, where time is multiple not linear. An idea where change increases the intensity and playfulness of conversation. An India where the dialogue of medical systems and a dialogue of religions embraces a dialogue of civilisations. An India that is simultaneously Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jain, Christian in its diversity, where crafts survive and where languages multiply. A democracy of livelihoods and lifestyles that anchors sustainability, plurality and justice.

Change must be a process, not a product, an India where change produces a different attitude to change itself, where Hind Swaraj and Communist Manifesto converse with each other, where the defeated West finds a home, where translation and hospitality of cultures defines a society, where plurality marks the cosmos, the syllabus, the Constitution and the commons. The change we need is a change in the idea of change itself.

Shiv Visvanathan is professor, Jindal Global Law School and director, Centre for the Study of Knowledge Systems, OP Jindal Global University

Source: Hindustan Times, 23-11-2016

The decline of India’s universities is an attack on the young and nation

India has been internationally known for its great learning centres but many of the State universities face serious decline today, disappointing students and teachers. Many are performing poorly and do not have adequate opportunities to do research . Others that are better in research and performance face delegitimisation for being ‘different’. Universities generate ideas, inform citizens and form the basis of a democracy. They need urgent and appropriate attention.

All Indian governments — past and present — claim human resources and knowledge are precious assets. But when it comes to investing in these universities, they are lacking.

One problem is that successive governments use public universities for political and personal patronage. The political class has always tried to usurp university positions ‘for their own,’ starting from the top positions. The ‘open position’ is often seen as a placement opportunity for favoured clients of politicians, political parties and powerful individuals. Good universities have tried to resist this, but have not always succeeded. This has often led to a choice of candidate who has a patron as opposed to the one who has better teaching abilities. The earlier power elite did this, the current one believes that their turn for this ‘fix’ has finally arrived. So it goes on.

Why blame the politicians only? Public universities are often held hostage by the bureaucracy in the form of the University Grants Commission (UGC) and other bodies. Many committees have been appointed to look into courses, appointment guidelines, scholarship exams, qualification criteria, etc. The Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education (Yashpal Committee) made some good suggestions such as giving more autonomy to teachers and students, increasing funding, bringing state and central universities on a par with creative measures, bringing liberal arts into technology institutes and assisting more research in universities. It also recommended that the UGC be replaced by a national higher education authority, since it was felt that it was beyond reform.

Similarly, the National Knowledge Commission (NKC) suggested an independent regulatory authority for higher education which would ensure the autonomy and freedom for knowledge creation and dissemination and avoid conflict of interest . All the good, the controversial and the valid suggestions of these various committees have been shelved. Now another education committee has been set up.

The Supreme Court set up the controversial Lyngdoh Commission to curb student activism and elections in campuses. The belief that the rot in universities comes from student politics is mistaken. Student activism is part of the national political activism as long as it is balanced with academics. Leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, AB Vajpayee, Sitaram Yechury and Arun Jaitley — to name a few — were honed by student activism. So to put unreasonable curbs like being elected only once appear rather draconian.

Now the most major assault on universities comes from a set of ideas — termed neo-liberal — that propose: Cuts in social and public spending on education; outsourcing research to non-teaching research institutes and think tanks while the universities’ focus is put on teaching. Even though teaching barely counts for purposes of promotion or accreditation, the emphasis is on skills and vocations in tandem with downgrading social sciences; rejecting critical thinking and dissent, and making an attempt to reverse autonomy; emphasising technology without looking at the philosophy of science; encouraging expensive private and foreign universities; and so on.

Indian universities face an attempt at homogenisation that includes injecting ‘neo-nationalism’ into syllabi, as if the former was anti-national. The truth is that most of the university syllabi has been reviewed by generations of scholars though some may need upgrading. There is also a prevailing false consciousness that assumes social sciences is subversive and thus we hear arguments like: “Make JNU into IIT”. Funding support for technology and not science, skills and management courses is a ploy to depoliticise, control critical thinking and dissent. If this view prevails it will undo academia as a whole.

Great thinkers and teachers from Socrates to Einstein have stood for autonomous universities. Nobel laureate JM Coetzee and Henry Giroux argued that a university “is nothing if it is not a public trust and social good”. And if a university loses its critical insights, modes of questioning, struggles for social, economic and other justices, it loses its reality.

