Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr | Real Problems Of Neet Go Deeper Than Dealing With Wangchuk’s Fast
This has been the presidential style of Prime Minister Modi’s governance. Ignore the questions arising from the government’s failures and talk about other things, as though the problems are imaginary. The government has succeeded in pulling the wool over the eyes of the people. Manipulation and brainwashing fail to describe the act of deception adequately
The brutal question that needs to be asked is whether the shifting of the fasting Sonam Wangchuk, the radical educationist and environmentalist from Ladakh, from Jantar Mantar, New Delhi’s Tahrir Square of Cairo and Istanbul, to Safdarjung Hospital by the Delhi police will create a backlash for the mulish Narendra Modi government? It seems it will not. It is necessary, therefore, to face certain unpalatable facts.
The Neet leak paper is the most shameful and degrading scandal and people across classes and regions are angry about it. You can hear the expressions of disgust and anger from private sector boardrooms to people on the street. But people feel helpless and they want somebody to protest, and somebody to clean up the act.
The Modi government, as always, is unwilling to take any moral responsibility. There is no move on the part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and education minister Dharmendra Pradhan to apologise for the critical failure affecting the educational fortunes of millions of students in the country. This has been the presidential style of Prime Minister Modi’s governance. Ignore the questions arising from the government’s failures and talk about other things, as though the problems are imaginary. The government has succeeded in pulling the wool over the eyes of the people. Manipulation and brainwashing fail to describe the act of deception adequately. It’s in this context that the protest and fasts of Wangchuk, the three students of All India Students Alliance (AISA) of CPI(M-L) -- Neha, Ameen and Amish – should be seen.
With Wangchuk taken away from Jantar Mantar, the government believes it has taken away the main focus of the protest. Wangchuk’s unimpeachable credentials lent heft to the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), founded by Abhijit Dipke, the man who came in from the cold, and the protesters from AISA joined. The participants are sincere and the issue is of immense national importance. But what matters most is of least consequence under the anaesthetising effect of Mr Modi. The demand for Mr Pradhan’s resignation is totally legitimate. In a similar situation, Congress governments would have initially resisted but would have capitulated ultimately. The Congress, for all its cynicism, showed rare sensitivity to public discontent and Opposition pressure. The Modi government, with its totalitarian attitude, follows the Hindutva tenet that ignore protests and they will die out, and if they don’t, then arrest them and put them away. By removing Wangchuk from the protest site, the police plans to push out the other protesters. That silences the protest.
What is happening on the Neet front? The test due on May 3 was cancelled because the investigating agencies concluded there was a leak, and thus the exam was postponed. The rescheduled test was held on June 21. The Neet results are now out.
The damage was successfully controlled. Heads should have rolled. But that is where scandal management, the forte of the Modi government, comes to the fore. Whether it is the Neet leak or the Ayodhya Ram temple donation theft, the Modi Sarkar skirts round it. Survival is surely a political virtue, but the reputation of the Modi government has a dismal grade point average for governance.
The Neet faced a far more serious challenge to the “integrity” -- a term used by all concerned, including the Supreme Court and the National Testing Agency (NTA), which conducts Neet – in 2024, when the NTA said there was a leak, but the police fled cases, arrested 13 individuals in Bihar, saying that there was a leak. So, there are problems with Neet and there should have been a serious debate across the country about it. Unfortunately, there was none. The focus in on increasing the number of medical colleges, and the seats available in them. In the most populous country in the world, there is need for a larger number of doctors. Little thought seems to be given to the quality of medical education.
In broader terms, the standards of education and the need for excellence that are needed to make India a top industrialised country is not of much concern. For the Prime Minister, the goal of “Viskit Bharat” is not about transformation of the whole system at the qualitative level. He does not believe in quality dynamics. Quantity is quality. He doesn’t even believe in the economist’s creed that after a certain point, increase in quantity makes for qualitative transformation. That is much too abstract a calculation.
It is unfair to expect that either Modi government or those handling science and technology education in the country are capable of evolving an open-ended education system that pushes the frontiers of knowledge systems. They don’t even spare a thought on the issue. It is when a system is ossified it becomes predictable, and opens the scope for cheating in more ways than one. The Modi Sarkar, in its pseudo-nationalist zeal, wants to establish a single mega-system, where millions will learn the same things in a rigidly uniform manner. That is a recipe for intellectual disaster. It is however something that the right-wing BJP and its Hindutva advocates demand uniformity in education as well as in everything else. It also facilitates brainwashing. For authoritarian governments like that of the Modi-led BJP, education is the potent brainwashing weapon. It is the uniform system that might appear ideal for technological education that is really its undoing.
Education should be out of government control if it is to grow and expand to take countries and civilisations forward. But governments are generally averse to letting go of control over education, especially in Third World countries such as India. It should come as no surprise that exam scandals of the Neet kind are bound to happen when rigid systems are put in place, with good and evil intentions.
