Selecting a Career for Your Child? For God's Sake, Leave It To Them...

I JUST returned home after a visit to Ernakulam, where my son Praful had to write the entrance examination for law conducted by the national law universities' common admission board.

There was a big crowd there, as hundreds of children from various parts of Kerala had come to write the exam. There seems to be a huge spurt in demand for law courses offered by national law schools, as three years ago when Amrita, my daughter, took it, the candidates were comparatively fewer.

But the candidates appeared to be of two types: Those who came there simply because somebody told them it was a course that could help win jobs with hefty money; and those who had some background in law or were seriously interested in pursuing law as a career. But what was surprising was that in most cases, these decisions were taken not by the children, but by their parents.

I do not say parents don't have a say in selecting a career for their kids. They do, but that is an advisory role; not a decision-making role. I am disturbed many parents are now trying to take over their children's lives, imposing their pet wishes on the youngsters. This could prove to be disastrous.

I do not claim I don't interfere with my children's lives. I do. In the case of my son, I was trying to tell him if he is interested in a management career, as he seemed to be, then he must first pursue a course like economics or law that could prove helpful in tackling challenges in a management career.

It was not easy. What advice to offer calls for serious effort, I realize. The other day, I was advising a friend to read a book on economics, Economics: Making sense of Modern Economies, edited by Simon Cox. I was reading the book as I was planning to lecture to my 17-year-old son, as he had to decide on what course to pursue.

As kids go, I must admit this one is a genuine representative of his generation, carefree to the core giving paroxysms of anxiety to his mother. So I thought it would be prudent and economic to advise him to pursue economics, and I was trying to convince him this discipline, in itself, was as sexy as say IT or other hot pursuits of our times. Or if he was eager on MBA, he could pursue that as well.

Now I know that we need a lot of convincing not only our youngsters but their parents too on the matter of pursuing the right career. Like me, two of my brothers too have boys who now seek a degree course and I find, it is a mad pursuit for the best and most juicy. No one wants the second place and hence a mad rush. The kids are now being fed ambitions beyond their endurance and one of my friends told me he had spent Rs. 25,000 just to purchase various application forms alone!

I thought he was kidding or trying to make me feel petty and look stingy as, as a matter of fact, I had spent only Rs. 3000 for such application forms for various entrance tests. But later I realized he was telling me the truth, as there are dozens of such tests now going on and they charge hefty amounts just for the prospectus and application forms. Sure, they must be making a hefty amount of money this way.

You may say these are gullible, uneducated people. Not at all. They are middle class people with excellent education, professional track record, and access to all the information available in the world. Still, they seem to be critically confused when it comes to the career choice for their children. I really do not know why this is so: is it a question of one's unending ambitions or is it a matter of our outlook, or is it a question of a problem of plenty?

One thing is sure: we need career guidance not only for our children but for their parents too so that the kids would be saved much headaches in their lives.

The Curious Case of Good Samaritans and Dead Lamb: A parable from Kerala

CPM jumps in as the BJD-BJP alliance breaks in Orissa: news.
Political Samaritans taking home a lamb...!

KERALA'S EDUCATION department is now conducting a very interesting inquiry about a compact disc, that was distributed as part of training progammes in some parts of the State.

The CD contained a play, shot on camera, that was supposed to help the students and teachers in the class room exercises. But at some places, along with this innocuous one, another by the same playwright, was downloaded into the CD and distributed raising a hue and cry.

This play, surely, is enormously interesting if you look at its content. It shows a bishop and his driver travelling on a village road and accidentally hitting a little lamb. The driver asks the bishop what to do with the dead lamb and receives the instruction to put it in the dick of the car so that once in their palace they could make a good dish of it.

The lamb is owned by a poor village boy and he loved it so much. The boy comes to know about the death of his friend and comes to the bishop's house in search of it and the ensuing scenes are somewhat funny.