Indian universities can be revived if development is on our agenda. For this universities should be made accountable to the public. This accountability has to start from vice-chancellors, directors, principals of colleges and education bureaucrats to each layer of the academic system. Universities must have autonomy with social responsibility. They must expand to include the marginalised in terms of gender, caste and communities. They need funding and support. The VCs and principals should be agents of the university/college and not of the political regime.

There should be no externally dictated agendas on university functioning. Higher education needs to be expanded, the Knowledge Commission had recommended a 100 new universities. Let us start with at least 20. The private universities must come under public scrutiny with regard to standards.

Old reports on education should be looked at and the best suggestions should form a consensus by the political class and public as a whole and be implemented. This is the only way to save universities and save democracy.

The decline of universities is an attack on the young people and the nation. There is a need to revitalise Indian universities. Reconstructing the university to suit a particular brand of politics is a rejection of the centuries-old accumulated wisdom and plural heritages. This will not be forgiven. The rethinking on universities must be a collective responsibility.

Anuradha Chenoy is professor at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Source: Hindustan Times, 23-11-2016

Women powering a clean future

There is a clear link between energy access and women’s economic empowerment and well-being

The lack of access to clean energy has a direct link to violence against women

India ratified the Paris Agreement last month on Gandhi Jayanti—the birth anniversary of M.K. Gandhi, one of the strongest proponents of living in harmony with nature and the environment. India committed to generating at least 40% of its electricity from non-fossil sources by 2030. Currently India accounts for 4.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Its efforts are key to achieving the goal of halting the effects of climate change by restricting the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

At the 22nd Conference of Parties (COP22) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Marrakech, Morocco, delegates from 200 nations declared that fighting climate change was “an urgent duty”. India’s increasing focus on expanding the use of clean energy is therefore critical. It is also a step towards the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 7, which emphasizes universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy and increasing the share of renewables in the global energy mix.

In addition to the established avenues towards a cleaner future, it is becoming increasingly evident that women play an important role as agents of change in the transition to cleaner, affordable and sustainable energy. There is a clear link between energy access and women’s economic empowerment and well-being.

In India, for example, women still spend up to 5 hours a day collecting fuel for cooking, as part of their unpaid, unrecognized and unaccounted care work—work that restricts the opportunity for education, paid employment and economic advancement. Further, the use of biomass fuel causes severe and long-term health problems such as respiratory diseases. The World Health Organization reports that in India 500,000 deaths occur every year due to unclean cooking fuels.

The lack of access to clean and affordable energy also has a direct link to violence against women. Women often venture out to collect firewood in remote, isolated and difficult geographic terrains, and are therefore more vulnerable to violence. In addition, reliance on wood disrupts natural resilience buffers and produces vulnerabilities and even accelerates climate change.

Improving energy access would reduce the drudgery of women’s unpaid and care work, enable them to access education and employment options and enhance their livelihoods. Clean cooking fuels such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), biogas and other options such as solar energy could help eliminate the hazards of indoor air pollution in the nearly 140 million Indian households that rely on open fires and biomass for cooking.

Access to energy for women also results in positive gains for the ecosystem. For example, the electrification of rural communities can result in a 9 percentage points increase in female employment, and a staggering 23% increase in the probability of rural women working outside the home. According to a recent study by the McKinsey Global Institute, empowering women to participate in India’s economy on an equal basis with men would add $3 trillion to the nation’s economy by 2025.

Enabling women’s access to energy also results in improvements to their social conditions. Women invest 90% of their income back into their families and their welfare—which has a positive knock-on effect, with lasting effects for generations to come. Investments in women’s access to energy are therefore critical. The government’s Ujjwala scheme, which provides LPG connections at reduced rates to women from Below Poverty Line households, is a useful example. The scheme will be bolstered by public investment in clean energy, incentives such as subsidies and taxes, and communities’ access to finance, awareness and education. Earlier this month, at a side event at COP22, UN Women unveiled its partnership with the ministry of new and renewable energy, government of India, and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to address barriers holding up women entrepreneurs, enable women’s participation and leadership in energy policies, and the productive use of sustainable energy. Launched last year, together with the ministry and UNEP, at COP21 in Paris, the new flagship programme on “Women’s Entrepreneurship for Sustainable Energy” is supported by the UK’s department for international development, and will be implemented in four states—Madhya Pradesh, Nagaland, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh—in 2017. It will have an impact on 100,000 disadvantaged women, by providing better access to sustainable energy.

