How dissent over JEE, NEET impacts govt, BJP
The Human Resource Development Ministry, recently rechristened as the Education Ministry, is beset with yet another dispute: this time, over the scheduling of the Joint Entrance Exam (Main) or the JEE and the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (Undergraduate) or NEET. Twice deferred because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Centre bit the bullet and rolled in the qualifying exams on September 1, ostensibly on the ‘advice’ of a four-member panel chaired by the Director-General of the National Testing Agency.
Amid an outcry, marked by genuine anxiety and concern over the fate of over 20 lakh students who registered to enter the gateways of the exalted IITs and medical colleges, the Opposition parties pressured the government to put off the exams. The government refused to yield. Have the Congress and the regional parties latched on to an issue bristling with political implications for the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi? Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’, Education Minister, would hardly act independently. So, the buck will stop at the doors of the top brass.
At the best of times, overseeing the Education Ministry is unenviable for an incumbent, particularly if the minister is from the BJP. Its ideological mentor, the RSS, was fascinated with education and culture and preoccupied with the enterprise of reprising the sectors from the ‘stranglehold’ of the ‘liberal-left’, a loose grouping of intertwined ideologies which it divined was opposed to its worldview. Unlike economics, on which the views of the RSS never congealed into a cohesive perspective, swinging as they did between the Gandhian philosophy, a vague swadeshi model, and the pro-NRI reformism, the ideas of the RSS on education and culture, however disputatious, were clear.
The Education Minister in a BJP dispensation, regardless of whether the party led a coalition with unlikely allies or was in a majority, was expected to toe the Sangh’s line.
In the NDA-1 dispensation, Murli Manohar Joshi was influenced by the RSS’s education fronts — Vidya Bharati and Ekal Vidyalaya — but the BJP’s constituents, which continued to be avowedly ‘secular’, stopped him from implementing their proposals. In Modi 1:0, Smriti Z Irani was controversy’s child. From stirring up a storm over her academic qualifications to replacing the German language with Sanskrit in the Kendriya Vidyalayas and making gratuitous remarks on the suicide of Rohith Vemula, a Hyderabad University Dalit student, and the protesters at Delhi’s JNU, Smriti was a red rag for academics and students.
Pokhriyal, who taught at the Sangh-aligned Saraswati Shishu Mandir, second-guessed the RSS. Addressing an IIT-Mumbai convocation in August 2019, he made a series of contestable, if laughable, claims: Rishi Charaka, who goes back to antiquity, was the first person to study atoms and molecules; NASA chose Sanskrit as the base for a spoken language-designed computer and so on.
To be fair, it seems unlikely that the RSS fully endorsed the Centre’s resolve to go ahead with the JEE and NEET entrance tests. Faced with a done deed, it tried to ease the pain for the candidates, especially those having to travel to the designated centres from other places, by arranging transport, food and lodging. The pandemic and the hardships it imposed were at the core of the candidates’ protests.
The aspirants feared that even if they did not get infected, they might carry the virus back home to their parents. Transportation got wildly expensive as private operators were out to make big bucks. Those stuck in the flood-inundated parts of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh despaired at the thought of missing the exams. Some aspirants wondered that even if they made it to the centre, how would they write their papers wearing masks and gloves?
None of the problems apparently made sense to the Centre or the BJP, not even when social media was deluged with petitions seeking postponement. The petitioners were young men and women, central to Modi and the BJP’s ‘demographic dividend’ narrative, who beseeched him to put off the exams.
Did the campaign strike a chord with the Opposition? Ostensibly yes. Sonia Gandhi, in the throes of a simmering revolt in the Congress, collected her nerves and convened a video conference that many regional leaders participated in, Mayawati being a notable exception. Hemant Soren, Jharkhand Chief Minister and Congress ally, launched an online feedback site in which over one lakh applicants said a conclusive no to holding the scheduled exams. Rahul Gandhi delivered the most damning critique when he questioned the PM’s silence in the last Mann ki Baat. When Modi made a big pitch for locally made toys and indigenous breeds of dogs and exhorted people to shun the foreign ones, the Congress MP wondered why there was ‘khilone pe charcha’ instead of ‘pariksha pe charcha’.
Has the Opposition’s reaction and the JEE and NEET competitors’ entreaties impacted the government and the BJP? Typically, the scenario was cast in a ‘BJP-versus-others’, a ‘liberal-versus-conservatives’ framework that might have worked if the trigger was a polarising one.
Think of the police crackdown on the Jamia Millia Islamia, JNU and AMU campuses and the arrests during the anti-CAA protests and the pieces fall in place. There were elements of everything that was depicted as socially and politically abhorrent by the Sangh and the BJP in those episodes. ‘Islamic radicalism’ fomented by external forces, ‘Naxalites’ at war with the state, ‘enemies’ of Hindus and so on — tropes that made for a scary picture of a besieged nation to those who bought into the narrative.
The JEE and NEET dissenters defied the stereotypes the BJP and RSS fit their opponents into. These were young people who hoped that good times — achhe din — would arrive through a robust job market, handsome salary packages and perks, EMIs on easy terms and disposable incomes to splurge on leisure travel. Is it fair to force an exam on candidates who invested everything they could muster in the hope of seeing better times?
Modi is not known to be swayed by feedback and unpopular opinion. Perhaps, the only occasion when he heeded dissent was over the Land Acquisition Act amendments that he shelved because the changes were perceived as ‘pro-rich’. He never budged on demonetisation. The move paid off for the BJP in the elections that followed, the victory in Uttar Pradesh being the best illustration. Modi and the BJP probably believe the JEE and NEET uproar too shall pass.