The church in Kerala is up in arms and Malayala Manorama, which broke the story, also relishes in it because they find in it a very good weapon to beat the education department run by M A Baby and the Left Front Government in the State. The education department is jittery and Baby denies there was any move to defame the church. It was quite accidental that such a play with which the department has nothing to do got itself into the CD, he explains. In fact they have suspended an official for negligence in his duty.

Watching the play, I thought it was not a bad thing, albeit accidental. The play raises some very disturbing questions about the morals of our religious leadership, whether it be Christian, Muslim or Hindu. There was a time when we heard stories about Jesus Christ and the good Samaritan, about the Buddha carrying a limping lamb to its abode and so many others.

And what kind of stories we do hear today? We hear stories about religious persecution, hatred, and violence, sexual assaults in religious institutions, fleecing of people in the name of donations and fees and what all these give is an impression of all round corruption and moral degradation. In fact if you read the newspapers, you would think our religious leaders are nothing better a mafia.

That should make us think, not only about our religions and their current plight, but about our moral principles too.

Down Memory Lane:Dr A Achuthan on Early Days of Sastra Sahitya Parishad

YESTERDAY I had a meeting with Dr A Achuthan, an eminent conservationist, pioneer of the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad and a well known environmental activist.

He lives in Kozhikode, where much of his working life was spent, first as a teacher in the Regional Engineering College (now National Institute of Technology), and later as dean of students welfare at Calicut University. When he was dean of students welfare, I happened to be the chairman of the Calicut University Union for a term (1979-80) and so I had occasion to work with him closely those days running the affairs of the union. Even before that I knew him because both his children were with me in Malabar Christian College in late seventies when I served the college union in various capacities.

Yesterday, we were talking about the early history of the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad and how it evolved into a major popular science movement in India and indeed in the third world, winning international awards in its over 40 years of history.

But in 1962 when it was launched in Kozhikode it was not a popular social movement. It was indeed a movement for the spread of science and science consciousness with books on popular science rendered in Malayalam, with classes for younger generation held in various colleges and schools and for the common people, and other activities which were mainly of an academic nature. He remembered people like P T Bhaskara Panikker, Prof V M N Namboodiripad, Dr K G Adiyodi, Prof M K Prasad, Prof I G Bhaskara Panikkar, Konniyur R Narendranath and others were pioneers in the movement, most of them teaching in colleges in Kozhikode and surrounding areas those days.

One of the major activities was translation of science books and publication of a science magazine, Sastragathi, first edited by P T Bhaskara Panikkar and later by Dr Achuthan. Those days they conducted ten thousand classes in various parts of the state on the topic Nature, Society and Science which addressed the issue of the relation between these forces through scientific and often Marxist point of view.

Dr Achuthan remembers there were contacts with the official CPM leadership even those days, and later this bond became quite strong. "I told EMS that we were doing a service to society which would eventually help the left and progressive forces and hence better leave us with the way we are," he said recalling his conversation with EMS on this aspect. EMS too agreed to this view, he said.

There were problems in the organization in those days too. For example, Dr K G Adiyodi, an eminent scientist, left the Parishad within two years of its formation and Dr Achuthan feels that he left because he thought his contributions were not given sufficient recognition in the organization. It was a feeling of hurt ego that forced him to leave, he said and recalled all his efforts to bring him back to Parishad when they worked together in Calicut University failed to bring any results.

Rabiya: A Story

WHEN I was a child my mother told me the story of a frail old man, who set out to remove a hill. The village called him a foolish old man because he looked very foolish indeed. He told everyone this hill must go. It prevented the sun entering the village early in the day.

And people laughed, saying silly old man, how can you remove it? It is such a big hill and you are a frail old one.

He ignored them, reasoning one day he will win, as day by day inch by inch he will conquer it. If he failed to complete it, then his children will take it up and then their children…He went on working, and the sun laughed at him from above, burning his skin with his cruel rays.

But somehow, his story spread, people came to help out, and one day, the village saw the hill gone and instead there was a playground, a beautiful playground where children played ever after…

When I heard this story, I never dreamt I would meet someone like this frail old man till the day I met Rabiya.

