The results of the 2024 elections first stunned, then surprised and finally gave hope to the country with a weaker ruling coalition and a newly strengthened opposition. With the new parliament in session, India is rediscovering the pleasure of listening to actual debates. The opposition’s bold, though token, refusal to unanimously support the ruling party’s candidate, Om Birla, as the Speaker of the House was unthinkable during the previous Modi government. The opposition openly said that they found Birla taking a partisan stand and favoured the Modi government on crucial Bills.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
While this was good, watchable TV, it dislodged the news about sudden cancellation of crucial entrance exams for medical school and senior university positions for research and higher learning. This is both sad and unfair. The reason was the surfacing of leaked exam papers a day before they were to take place. This happened on a national scale and indicated widespread corruption in bodies conducting the NEET and NET exams. Nearly 2 lakh aspirants take these exams each year. Enough has been said about the regular and systematic leakages of exam papers as well as their routine cancellations, which often favours students who can afford multiple trips to the centres and expensive coaching institutes that ‘guarantee’ success.
There are multiple media reports about how there is a vast nationwide network of education mafiosi, responsible for the systematic leakages, and how it may be patronised by those working within the system and political parties. After the recent explosion of public anger, the CBI and other interrogative bodies hastily created by the Union government are examining the matter. However, by now the proverbial horse has bolted. This is going to deeply impact the future of young doctors and scholars as well as all levels of higher education.
Nietzsche, in Daybreak: Thoughts on Prejudices of Morality, wrote that all great problems come alive in the streets, and it is in the streets that they are always debated because the street has always held both the flesh and the world. Dr Ram Manohar Lohiya remarked, “Agar sadkein khamosh ho jayein tau Sansad awaara ho jati hai (If the streets fall silent, the Parliament goes berserk)”. Street voices may not be the hard story, but the climate, the feelings expressed outside offices and parliaments and assemblies – where frank talk had, of late, become increasingly dangerous – are what all major stories are shaped by. You have to listen to understand to know what is happening on the ground.
Listening to the streets and reading what is on placards and slogans, the first thing you notice is that the vociferous protesters are largely senior aspirants for entrance to government-run colleges of medicine (still rated the best). Together, they are not just our future doctors and engineers and managers, but also the nursery of faculties for institutes of higher learning, currently functioning on a fraction of their sanctioned strength.
Second, the students are hopeful of entering institutions like Jamia Millia Islamia, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Aligarh University as well as those in Chennai, Bengaluru and Benaras, all rated among the best year-on-year and often treated shabbily by the educational system largely on political grounds. Despite this, they have kept alive the true spirit of public protest which has fast eroded in the last decade.
Also read: NEET Exam Scandal: Congress Accuses BJP of Protecting Alleged Fraudulent Institution in Gujarat
The third point is that there are some notable fence-sitters among the power pack. They are part of a small, creamy-layer and have copped out of the Indian system altogether by simply buying their wards a seat in some well known universities abroad. This creamy layer largely comprises senior ministers, powerful diplomats, bureaucrats and corporate honchos. When cornered, they deplore the corruption in India’s higher education system and its falling standards, but listlessly condone it in public saying it is all because of our vast population and lack of many more private colleges to admit all.
Given the widening gulf between the rich and poor, India’s concept of public protests has changed in the last decade. Those who agreed with the protesters, several of whom were jailed or expelled, feared to be seen on the streets with a dozen TV cameras recording their presence. You do not see a writer, a poet, a social scientist, a senior faculty member or a retired vice chancellor amidst the students.
Most protests in a democracy are not for ushering in revolutions, but for reforms in corrupt and dysfunctional systems. And when you write of change, it can be validated only if you were there in the street, among the protesters, when they were demonstrating and talking to each other as human beings under stress. The term ‘protest’ implies acceptance that there is an authority that is lending them an ear and taking heed of their grievances. Therefore, to report protesters, especially young students, simply as anarchists, and applaud their voices being silenced is foolish and counter-productive, even for the government.
Once upon a time, street protests were well-reported and managed to trigger change. Remember the Navnirman movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan, the spontaneous rallies at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan or Patna’s Gandhi Maidan, the much more recent peaceful candle marches against Nirbhaya’s rape or the internationally reported long dharna on Delhi’s borders by our farmers? The vast majority of our people who have the vote but not the voice, nor the access to ears of those who frame policies for the poor and the marginalised. They were given a platform in these gatherings and were reported well by the media. You could call them personal reportages but they were important and timely.
What is worrisome, when one looks around today, is that many among yesterday’s student protesters and their media friends, have graduated to higher jobs, gotten married, and turned complacent in a life of material privilege. To quote German novelist and poet Günter Grass, today their “mistaken sense of loyalty heaps blessings on yesterday’s crime”.
The students, hollering against the injustices embedded in the gradual privatisation of the machinery that conducts the vital entrance exams, have a point. Most of them have been forced to pay large sums of money for joining coaching schools, run and encouraged by the educational system, and tom-tommed by the media through full page ads about their ‘success’ rates. Those who have worked hard and with honesty, within a system they knew to be unfair, face a double whammy. Add to this the recent reports that say yesteryears’ role models, raking in six or seven-figure entry-level salaries after graduating from IITs and IIMs, are gone. The Deloitte Campus Workforce Trends report is indicating an atrophy in both the number of jobs and entry-level salaries. The criteria is no longer academic credentials but the skills required in using micro-learning, virtual augmentation and use of various AI-assisted technologies.
Once the Election Commission declared severe punishment for anyone caught breaking the model code of conduct, government agencies swung into action against all heinously culpable. The resulting silence was seen by the ‘400 paar‘ group as good news. They were too busy crunching numerical, state-wise data on age and caste, and forgot to read the silent streets. They stuck to the traditional Indian hierarchies in public speaking. The higher the personage, and proximity to The Leader, the more media focus they were given. There were no friendly and garrulous bureaucrats or Party spokies who used the media as sounding boards in exchange for information. Throughout 2024, The One spoke while others appeared to listen or thump the table.
This is why the beginning of a stirring among the opposition benches came as such a pleasant surprise. One hopes it will grow organically and restore the healthy tradition of debate in the parliament, and questions other than those of Parliamentary decorum will be raised: an angry, waterlogged capital, flooded streets of Ayodhya and overcrowded cremation grounds of Tamil Nadu with grieving families of the poor killed by scorching heat, hooch or crashing infrastructure – newly inaugurated bridges, airports and roads – built at a humongous cost.
In brief videos, we saw wood crackle and flames fly. Death came alive among the living, smelling of ghee, incense, wood smoke, and water – water everywhere. After the cremations and demonstrations, as the people spill out onto the streets subdued, what are they talking about? Is it irrelevant for the media to highlight the debate on Sengol and the Emergency?
Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.
Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
