With elections to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) — the country’s richest municipal body with a 2016-17 budget of Rs.37,052 crore — scheduled for next February, antagonism between Maharashtra’s ruling alliance partners — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena (SS) — is spilling into the open. Although the minister of state for education in the Maharashtra cabinet is the Shiv Sena’s Ravindra Waikar, on October 15, the Sena organised a protest march against the BJP, targeting it for declining education standards in the country’s most industrialised state (pop. 114 million).

The “KG to PG march” was led by Aditya Thackeray, son of Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray and head of the Yuva Sena, the party’s youth wing, and included over 10,000 party members. During a halt in the march, Aditya blamed BJP education minister Vinod Tawde for “inaction” on policy issues in the education sector. “Despite several promises, Tawde has not made education a priority in the state,” said the youngest Thackeray to have (inevitably) emerged as a Shiv Sena leader. While addressing party faithfuls, Aditya raised several populist issues such as abolition of parent interviews at the time of kindergarten admissions, reducing the load of children’s school bags and facilitating online admissions for junior college students.

Unsurprisingly, this sharp attack by an ally has irked Tawde. “The objective of the Shiv Sena’s sudden awareness of BJP neglect of education is to establish Aditya Thackeray as a leader of the Shiv Sena ahead of the Mumbai civic elections,” says Tawde. Adds a Tawde aide who spoke on condition of anonymity: “Had the Sena done its homework, it would have known that the state government is already seized of most of the issues raised at the Sena rally. For instance, we conducted 11 online admission rounds this year and ensured 100 percent online admissions to junior colleges in Mumbai.”

Quite clearly, sudden awareness of the acts of omissions and commissions of the BJP minister and government in education has been provoked by the looming BMC election. BMC with its huge budget, is a rich prize and offers vast scope for shakedowns and patronage that the Shiv Sena, which has ruled it since 1985 (with BJP support), has become accustomed. Naturally, the BJP, which rules at the Centre and in Maharashtra state, is keen to make it a hat-trick and rule the BMC as well. Therefore, as the parties gear up to fight the BMC election separately early next year, the decline of education at all levels in the country’s #1 industrial state is a good stick with which to beat the BJP.

Indeed, Aditya believes the Sena’s record in contemporising primary education in Maharashtra is better than the BJP’s. Taking a dig at the Central government’s Digital India initiative, he says that whereas the Sena-ruled BMC has distributed 22,170 tablets to class VIII students of the 1,200 municipality-run schools under its ambitious e-learning programme which cost the civic body Rs.15.30 crore, BJP’s Digital India drive announced by prime minister Narendra Modi is yet to take off. However, BJP spokespersons say almost 17,000 zilla parishad schools, which come under the state education ministry’s purview, are using LED screens, digital tablets and e-learning videos and that another 50,000 such schools will be digitised by December.

However, educationists in Mumbai are wryly amused that the Shiv Sena and BJP spokespersons seem to believe education reform is synonymous with tablets, LED screens and e-learning. “During its long rule over the BMC, the Shiv Sena has done great harm by appointing under-qualified teachers in BMC schools and insisting on Marathi as the medium of instruction, apart from being neck-deep in teacher recruitment and textbooks commissioning and printing, and equipment procurement rackets. As a result, as testified by Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Report 2015, learning outcomes in BMC schools have plunged precipitously and there’s a mass exodus from corporation schools. Aditya Thackeray is the last person who should try and make education an election issue,” says a veteran educationist who prefers to remain anonymous.

Contrary to the popular adage, in an ill-educated democracy, you can fool all the people all the time. Or at least for a very long time and Aditya Thackeray’s neglect of education charge against the BJP is a clear case of pot calling kettle black.

Dipta Joshi (Mumbai)