Rabiya lived in a little village in Malappuram, a place buried in poverty and backwardness, most of its population poor and illiterate Muslims.

When I met Rabiya, she was already famous in the village. She was 23 or 24 and very beautiful, her face radiant with a smile and her lips firmly closed with an expression of determination. Her legs were as thin as a reed as she had been hit by polio in her childhood.

She was one of the rare women in her village to attend school and she had to stop before going to the college in the city as she was poor and also a cripple. But she retained her love of books, her love of reading and in her spare time she took to her books.

It was then the local government took up a project for total literacy. The government officials said one reason why they were backward and poor was the lack of literacy among the population.

The volunteers spread everywhere, organized campaigns urging the people to join the total literacy mission's study centers set up even in remote villages. It was more like a celebration in the villages, there were daily demonstrations by educated youngsters going from place to place, shouting slogans about the darkness in their minds, staging street plays in impromptu theatres, organizing slideshows and talks, all to entice people to the new movement for total literacy.

But the response was poor as the poor villagers thought they had better things to do, like planting a tree or harvesting their fields, than struggling with grammar.

Why should we learn now, as our youth is gone, our life is gone and do you think we would need to write letters to our children living next door, they asked derisively.

Then one day they saw Rabiya on her wheelchair, ambling her way through the dirt paths of their village, going to every single household and meeting every single villager.

She told them, 'Look uncle, these letters are our friends, these letters opened the gates of wealth and progress to nations everywhere, they opened the gates to heaven. And its never late to learn, never late to do a good deed in our life. Even on the last day of our life…'

Her wheelchair became a common sight in the narrow bylanes and school children always went after her, and often they became a long march through the village, the kids shouting slogans Rabiya taught them, hailing the literacy mission.

Slowly she saw her little classroom flooded with villagers and they learnt the letters and grammar sitting up late in the evening, with the kerosene lamps giving them light…

Those who visited her school heard the singing of the nursery rhymes by the old men and women even from a distance, their voice rough, and with a blush on their wrinkled faces, they displayed their new books, proudly read out from their texts…

When after two years of struggle, the province became totally literate and an old woman Chelakkodan Aysha, again from her village, declared it 100 per cent literate, Rabiya was there to celebrate the occasion.

It was not a small occasion, there were television cameras and an army of newspaper reporters from all over the country, because it was a great feat in a world where poverty and illiteracy reigned supreme.

Rabiya's story became famous and people came to meet her, and she received many awards too. Then years after when I went back to the village, it was a different scene.

The government had changed, and the new rulers had little enthusiasm for literacy campaign and the village slunk back to its moody existence, the villagers back to their cynicism and dull routine life.

Rabiya was there in her little home, hoping for a day when the struggles for big ideas will come back, when a new fight to remove the hills of poverty will come back to her village to light up their lives.

(Courtesy: ndtv.com/books/writingroom)

Ayyankali & the Missing Chapters in Kerala History

Remembering the Dalit fighter on the centenary of his historic struggle for entry to Dalit children to schools in Kerala.

By N P Chekkutty

Ayyankali, the legendary Dalit fighter from Kerala, seems to be caught in a trap of history: On the one side his name is evoked by left-wing extremists who have christened themselves as the Ayayankali Pada, or the Fighters of Ayyankali, and on the other it was Sonia Gandhi who came to inaugurate the centenary celebrations of his historic struggle for the right to education to Dalit children.

Ayyankali was a fighter who took on the powerful upper caste elite as they prevented Dalit children by force from entering the school in his village. But paradoxically, the Naxalite group in Kerala who calls themselves the Ayyankali Pada stopped a European woman scholar and her Dalit associate from conducting an academic research work among the tribals in Iritty in north Kerala. The same hypocrisy can be seen in the traditional attitude of the Congress party towards the concerns of Dalits in this country.