The flagship programme, which yokes together women’s economic empowerment and sustainable energy for all, is seen as a key means of implementation of the gender equality and women’s empowerment compact.

The partnership is an example of a concrete commitment to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Goal 5 on gender equality and women’s empowerment and Goal 7 on energy access.

As we call on governments across the world to “Step It Up” for gender equality, this initiative by the Union government will set a standard for many other countries, and accelerate the momentum towards a more equal world, a Planet 50-50, by the year 2030. Comments are welcome at theirview@livemint.com

Source: Mintepaper, 23-11-2016

Richest 1% Indians own 58.4% of wealth

The richest 1% of Indians now own 58.4% of the country’s wealth, according to the latest data on global wealth from Credit Suisse Group AG, the financial services company based in Zurich. Credit Suisse has published the report every year since 2010.

The share of the top 1% is up from 53% last year. In the last two years, the share of the top 1% has increased at a cracking pace, from 49% in 2014 to 58.4% in 2016. The accompanying Chart 1 has the details.

Does that mean the trend of the very rich getting richer is because of the Modi government? Not really—as the chart shows, the share of the top 1% in the country’s total wealth improved from 40.3% in 2010 to 49% in 2014. But the numbers do suggest that the very rich are expanding their share at a faster clip now. The richest 10% of Indians haven’t done too shabbily either, increasing their share of the pie from 68.8% in 2010 to 80.7% by 2016. In sharp contrast, the bottom half of the Indian people own a mere 2.1% of the country’s wealth.

Data from Credit Suisse shows that India’s richest do well for themselves whichever government is in power. In 2000, for instance, the share of the richest 1% was a comparatively low 36.8% of the country’s wealth. In the last 16 years, they have increased their share from a bit more than a third to almost three-fifths of total wealth.

Very clearly, most of the gains from the country’s high rate of economic growth have gone to them.

How does India compare with other countries? Well, the Credit Suisse numbers confirm what we see on a daily basis— that India is one of the most unequal societies. Consider this: while the top 1% in India own 58.4% of the country’s wealth, the top 1% in China own 43.8%, in Indonesia they own 49.3%, in Brazil 47.9%, in South Africa 41.9%. Chart 2 has the details. But perhaps our richest need to try harder—the top 1% in kleptocratic Russia own 74.5% of the nation’s wealth.

Source: Mintepaper, 23-11-2016

A new idiom of Dalit assertion

There’s a new turn in Dalit politics that entails taking charge of affairs in their own hands, and a widening of the terrain of struggle rather than restricting it to political power or religious conversion.

There is a new swing in Dalit politics today. Its signs are palpable in the way Dalits have reacted to atrocities on them, the modes of struggles devised, the kind of alliances forged, and the nodal concepts and norms invoked for action. While old ways of doing Dalit politics — paternalism, quotas, sub-caste appeal, conversion, bahujan (including sarvajan) — are still around, more in a client-patron mode, Dalits are increasingly taking charge of affairs in their own hands.

A few features of this turn are noteworthy: caste is back into reckoning; the use of social media to network and communicate has proliferated; Left politics and its limitations are under scrutiny; Babasaheb Ambedkar has reinforced his presence as the flagpole; there is a highly literate Dalit leadership deeply aware of historical injustice and electorally decisive numbers in support; a thick notion of Brahmanism is highlighted as the enemy; a search for a new civil society-state axis is on; and a new body of concepts and slogans are being deployed as the battle cry. Dalits have begun to dig deep into layers and layers of folklore and alternative nationalist imagery to forge skilful use of signs, symbols and representations.

While one can say that all these features were part of the Dalit movement at one time or the other, it is their combinatory which is proving itself lethal. Above all, this stir is situating itself on the terrain of India’s distinct democratic politics, employing its resources as much as possible. There is no single political party at the head of this movement although many political parties will have much at stake in it.

