Right to Education Bill: Ruling Class Triumphs as Opposition Gets Coopted
Monday, 02 February 2009
Ravi Kumar
One of the differences between classical liberalism and neoliberalism is
that while the former called for reducing the role of the state to a minimum
and replace it by private capital the latter seeks to expand the role of
private capital through the state, making it authoritarian and a dedicated
facilitator of its interests. The recent developments in the sphere of
education need to be seen from this perspective. The efforts to confer on
the state the aforementioned role seems to be nearing completion as the
Constitution is being rephrased to facilitate the interests of private
capital. The current Bill tabled in Parliament is the most appropriate proof
of that and the Left political formations are yet to raise any objection to
the way its passage is being secretly designed.
The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill, 2008 was tabled
in Rajya Sabha in the month of December 2008. It has been a long pending
Bill, not because numerous objections were put to it but because it never
figured as a priority for the Indian state. And as the contents of the bill
reveal, it is still not very committed on providing quality education to
every child. That, needless to say, compounds the sorry state of affairs
here because India, unlike many other countries in the world, had failed to
establish a school education system that made education accessible to every
child before the onslaught of neoliberalisation. That those other countries
had succeeded on that count was mainly on account of the necessity of
capital – it needed the educated labour force. It also, of course, emerged
out of movements in those nations. Indian state neither felt that need nor
did the movements make such a demand. Consequently, the education system
came to be seen as an autonomous agency of change, a unit divorced from
class struggle.
The current Bill tells us not only about the intentions of the state, it
also reveals the politics of the so-called progressive and secular actors
whose methodology of looking at world as a canvas made up of fragmented and
non-connected particulars has further allowed capital to entrench itself.
There is a discourse built in the favour of the Bill by its disguised
authors who have been sitting on the front benches of a politically
amorphous identity called 'civil society groups' or 'citizens working for
the welfare of people'. And with the expanding intellectual base of such
groups and popularisation of ideas of equality and justice as outside and
disconnected to the character of capitalism and the facilitator state, the
borderlines at such moments between the politics of the Left and those of
such agents of capital tend to get blurred, marring the possibility of an
organised resistance.
That the Bill has elicited no reaction from the Left parties and trade
unions is because of this neo-liberalised character of the current
conjuncture. There is no national concern for the mechanisms built into the
Bill to pauperise the teaching labour force. It provides sufficient ground,
through its Section 23, to appoint teachers who would continue to follow the
parameters of what has become known as para-teachers. While great duties are
expected out of the teachers there is no provision which would define their
wages or working conditions. And may be the notion of teachers as
non-workers, and as 'messengers of god' ('…balihari guru apne govind diye
milaye') obliterates any possibility of their consideration as workers
howsoever much they are integrated into the market and prone to the vagaries
of capital.
For the opponents of the neoliberal assault in education, the Bill would
make certain things constitutional – involving teachers in non-teaching
work, insufficient school infrastructure as the norm, putting onus of
educating children on parents, ambiguous notion of justice vis-à-vis
providing representation to 'marginalised' sections, complete neglect of
issues of curriculum, pedagogy, education for disabled children and making
provision of financing education vague. But what emerges from this
opposition is also the need to address these issues in the dialectics of
labour-capital struggle, which is missing and which can be taken up only by
those who would first agree that these are inherent problems of capitalism,
and it therefore needs to be understood in a context.
While the Bill ignores the most fundamental aspects of education such as
pedagogy, teacher's education and working condition of teachers, it makes
the intent of the Indian state amply clear. All flaws which were critiqued
as schemes (for example Sarva Shikhsa Abhiyan) will now be part of Indian
Constitution. The institutionalisation of inequity will be complete and
constitutional. The hopes that the champions of equality and justice were
pinning on radical changes within capitalism will be shattered in the most
obnoxious fashion – passing a Bill which has lies written in it (for
example, when it comes to financial provisions for providing education) and
which is tabled but no public representation is invited on it as is the
general practice. Hence, what the human resource and development minister
writes in the 'Statement of Objects and Reasons' of the Bill regarding the
beliefs and values of "equality, social justice and democracy and the
creation of a just and humane society" on which the Bill is supposedly
"anchored" becomes nothing more than lip-service to the rhetoric of
welfarist remnants.
Given that there are problems with the way developments in education are
seen and analysed in India – in complete disjunction from the struggle of
the working class and other struggles against capitalist disfigurations of
human existence – there is a need to resist the Bill tabled in Parliament.
While one may ask whether it is really possible to tackle the issue of
majoritarianism or right-wing assertions through including it in the Bill,
there are still possibilities to modify the Bill in the direction of
providing a better alternative to what is being promised by the Indian
State. For instance, the curriculum and pedagogy detailing can be framed in
such a way that there is space for critical engagement with diverse issues
of inequity or communalisation. Similarly, the role and working condition of
teachers as well as their education is another major area of intervention.
The mechanisms suggested for bringing about justice and equality in school
also needs drastic modification. Changes can be suggested at all these and
more levels. These suggestions in either form – whether accepted or rejected
– will highlight the contradictions of the system vis-à-vis its rhetoric of
justice and equality. And these contradictions will open up new avenues of
resistance in the area.
Though there are problems intrinsic to even the anti-neoliberal critique,
the resistance to the Bill as of now is minimal and negligible. The reasons
are amply clear – there is no organised force in the country (not even the
Left teachers unions!!) which is opposed to the Bill. While silence from the
NGO-brand egalitarians is well understood (as they are designed to stand by
capital in the ultimate run) those sections that consider themselves
opponents of capital's offensive have also withdrawn. The problem emerges
from the fact that there is hardly any questioning of the logic of
stratification and the process of production that shapes it. Rather, the
fight is for inclusion in the existing system of stratification. The
withdrawal emerges from their understanding of education as divorced from
class struggle and political economy of capitalism. We can only hope that
some day the anti-systemic forces of the country would emerge from their
myopic understanding of how to look at developments in the education sector,
relating it to the struggle of the working class. Until then, the ruling
class would continue to score its victories through Amendments and Acts in
Constitutions passed with their support.