Still, the question to ask today is why Ayyankali remains such a powerful symbol, for forces as inimical to each other as the left extremists and the Congress party? Perhaps, the great Dalit leader from Venganur in Travancore, who came to eminence in the Malayalee public sphere in the first few decades of the 20th century, represented both these trends: He was a fighter and an anarchist revolutionary at one level; and at another, a social reformer and institution builder who made use of the established pillars of society for seeking the right to education and social equality for his brethren who were the ones severely ostracized in our society for many centuries. Ayyankali was the leader of a band of Dalit youths who themselves called Ayyankali Pada and he was also the first Dalit member in the Travancore Praja Sabha, the Maharajah’s nominated Assembly.

This year marks the centenary of the year-long strike of agricultural workers that he had organized in various parts of Travancore in the early years of the last century. Of course there are differences among historians about the actual dates of the Pulaya farm-hands’ strike in the princely state, whether it took place in 1907-08 or earlier in 1904-05, the time when Travancore Dewan first gave permission for Dalits to enter public schools amidst stiff resistance.

Let the dispute among historians stay. Let us look at what happened in our history. What we confront here is a deafening silence of the mainstream historians, as precious little has been written on this critical part of our social history. It is a fact that even E M S Namboodiripad, veteran Marxist who wrote a people’s history of the land of Malayalees, had said very little about Ayyankali and his band of Dalit fighters acknowledging that he knew little about those developments.

Surprisingly, even after a century, Ayyankali remains a figure whose contributions are not properly studied or understood by the mainstream school of historians. Even the liberals in his own time, like the famous editor Swadeshabhimani Ramakrishna Pillai, who was deported from Travancore for his critical writings against the dewan, failed to appreciate his effort to get Pulaya kids into public schools. This is how Ramakrishna Pillai looked at the Pulaya demand for common education: “We don’t find any reason to support those who demand complete equality in customs and manners and on that basis seek admission to schools without taking into account the respective caste merits. To provide admission to those from castes cultivating land on a par with those castes cultivating knowledge is worse than tying a horse and a buffalo under the same yoke to make them plough…”

Ramakrishna Pillai was a man who was familiar with liberal and even Communist ideas in those days preceding the Russian Revolution. In fact he was one of the first Indian journalists to write on the life of Karl Marx, in his 1912 monograph on Marx which appeared in Malayalam. The only other article on Marx, in an Indian publication, was published in Calcutta’s Modern Review, note P C Joshi and K Damodaran, veteran Communist leaders in their book on the origins of Indian left, Marx Comes to India. But neither they nor any of the recent historians of the Indian left movement who traced the origins of working class agitation in India, give any reference to the historic agricultural workers strike that Ayyankali launched in 1907-08, almost a decade ahead of the Russian Revolution. Nor do they ever mention about those frail and weather beaten farm-hands like Thaivilakkathu Kali and Moolayil Kali, Pulaya women who were in the leadership of the SJPS who led the historic agitation to a success conclusion a century ago.

That leaves the difficult task of reconstructing Ayyankali and the Dalit struggles he led a century ago, to a new generation of historians. This is no easy task. Ayyankali and his comrades had no initiation to the world of letters and the media of their times had largely ignored them. What we have today is largely the negative references in some publications of those days and the anecdotes in oral history passed through generations.

But the main facts remain largely uncontested: The Travancore rulers had issued orders permitting Dalits and other outcasts into the schools run by Government following severe public pressure. But the upper castes were firmly opposed to this and they used violence to stop lower-caste children from entering schools. That led to violent confrontations between these two forces. Such confrontations had been reported on a number of occasions, mainly during 1904-05, 1907-08 and 1913-14, according to historians like Dr M S Jayaprakash and T H P Chentharassery, biographer of Ayyankali.

The first of these clashes took place in 1904-05 when the Government first gave permission for Dalits to enter schools. The resistance from upper castes was fierce and the Dalits fought back. Since none of the Dalit children were allowed to enter schools, Government allowed them to start their own schools called Kutippallikkootam to teach Dalit children.

