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EDITORIALS
Barbarians At The Border
India cannot afford a pirated edition of the Taliban
raj in
its territory
 There
was a kind of dark-age savagery about it, the beheading of two Hindu priests
in Jammu by terrorists. The latest from the border town of Poonch cannot
be shuddered away as yet another statistical addition to the already bloated
chronology of foreign-inspired violence that defines the ongoing war against
the Indian nationhood. Look at the horror of the method: the victims were
dragged out of a temple and beheaded and their heads thrown on the road.
As if the message was not clear enough. All dark adjectives of anger and
revulsion would not be out of place here to comprehend the method of terror.
This is Talibanisation of the jehad-stark, chilling and provocative. For
the religious identity of the victims and the setting of the murder-too
symbolic to be generalised-make it clear that the jehadis are very clear
minded about their mission.
This country, however, does not seem to be so
clear minded about its own national mission in the face of determined
barbarism. Maybe the familiarity with the situation, and the near permanence
of it, has made the national conscience inactive. But the situation is
renewing itself; it's testing the patience as well as challenging the
national will. By resorting to medieval methods of religious symbolism,
it also hopes to create a scenario of self-serving communal backlash.
For any destabilising upsurge can be exploited by enemies of the nation
to their own propagandist advantage. This moment calls not for bleeding
heart liberalism but cool, focused proactivism. It requires a higher sense
of national survival, as exemplified by, say, the state of Israel. India
cannot afford to have a pirated edition of the Taliban raj in its own
territory. Or, for that matter, India cannot live with the precivilisational
images of severed heads of temple priests pleading for justice from the
roadside.
End
Of Ideas
Is school education churning out potential conceptual
illiterates?
The new plague: the saffronisation of education.
The afflicted will be chanting Sanskrit slogans and reading celestial
messages for the rest of their life. Intervene immediately, the civilised
and the secular of the nation, or be damned. This is the new fear of India.
And there seems to be hope for the secular. Human Resources Development
Minister Murli Manohar Joshi has said he has no hidden agenda to take
Indian students back to the Middle Ages. So everything is going to be
very modern and culturally enlightening. No star gazing, there will be
only computer worship; no arcane language, only modern science-the education
policy will continue to be very user friendly; rather, it will be quite
utilitarian. Today's schoolchild will be the citizen of a brand new world
where mind will be the rarest of commodities. No, please note, this scenario
is not a logical extension of the non-saffronisation of education.
 Saffron
or no saffron, the problem is with the NCERT vision of education. The
emphasis is on a contrived sense of scientific temper that enables the
student to pass the entrance examination, remember the names and count
the numbers. Good things, no doubt. But whatever happened to humanities,
whatever happened to the ideas? The low status of humanities in the job-centric
curriculum can only create future outsiders in the marketplace of ideas.
For, the intellectual bank of a society cannot be created by conceptual
illiterates. Languages and classical studies, social histories and philosophies,
traditions and cultures-they are the subjects that prepare the mind for
being in the world. Of course, this doesn't mean that the emphasis on
humanities has to be at the cost of user-friendly subjects. But nobody
is there to make the point, every one is busy talking saffron.
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