Mainstream, VOL LV No 41
New Delhi September 30, 2017
Taking Educational Institutions Backwards
Friday 29 September 2017,
By Sandeep Pandey
On September 11, 1893 Swami
Vivekananda delivered his famous speech in the Parliament of World’s Religions
in Chicago. The Bharatiya Janata Party Government decided to celebrate the
event and Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the youth of the country.
Incidentally, he shares his first name with Vivekananda’s original name,
Narendra Nath Datta.
Vivekananda
has inspired the youth of this country for long. His preachings are thought-
provoking. For example, he says, ‘As certain religions of the world say that a
man who does not believe in a Personal God outside of himself is an atheist, so
the Vedanta says, a man who does not believe in himself is an atheist. Not
believing in the glory of our own soul is what Vedanta calls atheism.’ At
another place he pleads with his audience, ‘If you are not a prophet, there
never has been anything true of God... Everyone of us will have to become a
prophet.’
However,
when this occasion was celebrated on September 11, 2017 on university campuses,
students were asked to memorise the speech of Swami Vivekananda delivered in
1893 and regurgitate it. When students did not even bother to learn it by rote,
they were allowed to read it from paper. Such is the sorry state of affairs of
our academic institutions. If the Swami were alive today he would have cringed
in despair.
He wanted
everybody to have complete faith in themselves and feel like a sovereign but
our higher educational institutions do not want our students to develop
independent thinking. Had the students been asked to give their comments on
Vivekananda’s speech they would have had to exercise their brain. But it is
amazing that university-level students are just being asked to memorise and reproduce
a speech! The entire idea of putting a curb on students’ thinking is
contradictory to Vivekananda’s idea of empowerment. How can the students have
belief in themselves if they are merely activating not the analytical power of
the brain but only its photographic ability? Quite clearly the autho-rities
want to produce followers and not leaders.
That
Vivekananda is not taken seriously by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the
ideological parent of the ruling dispensation in India, is also clear from his
statement in the same speech, ‘We believe not only in universal toleration, but
we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has
sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of
the earth.’ However, in the context of the current migration of Rohingya
Muslims from Myanmar, the Home Minister, Rajnath Singh, says they are illegal
immigrants and not refugees who have not followed the procedure to apply for
asylum, but it is not clear whether the Government of India would welcome them
even if they were to seek entry through the proper channel. They obviously
don’t have Viveka-nanda’s large heart. Narendra Modi chose not to raise the
issue of persecution of Rohingya Muslims during a meeting with its famous leader,
Aung San Suu Kyi, in his recent maiden visit to Myanmar. That demonstrates
India’s overall insensitivity towards the Rohingyas.
Vivekanand
also said in Chicago, ‘Sectaria-nism, bigotry, and its horrible descendent,
fanaticism, have long possessed the beautiful earth. They have filled the earth
with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed
civilisation and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these
horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.’
However sectarianism, bigotry, fanaticism and violence have increased with the
BJP’s ascent to power. Some Sangh Parivarloyalists can argue that this is in
response to the rise of similar tendencies in Islam globally. The moot question
is: could there have been a different response rooted in Vivekananda’s and
Mahatma Gandhi’s ideologies to it?
It is also
worrisome that senior functionaries of the BJP governments are indulging in
negating scientific and rational thinking. The Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister,
Yogi Adityanath, while speaking at the convocation of the Sanjay Gandhi Post
Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences in Lucknow on September 16, claimed that
China was researching how Hindu God Ganesh’s head slain by his father Lord
Shiva was replaced with an elephant’s head and exhorted the Indian doctors to
delve into the treasure of our scriptures. He also beseeched the faculty and
students to find the herb which brought back Laxman to life. According to him,
Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was inspired by the Mahabharata to work on missiles. Yogi Adityanath
holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics.
The State
Minister for Human Resources Development at the Centre, Satya Pal Singh,
claimed in a programme of the All India Council for Technical Education on September
20 in Delhi that Shivakar Babuji Talpade in India invented the air plane eight
years before the Wright brothers. According to him, plants in Ravana’s kingdom
were not required to be watered as they contained a mythical elixir,
Chandramani. He wants engineering students to learn about the Hindu deity,
Vishwakarma, puranas and mythology. Singh holds a Master’s
degree in Chemistry and is a former Indian Police Service officer.
By not
letting analytical thinking develop in students the RSS is ensuring that there
will be no one to ask the Yogi when he makes the suggestion to doctors to
research how an elephant’s head replaced the beheaded Lord Ganesh and that if
indeed doctors were successful in doing this surgery, whose brain would the
resultant creature possess—human’s or elephant’s? Or they don’t want any
student to ask Satya Pal Singh that if India possessed the know-how of making
planes, why is it not investing in rediscovering that knowledge rather than
buying Rafale jets from France?
Noted social activist and
Magsaysay awardee Dr Sandeep Pandey is the Vice-President of the Socialist
Party (India). He was elected to this post at the founding conference of the
party at Hyderabad on May 28-29, 2011.
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