It was then Ayyankali launched a school in his village, Venganur, for Pulaya children. His task was daunting. He knew no reading and writing and so had to find a teacher for the school. No teacher was available as the upper castes threatened anyone willing to take up the job. Finally, Ayyankali succeeded in persuading a Nair youth to work in his school, but as the teacher entered the school with his Dalit bodyguards, he found the place burnt down.

It was in 1907 that Ayyankali and his friends launched the Sadhu Jana Paripalana Sangham (SJPS) on the lines of the Sree Narayana Dharma ParipalanaYogam (SNDP) started by the followers of Sree Narayana Guru, among the more progressive Ezhavas of south Kerala. The SJPS primarily worked among the Pulayas and its activities spread soon in most parts of south Kerala. The SJPS demanded that the Pulayas who worked in farms be given a weekly off day and all the members were advised to meet every Sunday to discuss their common problems.

The SJPS gave Ayyankali a powerful forum to address the Dalit question in Travancore: In 1910, as Dewan P Rajagopalachari and the director of education department, an Englishman named Mitchel, issued orders permitting Dalit admission to schools, Ayyankali went to the Uruttambalam school in Balaramapuram seeking admission for Panchami, a Pulaya girl. The headmaster refused, and that set of a series of clashes between Nairs and Pulayas in various parts of Travancore. According to one set of historians, it was then Ayyankali called for the farm workers strike that lasted almost one year, forcing the land owners to sue for a negotiated settlement.

These efforts did have a positive impact on the education of Pulayas and other Dalit groups in Travancore. According to the census figures in 1875, among the 188,916 Pulayas in the state only 183 had been marked as literate. But between 1913 and 1916, there is a five-fold increase in the Pulaya enrollment to schools. According to figures published in Mitavadi, a local newspaper, the admission of Pulaya children to school was only 2.01 per cent in 1913. But it had risen to 10.91 per cent by 1916. Still they were way behind the Nairs with 99.50 per cent children going to schools, and Ezhavas with 45.43 per cent. Another interesting point this statistics brought out was the comparative fall in Muslim enrollment during this period: They were 4.85 per cent (much higher to Pulayas) in 1913 but in 1916, their enrollment of 9.55 was lower than the Pulayas’s 10.91 per cent. Still, all these efforts together put the state on the road to its record of near total literacy by the end of the 20th century.

Illustration courtesy: Raghavan Atholi, Kozhikode.
(An edited version of this article is available at www.indiatogether.org)

The Unsung Heroes of Indian Villages

On the mass literacy movement in India


In the five decades of independent India, the nineties witnessed the biggest achievement in mass literacy, taking India’s literacy level to 65.38 per cent according to the Census 2001 figures, released late last year. It is a great achievement in view of the enormity of the task covering a 1000 million population, the diversity of the languages and terrain, the problems related to a society divided by caste and untouchability, economic disparities and the immense poverty.
The nineties was a decade which saw a great awakening among the ordinary people all over India in a countrywide literacy drive, and the results were evident in the fact that while in all the four previous decades the average literacy growth rate was a meagre 9.41 per cent, in the nineties it was as high as 14 per cent.

The reason for the literacy revolution in the nineties was simple: unlike in the past when the government agencies and bureaucracy led the mass education programmes, the nineties saw a new approach with the non-governmental organizations and the civil society movements taking the lead, converting the literacy programme into a public campaign organically linked to the day-to-day life of the people. The result was a hugely successful mass movement with almost a million volunteers in various parts of India joining the ranks of the literacy movement, taking the message to a phenomenal 100 million people in the far corners of the country in the short span of a decade.

Chelakkodan Aysha, a poor Mulsim woman from Malappuram in Kerala; Usha, a Dalit literacy campaigner from Begusarai in Bihar, and Sagar More, a Dalit woman from the slums of Mumbai, are the public faces of the new movement that has spread all over India in the past one and a half decade. Chelakkodan Aysha is the pioneer of the movement as she was the person selected to make the historic declaration at a meeting held at Kozhikode in Kerala in 1991 when the state declared itself fully literate after a year-long campaign in which tens of thousands of volunteers were actively involved. Now at the ripe age of 80, Aysha is nursing ambitions of learning the skills of computer as her home-town of Malappuram is pioneering another mass education campaign, of making the people fully computer literate.

