At a boarding gate in Delhi’s chaotic
Terminal 1, an Armani-clad young man bristling with the accoutrements of
wealth: flashy phone, big watch, designer sunglasses, tried to push past me.
“Excuse me, we’re all going to board the same aircraft; it will not leave
without you,” I admonished him. He stared back uncomprehendingly, insolently.
It was not language that was his problem; what he didn’t understand was why I
was not letting him through. The civility of queuing up seemed to be completely
beyond his experience.
This young man is a representative of the
newly emergent middle class that the early decades of 21st-century India have
thrown up: crass, belligerent and reckless. This new middle class is the polar
opposite of the privileged class that presided over socialist India: snobbish,
full of intrigue and cautious. There’s not much to choose between the two. The
new one is vile; the other was servile. The new middle class is just as hideous
as the privilegentsia. I call them the vulgarians.
The privilegentsia was bred on elitism:
the right connections, the right schools and Oxbridge. The vulgarian instinct
is to push and shove; and when push comes to shove, to buy their way out.
Similarly, while mouthing homilies about the rule of law, privilegentsia held
themselves above the law. They never waited their turn for anything and without
the slightest bit of embarrassment bent rules, flouted regulations and scorned
the law. The new vulgarians make no such pretence: they seem to believe
everything has a price: schools, colleges, hospitals, and more worryingly:
bureaucrats, policemen and judges.
During privilegentsia raj, India had to
reckon with parasitic elites who drained state coffers, extorted usurious taxes
and provided almost no public goods or services in return. Under their
dispensation, ordinary citizens were cruelly ignored: no power, water, public
transport, or roads, no airports, telephones, jobs, no primary education,
housing, public healthcare and sanitation.
The minuscule unprivileged middle class
was targeted by privilegentsia policies and in many cases, driven into exile in
the United States, Canada and Britain. Those who couldn’t emigrate witnessed
rapidly declining conditions: famines, civil disturbances, war, scarcity,
suspension of civil rights under the Emergency proclamation of 1975 and finally
total national bankruptcy, which forced the government to fly out the country’s
gold reserves in secret and mortgage them to the Bank of England.
Forced to free the shackled economy, the
government scrapped industrial licensing and numerous other controls. In the process,
it unleashed the long-suppressed entrepreneurial spirit of the people which has
transformed the economy. From being pitied as a ‘basket case’, India quickly
gained admiration as an emerging world power with a dynamic economy. With the
annual GDP growth rate doubling to 7-9 percent, millions were lifted out of
poverty. From being an apostrophe in the demographic profile, the middle class
burgeoned and global business rushed in to cater to it while local businesses
shaped up to provide quality goods and responsive service.
Sadly, post-independence India’s long
neglected education system inhibited the transformation; it has achieved less
than what it should have. Under privilegentsia raj, primary education was
neglected and higher education became a screening process to weed out “people
like them”. Thus, the ordained ones went on to Ivy leagues and Oxbridge to
return to exalted positions within the privilegentsia. The others, who had no
connections in the elite segment, either went abroad to seek their fortunes or
struggled through an irrelevant higher education system to become
rabble-rousers for political parties.
On the other hand, the IITs and IIMs
produced engineers and managers whose skills were far too advanced to be
accommodated in the makeshift Ambassador car economy. Consequently, these
heavily subsidised elite institutions became feeders to the global economy. All
the Indian success stories in global business trumpeted in the pink papers are
outcomes of the privilegentsia’s misbegotten priorities.
In sum, free India offered three types of
‘education’. The first was the classic Oxbridge type whose quality didn’t
matter because you came back to an exalted place in the elite establishment.
The other was technical training where you had no place in India but found a
perch in multinational corporations, universities or other institutes of higher
learning in the West. Now you have the third variety: of trained personnel
focused on specific cog-in-the-wheel jobs. Undergirding this is a vast pool of
illiterates, the cannon fodder of India’s increasingly confrontational
politics.
This unfortunate outcome is the result of
continuing neglect of primary education, politicisation of secondary education,
and usurpation of higher education by a technical and managerial aspirational
class. At a time of an existential challenge to the very idea of India, the
need is for a growing mass of the population to be schooled in the liberal
arts. Illiterates, semi-literates and technocrats are simply not up to the challenge
of nation-building.
(This
article appeared in Education World, November 8, 2016)