Reaction to atrocities   The continuing, large-scale and disdainfully executed atrocities on Dalits were largely confined to police records and the bulky records of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes for long. But incidents such as a suicide note by a research scholar, Rohith Vemula, that stated, “My birth is my fatal accident”, has connected all of them and much more to the social fact of caste: his suicide is seen as a witness to the squeezing out of the life of millions of youth — bright, daring, and with dreams to reach out to the sky — on account of caste and all it means in context. Dalits increasingly feel that the opportunity to access the legal and institutional resources of a democratic polity has gone hand in hand with relocating them into a caste grid, consigning all their effort, again in Vemula’s words, to “immediate identity and nearest possibility”. Their life prospects are much inferior to those of its other beneficiaries. This sense of ‘unfair inclusion’ connects them to the vast numbers in the Indian subcontinent who are kept, in Ambedkar’s cryptic phrase, “outside the fold”.

 The denial of access to equal opportunities and rewards is not merely economic but ways of life, and abilities to define one’s own and collective futures. Such a state of affairs may not be played out in the open but built into the common sense of everyday life. Therefore, in all sectors, even in public enterprises, Dalits tend to crowd those levels that are insignificant, prone to routine and imitation rather than inventive and decision-making. In institutions of higher learning Dalits crowd social sciences and humanities that are endowed with very little institutional outlay or vision, and can generate very few sought-after jobs or opportunities.

The effect of land reforms and agrarian transformation — while reinforcing the hold of landed castes and communities in the countryside — has pushed Dalits and social segments akin to them further to the margins. There is a new enslavement and recrudescence of gradation and ranking at the workplace rather than enablement and camaraderie.

The Hindutva agenda of inviting all Hindus to the banquet table but assigning lower castes to their predestined places has further exacerbated the sense of being unwanted. ‘The fatal accident of birth’ connects all the sites that have witnessed Dalit upsurge in recent days, from Tughlakabad to Una, from Hyderabad to Udupi. But it also runs through the distinction between skilled and unskilled, organised and informal, rural and urban, and male and female labour. This cleavage also links much subtler forms of exclusion and relative marginalisation to more cruder forms of atrocities.

Modes of struggle   The social relations in which Dalits are caught calls upon them to struggle not merely against external dominance, be it capital, caste or power, but also against denial of their very humanity. The latter forms of struggle are pitted against subtler forms of human degradation and enslavement of one’s very self.

The new turn in Dalit politics is precisely calling for a widening of the terrain of struggle rather than merely restricting it to political power or religious conversion. Given this task, there are new instrumentalities in place in Dalit struggles: the social media does not become merely a site to network, but also to inform, to criticise, to assess as well as redefine concerns. In fact the social media has emerged today as the backbone of the new Dalit awakening as could be seen in the solidarity movement with Rohith Vemula across the country, in ‘Azadi Koon’ (March for Freedom) from Ahmedabad to Una in Gujarat, or the ‘Udupi Chalo’ walk that brought thousands of Dalits from different parts of Karnataka to the temple town, Udupi.

The great marches and rallies winding across distant villages and small towns and uniting people around a set of core demands are connecting people physically and emotionally. There are slogans asserting pride in being a Dalit, with a sub-caste enumeration as an add-on, not infrequently. There is a resurgence of folklore, sites of atrocities have become places of pilgrimage, traditional musical instruments of Dalits have thrown up fusion with rhythmic dances of great power and poise, and broadsheets, songs and street plays, evocative posters and imaginative slogans challenge dominant perception and sensitivity. Women and men are found shoulder to shoulder with one another in this ‘long march’, something that the late Sharmila Rege portrayed in her writings. Ambedkar makes a rich and exemplary presence across such performances, and there is almost none beside him in stature. Today, sites of Dalit rallies are crowded with a rich display of books and publications, a widespread practice in Left rallies of yore.

Hitherto, cleavages between Dalits and backward castes, Dalits and Muslims, and the gender divide have come in the way of optimising the democratic dividend from their overwhelming numbers. The decisive support of Dalits to the backward castes in the Mandal agitation did not beget enduring political alliances. The Dalit and Muslim alliance never took off the ground at any time in right earnest. And, less said the better with regard to the alliance between backward castes and women. In recent years, faced with Hindu consolidation under the aegis of Hindutva, the targeting of Dalits and Muslims by the cow-brigades or Gau Rakshak Dals, the growth in civil society surveillance and moral policing, and the relative marginality of these groups in the market, there is a growing realisation among sections of them that they need to politically draw closer.