Usha became associated with the literacy movement in Begusarai in the mid-nineties when Bihar took up the cause of mass adult literacy seriously. None of her family members including her husband was literate and it was a hard task initially to get them agree to her desire to join the evening classes, she remembered as she spoke to journalists at the national convention of literacy workers at the freedom grounds near Humayun tomb in New Delhi recently. Through the literacy movement, Usha became associated with public causes and now she is a member of the Bihar Legislative Council and also the president of the Bihar State unit of the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti, the national level nodal agency coordinating the mass ltiteracy movement in India.

Sagar More recalls that as a small child, she was discriminated against in the class-room because she was dalit and an untouchable. “I was humiliated by the teacher and dropped out after one year in school,” she said. But she went back to the world of letters in 1988 as an adult student in the National Literacy Mission campaign becoming a volunteer in due course. “My daughter has now graduated from university and wants to study for master’s degreee,” she said prouldy in an interview to Unesco Courier, in an article celebrating the unsung heroes and heroines of Indian countryside in this silent revolution.

The paradigm shift in the literacy movement came after the success of a novel experiment in Ernakulam when the district administration joined hands with non-governmental organizations like the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad taking up an experimental programme for total literacy in the coastal district of Kerala in 1989.It was the first time this new approach of mass campaign was put to test and it was a phenomenal success. Emboldened by the successs, the State Government of Kerala took up the campaign a year later culminating in the total literacy declaration at Kozhikode in 1991.

It was then the turn of the Indian Government to take the movement all over the country, with focus on mass participation. The National Literacy Mission was set up in 1988 with the objective of covering 100 million non-literates in the age group of 15 to 35 by the year 1999 and to take the country to the dream target of 100 per cent literacy by the year 2005. Despite the unprecedented levels of achievement, the target of total literacy in the country remains still a dream and the governement has now set 2012 as the target year for total literacy in India.

“There has been shortfalls, bureaucratic hassles and setbacks,but it is fact that we have been able to develop a working model for mass campaigns like literacy,” says Dr Krishnakumar, national coordinator of the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti, the voluntary agency that spearheaded the movement in the past decade. An asssistant director at the State Institute of Languages, Thiruvananthapuram, Krishnakumar said that it was the active association of popular mevoments and non-governmental organizations that made the programme a great success.

The Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti was established as the main engine for mass literacy in the country after the National Literacy Mission decided to emulate the Kerala model at the national level. The BGVS, as it is known today, was formed with eminent educationist Dr Malcolm Adiseshiah as president and Dr M P Parameswaran, a nuclear physicist turned popular science campaigner, as secretarty at a convention of the All India People’s Science Networks in 1990. After the death of Dr Adiseshiah, Dr Paramewaran became its president and Dr Vinod Raina of Delhi its general secretary.

Dr Parameswaran said that it was the organic relations the movement developed with the day-to-day life of the ordinary people that ensured its penetration to the grassroots. It was not just a movement to teach them how to read and write, but the focus has always been to help them face the hard realities of life, to give them the necessary skills to survive. The methodology adopted for literacy was to link the training programme to their urgent needs like teaching their children, communicating with others, fighting corruption at the village level, demanding better wages and working conditions, developing skills like mobility through methods like cycling, etc, that came in handy to their survival.

There are many interesting examples from the grassroots, which describe the success of this strategy. A classic case is the anti-liquor campaign launched by the rural women of Nellore in Andhra Pradesh, which became a mass movement that forced the cancellation of the arrack vendor auction scores of times in the various Andhra districts. It all started with a small lesson included in the first primer developed for the adult students in Telugu. It described the success of a struggle launched by the women of an Andhra village against the sale of illicit liquor in the countryside. As the literacy campaign spread, the women in various other villages took up the struggle and it became a mass movement very soon.

