The denigration of meritorious institutions like the IITs and IIMs through the RSS mouthpiece Organiser can only prove counterproductive. In running down institutions that have earned India a fair name by producing path-breaking world beaters in the pure sciences, medicine, technology and business, the right-wing ideologues of the ruling dispensation are not doing the country any favours.
In dubbing any open or pluralistic discussion in such institutes as anti-Hindu or anti-India, such fringe elements betray their ignorance of what such institutions have achieved by imparting a scientific temperament to emerging generations. Far from being a debate about the left or the right of the political spectrum, what such misplaced criticism based on pseudo-science does is to show the entire system of imparting elite principles to the young in poor light.
The fear that the HRD ministry is beholden to such elements in trying to give education an ideological colour cannot be said to be founded on the irrational fears of the liberal minded. All governing parties, or those heading alliances, have been known to appoint as heads of institutions people amenable to their way of thinking. If the right has eminent intellectuals to head such organisations they would be welcomed because left-wing thinking is not necessarily the only way ahead. Where the BJP is erring is in being side-tracked by argumentative ideology just for the sake of it rather than lofty principles based on scientific inquiry, which is what the success of modernism, driven by technological advances, is based on. Both leftist twaddle and rightist bluster are irrelevant to modernism.