The slogans that resound in the Dalit movement today indicate such a thaw: The banners read, and slogans echo: ‘choice of food’, ‘right to land’, ‘Swabhiman’ and ‘Atmabhiman’ (self-respect), ‘Azadi’ (freedom) and ‘dignity’. They pronounce death knell to historic oppression, and freedom to define their own self-hood. Dalits also proudly announce the equality of women and their right to choose the kind of life they wish to live and denounce the surveillance of Hindutva brigades on them. The dragging out of Mohammad Akhlaq from his house and his killing by a local Hindu mob on the charge of storing beef at his house in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, has become an important issue in Dalit struggles, woven around the right to food. As a result, we find the bonding together of a large number of associations of these groups and communities.

Nodal concepts and norms   The registry of norms that are invoked by the current Dalit movement to explain and justify its objectives and actions has much to distinguish it from its earlier expressions. It is increasingly human dignity and worth, and the capacity to be what one can be, that occupy the high ground. The reduction of freedom to one’s birthmarks, and the social structures, institutions, prejudices and interactions that sustain such a state of affairs are seen as new forms of enslavement. A patch of land of one’s own, a home where one can live on one’s own terms, not to be condemned to certain occupations, or be treated as low and defiled stir Dalit imagination today as never before.

The term Brahmanism that Dalits have employed to rally against a specific mode of dominance from the time of Jyotirao Phule and Iyothee Thass has acquired new connotations of sustaining a social order based on graded inequality, servility and deference, and self-aggrandisement at the expense of misery and inhumanity meted out to others. India’s so-called modern and democratic institutions are increasingly perceived as sustaining a Brahmanical dispensation. The central concerns of Muslims, women and backward castes are perceived as being consonant with these concepts and norms.

What electoral dividends this new sensitivity will bring at the hustings or in foisting party alliances is difficult to anticipate at present. The new Dalit politics feels that it holds the key to some of these concerns and strivings. While there is much that unites the social groups and communities enumerated above, there is much that divides them too. Bridges connecting these divides are yet to be built. Dalits are yet to reach out to Adivasis in a meaningful way.

Valerian Rodrigues is formerly Professor at Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and currently National Fellow, Indian Council of Social Science Research.

Source: The Hindu, 19-11-2016

The widening class divide

Children from the RTE quota are often left feeling small as equality seems to be lost in monetary disparity

Thirty-two-year-old Uma Devi (name changed) is conspicuous in a crowd of parents who have come to pick their children up in swanky cars. She works as a Group D employee at a government hospital, but thanks to the 25 per cent reservation quota mandated by the Right to Education (RTE) Act, her seven-year-old son goes to a “big” CBSE-affiliated private school in in Bengaluru.

Waiting for her child outside the school, she says she is thrilled that he can speak English. “My husband who is a driver studied only till Class X and I studied till Class XII as the circumstances at home forced both of us to discontinue our studies,” she says.

But “big” schooling has come with a deeper and disturbing reality. “Aunty, English ma’am says he doesn’t read properly!” shouts one of her son’s classmates as the children run towards their parents.

Keeping up with the Joneses

The innocent comment of her son’s classmate wipes the smile away from Uma Devi’s face. “I work overtime and pay Rs.900 for his tuition classes. What more can I do?” she asks helplessly. Her child has to “compete” with children from well-to-do families and she simply cannot afford expensive birthday parties, picnics or even tuitions.

“While the government reimburses tuition fees, schools still ask us to pay for miscellaneous fees such as smart class fees, picnic fees and transport fees and we cannot afford to pay,” says another parent whose child studies in a school in south Bengaluru.

The discrimination begins thus: children from the RTE quota and their parents are often left feeling small because the spirit of equality seems to be lost in monetary disparity, and this is not just the story of Uma Devi.

Every family has a humiliating experience to tell. Ten-year-old Raghavendra (named changed) spent all night studying for his Kannada test, but he was in for a rude shock when his teacher told him that he could not sit for it as his parents had not paid their fees. They simply had no money to spare, and the school was not willing to make an exception.

In July, a private school in the city charged all students Rs.35,000 as food fees. Parents of students admitted under the quota along with RTE activists complained to the education department. Under pressure from the government, the school offered to refund the fees but said that parents would have to send lunch and snacks from home.

“Very often when we question school managements for some of the decisions they make, schools feel they are doing charity by admitting kids under the quota,” says B.N. Yogananda, general secretary of RTE Students and Parents Association, a support group of 400 members formed for and by parents of children enrolled in schools under the provisions of the RTE Act.