The women of Pudukkotai in Tamil Nadu have written a different chapter in this saga. Pudukkotai is a coastal region near Kanyakumari and most of the women here eke out a living as fish vendors. As the literacy movement was launched there, Sheela Rani Chungath, district collector of Kanyakumari, came up with a new proposal to add mobility to their skills as part of the programme and a team of women on cycles started moving around the villages singing the “cycle song” they had composed. Voluntary agencies helped them buy cycles and the women, encouraged by the sudden mobility that they gained through this simple means of bicycles, became a powerful medium for the new message in the villages. Today, most of the women travel on their cycles, with fish baskets behind earning their livelihood in a dignified manner.

However, there were cases of opposition and confrontations too. In Dhanbad in Bihar, where the unorganized coal miners who took to the classes, organized themselves and demanded better wages and shorter working hours, the movement was dragged into a class conflict. Through literacy and organization, the poorer sections were slowly enlightened about their rights and started demanding better wages, better living conditions, decent treatment at workplace, etc.

Now the literacy movement is at a turning point: in the past six years the National Democratic Government at the Centre was not very enthusiastic about the mass movement style of its functioning. In fact, former human resources development minister Dr Murli Manohar Joshi described the BGVS as a trojan horse for the left-wingers to penetrate the national political scene. “We were not receiving much support those days and the movement had to suffer because of lack of official support and paucity of funds,”said Dr Parameswaran who thankfully acknowledged a Rs 10-crore grant provided by the Tatas to carry on their operations. But in the past one year, Arjun Singh, Human Resource Development Minister, has had many meetings with the literacy campaigners and has promised better funds and support with a two percent cess for education.

“Now we have to redouble our efforts as we have already missed the target of total literacy this year,”says Dr Krishnakumar, who points out that as a nation we just can’t miss it again seven years hence. That is the new challenge before these unsung heroes and heroines of Indian countryside today.

Campus Violence: Case of Kerala

Violence in Campuses: Why Kerala fails in Higher Education?

By N P Chekkutty


It was the other day, a police assistant sub-inspector was hit by a huge rod by goons in a degree college in Kerala, leading to his untimely death. That has once again unleashed a debate on the rising spate of violence in the campuses, something which has come to stay all over the country. It was only last year a professor was done to death by his own students in Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh. It was the pro-BJP students organization, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, who were responsible for the murder. In Kerala, the ASI’s death took place as the students belonging to the SFI and the ABVP were clashing in the campus, and the present round of debate is about who were responsible for the death. The LDF Government and police claim it was the ABVP men who struck the fatal blow, and the Sangh Parivar leaders try to oppose it.

The question however, is the rising trend of campus violence and he menacing proportion it has taken even in places like Kerala where the students movements had a long history. Many of the present leaders of Kerala, including ministers in the present cabinet, were the student leaders who came up during the seventies. They include Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, Home Minister, M A Baby, Education Minister, A K Balan, Electricity Minister, Dr T M Thomas Isaac, Finance Minister, N K Premachandran, Water Supply Minister, and others. Except for Premachandran, who belonged to the RSP, all others were leaders of the SFI in the seventies and early eighties.

In spite of the fact that the present crop of Kerala leaders are predominantly from the SFI, criticism is rife that it is SFI which is mainly responsible for the sorry state of affairs in Kerala campuses. They have an unchallenged position in most colleges, and they do not allow others to function freely, say the critics. There seems to be much truth in the criticism as SFI has come to stray as the campus bully and students and parents have started complaining about their highhanded ways.

Recently some friends in the media and academic world made a comparison between the present day campus in Kerala and the situation in the seventies, when the present leaders were making their appearance in public life as student activists. It served to highlight the shortcomings of a new generation of student leaders. This comparison was necessary and meaningful: First, students anywhere, anytime, have the same needs and hopes, though the levels might differ. But essentially all students are there to get a better education and find a place in life. So campuses need to be able to cater to their needs and aspirations. Most of our institutions seem to fail here. One reason is the way campus life has deteriorated and over-politicized, I mean partisan politics, over the past decade.

