Explaining the unexpected rout of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National  Democratic Alliance in the recent 14th general election is a slippery assignment which has tested the knowledge and perspicacity of the best pollsters and pundits within the media and academia. Nevertheless an additional explanation from a different perspective needs to be attempted because it’s important for leaders, ministers and strategists of the incoming government to learn from the debacle which broke down the NDA — and particularly the BJP — juggernaut, perhaps irreparably.

As written on this very page last month prior to the humiliation at the hustings of the BJP and its allies, an election campaign strategy which ignores the plainly evident poverty and deprivation of 70 percent of the population which lives — and votes — in rural India while advertising the relative affluence of a top bracket urban minority (as in the BJP’s India Shining mass media blitzkrieg), is suicidal. Because it ignores the fundamental and self-evident reality that while the Indian electorate can — and does — share poverty, it cannot tolerate injustice. The shiny new malls, lounge bars and swinging discotheques of urban India with sleek sedans clogging civic road networks, are a manifestation of social injustice to the rural majority denied half-decent housing, drinking water, basic sanitation and primary schools. This is a patent social injustice which newly installed governments in New Delhi and the state capitals must address and rectify if they are not to be laid equally low by another anti-incumbency tidal wave five years hence.

It has often been argued on this page that the expectations of India’s rural majority are embarrassingly modest. Indeed so modest that Sonia Gandhi won them over by merely lending a sympathetic ear. Contrary to popular belief, the greening of rural India does not require deployment of massive outlays which never filter down to beneficiaries anyway. It is very possible to bridge the unjust and unsustainable rural-urban divide through a few low-cost initiatives. Among them: easy connectivity to urban markets, availability of reliable power, silo and cold storage and micro-credit facilities, and downstream support of a vibrant food processing industry — all of which can materialise overnight if the gift of economic liberalisation and deregulation is also conferred upon village India groaning under the blatant corruption and injustice of licence-permit and tehsildar raj. And underpinning all this is access to equal quality education which has been callously denied to rural citizens for half a century.

Though econometrists may demur, this is not asking for much given that much of the facilitative infrastructure for delivering these modest expectations has already been created. The challenge before the new government is to harness already invested resources and compel unproductive personnel on the public payroll to lead, follow, or at least get out of the way once the logic of liberalisation and deregulation is extended to the nation’s chronically under-performing rural economy.

Dr. Joshi’s sins of omission and commission

The ignominious rejection of union minister of human resource development Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi by the electorate of the university town of Allahabad in the recently concluded general election, brings a dangerous era for Indian education to welcome closure. When Dr. Joshi, a former professor of physics at Allahabad University and a heavyweight within the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was allotted the education portfolio in the NDA government at the centre in 1999, great expectations were aroused within Indian academia and the community of social scientists around the country.

Unfortunately Dr. Joshi who once in office, morphed from a learned professor into an overbearing headmaster with a “quintessentially moffusil mindset”, belied all these expectations and embarked upon a high-handed reign of terror within this sensitive ministry. Among the first of his initiatives was the introduction of astrology as a degree level study programme in universities. Next he commissioned the haphazard rewriting of social science school textbooks to reflect an unsubstantiated hindutva interpretation of Indian history, and peremptorily dismissed the chairmen of the Indian Council of Social Sciences Research and Indian Council of Historical Research who advised caution and temperance.

Nor was this the sum and substance of the damage inflicted upon the nation’s fragile and neglected education system by Joshi. In 2001 following unremitting pressure from the Supreme Court, NGOs (non-government organisations) and the general populace, Parliament unanimously passed the 93rd (now 86th) amendment to the Constitution of India making it mandatory for the state to provide “free and compulsory” elementary education to all child citizens between the ages six-14.

Several years later the ministry’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education for All) programme designed in response to the constitutional amendment is languishing for want of finance and attention. Because instead of focussing the attention of his ministry on this initiative, Joshi felt it incumbent upon himself to target the six IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) and the half dozen IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management). Hitherto huge donations and endowments to the IITs from alumni have dried up after Joshi mandated their flow into a ministry promoted trust. And on February 5 this year, the HRD ministry arbitrarily slashed the already heavily subsidised tuition-cum-residence fees of the IIMs provoking widespread faculty and student protest and litigation pending adjudication in the Supreme Court.

With an estimated 60 million children dropping out of the nation’s moribund government schools before they reach middle school (class VIII), and higher education crippled by want of funds and obsolete syllabuses, Indian education is at the crossroads. There are many important lessons that Arjun Singh, the new incumbent at Shastri Bhavan, Delhi will need to learn from the sins of commission and omission of the unlamented Dr. Joshi, who providentially has been forced out of the Union HRD ministry.