A teacher at an ICSE school said that she had asked the school management why the “burden of adjustment” always falls on the child. “Doing simple things like ensuring that nursery rhymes in Kannada are taught until all students pick up English or putting a cap of Rs.10 for project work can go a long way in ensuring that students do not develop an inferiority complex,” she says.

But inclusivity goes beyond the classroom walls.

Discrimination in and outside school

Nagasimha G. Rao, convener of the RTE task force formed by NGOs in 2012 to address cases of discrimination against students admitted under the quota, says that parents of other children too need to question their actions. “It is not just during school hours; parents need to ask themselves if they have invited a child under the quota to their homes for a birthday party or a play date.”

The RTE Act does not address the issue of social inclusion. “My child asks me why he is not chosen to perform in the annual day celebration or why I do not come to his classmate’s birthday celebration. It is going to be hard to explain all this to a seven-year-old,” says a parent helplessly.

Private school managements, however, argue that the State government’s annual reimbursement ceiling — Rs.11,848 a year for a child admitted to Class I and Rs.5,924 a year for a child in preschool — is not adequate to meet all the facilities that they provide. But discrimination cannot be the answer.

While some schools deny RTE students access to certain facilities, others have blatantly discriminated by introducing separate teaching sections with clear lines of demarcation between the haves and the have-nots. Unable to bear the price tag that comes with “free education”, many parents have pulled their children out of these schools.

If the RTE Act is not embraced in spirit by parents, teachers and schools, its legacy will be overshadowed by prejudice, discrimination and a reaffirmation of the class divide.

tanu.kulkarni@thehindu.co.in

Source: The Hindu, 23-11-2016

Is Ritual Worship Necessary To Please God?

Shammi Paranjape





Will God get angry if we fail to worship Him? What is worship? It is a set of prescribed rituals offered to a deity . Hindus have an elaborate and varied set of rituals offered to multifarious manifestations of Divinity in their religious firmament. Christianity, Islam, and other religions, have their own prescribed modes of worship. The bottom line in all is the religious sentiment of adoration and reverence for the Supreme, in whichever manner perceived. This is not a bad thing.Ritual worship engenders humility and a sense of awe at the grandeur of the Supreme Entity and helps forge a relationship between man and God.Places of worship facilitate this process.If you want to post a letter, you go to a post office; to take a walk you go to a park; if you want a few moments with God, you go to the designated House of God. So, in that sense it is not bad at all.
However, there are some points to consider. Our worship gives us satisfaction, for sure, but what about `God'?
What does He get out of it? Does God need our worship? Not at all; He does not need validation. Praise and genuflection are the needs of earthly rulers.Then what might be God's need?
In the thousands that throng Houses of Worship, or religiously perform puja and prayer rituals at home, He is simply looking for a true devotee.
Sri Sathya Sai Baba says, “You may acquire the highest knowledge, you may spend hours in meditation, you may visit temples and perform rituals earnestly , but unless you feel love for God, it is all useless. Love alone surpasses the most arduous sadhana, and makes you the recipient of the highest of graces.“ Love. What could be the definition of this love that pleases God so much? Is it the one we hear and talk so much about in pop songs, movies, and books? Hardly. That is limited love and mostly transient. It changes, shifts, varies with time.And it is concentrated on a few chosen individuals only . Divine love cannot be narrowed like that. It is expansive and covers all creation, seeing the underlying unity of all. Such a love is spontaneous, permanent, engenders bliss and naturally promotes peace and harmony. Unless a devotee has this basic credential of universal love, he does not pass the test of a true devotee.
How can this universal love be manifested? It is quite simple. By developing a spiritual vision and seeing everything with the eye of wisdom. The divine principle is cognised in all, and revered and respected. When you hurt another, you are hurting the Divine, when you love another you are loving the Divine. That is the bottom line of all religion and spirituality. So, worship, yes. But remember, worship to become a better person. Its value is to you, not to God. Its purpose is to cleanse you and bring forth, from your true nature, the gems of universal love, that are the adornment of human life.
Sri Sathya Sai Baba says, “Love knows no distinction of any kind. It knows no caste, colour, creed or nationality. Love should be all-embracing and envelop the entire world. `Love all, serve all', is the worship which pleases God the most.“ (November 23 is the 91st birth anniversary of Sri Sathya Sai Baba).