In the seventies, when we were student activists there was a live debate on the desirability of student strikes. In SFI, people like me were of the view that these calls for boycott of classes were actually going against the interests of the poorest sections of the student community. There were a large number of strikes those days and every month many days were being lost. There were even continuous class boycott which held up classes for months together. The leaders kept on saying they were great victories.

Then what happened? The private education became the favourite with the ordinary people, the comrades including. The private tuition centres flourished everywhere and those teachers who were actively supporting these agitations were those who had a lucrative tuition business. Some of them were part-time politicians who made it big later on. (Kerala must be the only place where there are so many 'masters' and 'teachers' as important political leaders. We have many ministers too with the same suffix...). Another impact was that the parallel colleges abounded and many of them were run by the same leaders who had a control over the students’ organizations. Many of them have now graduated themselves into major education businesses making use of the recent shift to private education.

It seems that the seeds for the present rise of and respectability for the self-financed private education were sown in the seventies when the public sector education was done to death by its own great votaries of today. The net result of all this was that the poorest sections of students were relegated to the background and those with some money to invest in education were able to move ahead.

Many friends nostalgically recalled the wonderful student movement that was witnessed in institutions like the Jawarharlal Nehru University in the seventies and eighties. They are right. Some of those institutions were models in student activity. But they were exceptions and not the rule. JNU was a class in itself. In the seventies, JNU had the best of Indian student leaders like Prakash Karat, Sitaram Yechuri and many others. (My personal favourite in Delhi those days was, however, a wiry and fiery comrade called Ashoklata Jain, who died young, whose passionate voice and magnetic persona is still etched in my memory...)

But Kerala was a slightly different case, even then. The student leadership who called for boycott of classes incessantly, were influenced by outside forces who had other motives. For example, teachers unions, employees unions, etc, did have a great influence and they often misled the student leadership. That had a disastrous impact on the credibility of the leadership of the students. It also did play a role in destroying our best public institutions in education paving the sway for the rise of private self finance colleges that has sprung up in recent years.

Here, a personal experience from the eighties. It was in 1982 the Calicut University decided to do away with the semester system in its pg programmes. I was a student there and also a member of the senate. It was the AKPCTA, private college teachers organization in Kerala, who initiated the process of a debate for doing away with semesters in the pg departments, as they said it was an elitist system catering to only a few students in the campus. We don’t have such programmes in the private colleges or even in Government colleges, so it was not in the interests of equality we continuing with it here, went their argument.

Frankly speaking, myself and others in the senate as student representatives did not find anything wrong in the argument. We had such a mechanical notion about socialism and equality those days. The left parties generally supported the motion. Then Kesavan veluthatt, now a well known historian and then a PhD scholar there, came to my room one night and spoke about the need for preserving higher education. It has an elite nature. It has to nurture and build talent. You cannot do away with it killing the system, he pointed out.

The matter was raised with C P John, who was SFI president then, and we had a long discussion in which senior CPM leaders like Sivadasa Menon, then member of syndicate, and Imbichi Bava were present. But my arguments did not carry the day.

In the senate vote, the SFI decided not to vote in favour or against the motion proposed by AKPCTA. The CPM members voted for the motion and the semester was thrown out of the campus. It took more than two decades for the left parties to realize the misstate they committed. Recently semester system has been reintroduced in the Calicut University. But nobody asked what we had lost in those 20 years and how we put ourselves behind all others, including private sector businesses in education. Or were we actually being taken for a ride by those same interests, working through their paid employees who came to teach in colleges after paying a hefty amount as donation?

So much for so-called informed debate and discussions among student leaders even in the seventies and eighties, which produced to the greatest leaders of contemporary Kerala. No wonder Kerala remains quite far behind even Bihar as far as higher education is concerned.