AT THE 13th Saarc Summit in November 2005 in Dhaka, India proposed the creation of a Centre of Excellence, in the form of a South Asian University, which would provide world-class facilities and professional faculty to students and researchers drawn from every country of the region. Today (May 26) Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee is expected to lay the foundation stone for its proposed campus at a sprawling site near Delhi’s fabled Qutub Minar. The actual groundwork for universities is mainly done in schools. Have we fulfilled that responsibility?
The idea of the South Asian University, said to be the brainchild of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, himself a former economics teacher, has its attractions but it also raises fundamental questions. The notion of a centre of excellence modelled after the syncretic learning citadels of ancient Nalanda or Taxila could hardly be quibbled with.
If that is the idea then we should all help it to gather steam quickly. There’s nothing more invigorating than intellectual inquiry in full ferment. But do we have the intellectual wherewithal to implement the ambitious idea? My fear is that we have not done due diligence at a basic level where it matters most. We have not sown the seed of the questioning spirit in our schools for it to bloom adequately and widely. We have mostly given our students hide-bound ideas on religion, nationalism and history, to quote the most glaring areas where the vulnerable edifice of a common university would be most severely tested. This is where we lag behind as responsible nation states, forget being visionaries for a South Asian confederation, much less of a common currency.
The late Jyotindra Nath Dixit, former foreign secretary and high commissioner to Pakistan, spoke up loudly and frequently for good ties with Pakistan. He once berated the government when New Delhi under the BJP administration implicated Pakistan’s Deputy High Commissioner Jalil Abbas Jilani in a dubious case of cash payments to a Kashmiri conduit and deported him. Dixit would fondly narrate his memorable experiences as high commissioner, but one or two incidents rankled. A friend’s young son denounced him once as a dirty Indian. That would not have happened if the schools and the parents were alert about sowing prejudices. In a school textbook in Pakistan the Urdu letter “kaaf” denoted a “kaafir” showing the picture of a Sikh, he recalled. There are countless examples of doctored textbooks used in Pakistani schools. I had a copy of a detailed report on this by a Pakistani NGO but can’t seem to be able to locate it.
Indian textbooks should ideally be a shade better if for no other reason than for the fact that we pride ourselves as a secular, liberal democracy. But the way things are, in young minds in schools, particularly those managed by the RSS and Muslim madressah, they are left with a narrow distorted worldview that militates against an open university. In Gujarat or Madhya Pradesh, for example, the average student may have difficulty in knowing the difference between a Muslim and a Pakistani. Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, mocks India’s Muslims as ‘Mian Musharraf’. The daily abuse heaped on Indians as “kaafirs” in Pakistani madressahs and the description of Pakistanis as Islamo-fascist terrorists by their Hindu counterparts is matched only by the absence of a dispassionate, secular historiographical tradition in schools.
To give a subtle psychological insight, for example, most Indians do not know, or would hide the fact if they were aware, that Pakistan’s K2 peak is higher than any peak in India. Allama Iqbal’s poetic notion that the world’s highest mountain is our (Indian) sentinel, our watchman, is allowed to mutate into the unstated lie that Mount Everest is an Indian peak. These are minor examples that betray a deep undercurrent of pointless complex towards neighbours.
The stereotypes are daunting. Pakistani schools and colleges are taught history with Mohammed Ali Jinnah as their hero and Indians debate Gandhi’s merit as a world-class guru of non-violence. But they revel in tarring each other’s heroes as villains. Any deviation from the path is greeted with hostility from the establishment on both sides. Remember what happened when BJP leader Lal Kishan Advani praised Jinnah’s secular ideals. All hell broke loose over the remarks and Advani had to make a political sacrifice of sorts.
In 1997, I was making a film on Saarc so I travelled to Pakistan close to August 14, the Independence Day. In a Lahore hotel a TV programme was showing young students from Aligarh discussing the call for Pakistan given by Jinnah. To establish the time, the radio newsreader announced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Then it showed a Congress leader, a rotund villainous character dressed up as whatever the channel believed a Hindu looked like. In a menacing tone, he said if he had his way he would drop that bomb on the Muslims. India’s Doordarshan is doing no better in passing prejudices for history, particularly on the issue of Kashmir. There’s no space here to discuss that.
And what are we going to teach at the South Asian University? Neo-liberal economics or would there be room for Jean Dreze, Prabhat Patnaik and other assorted economists who disagree with the current syllabus at home? Visual and performing arts? It’s an excellent idea as long as we know what we are in for. With Bal Thackeray and Hindutva mobs breathing down our necks in India and the mullahs, their religious militias and the Zia-ul-Haq’s orphans in the Pakistan army scouring for any sign of delinquency (like the kind that Sadeqain dared to indulge in) what is the chance of a successful full semester being conducted undisturbed? It is great that people like Sheema Kirmani and Naheed Siddiqui have given dance and ballet performances in India. Theatre groups and musicians occasionally cross over. Of course it’s an excellent idea for people to be able to move freely across the heavily militarised borders. South Asian University would not be all about Indian and Pakistani prejudices towards each other.
It will involve Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan and Bangladesh among others. Only last week I joined a debate on NDTV’s Big Fight programme where most people were baying for the blood of Bangladeshi migrants. They cause terrorism and they eat up our jobs with cheaper labour, proclaimed a Hindutva ideologue.
Well! there you have it. The entire idea, the very dream of a South Asian community, together with a common currency like Europe, was getting stoned to death in the womb. I said so in the programme, but to little effect. The audience, brought up on bad textbooks, jeered. I said how on earth are we going to realise the dream of a confederation of South Asian nations, that Mr Advani wants, if we are surrounding ourselves with barbed wires. We are always looking for the foreign hand not realising that the fertile ground for subversion is created by our own politics. The entire northeast has enclaves of the most rabid Muslim fundamentalist groups entrenched there. It could be the relic of ISI or whatever. But why does the ISI succeed in wooing so many Indians? The answer has a lot to do with the fact that they were taught from the wrong textbooks. We have discovered a new terror link called HUJI, which has its roots in Dhaka. But is that what Bangladesh is all about, HUJI militants? In which case they should not be singing a national anthem written by Rabdindranath Tagore.
For goodness sake, this is the region whose communal partition we had all opposed as early as 1905. For better or worse, this is the country India had helped create and Indira Gandhi was called “Durga” for making that happen. “The end of Jinnah’s two nation theory”, exulted the media and the intelligentsia and the rant hasn’t decreased. Look again. Isn’t the Indian establishment subscribing to the same two-nation theory it claims to reject, by implicitly going along with ethnic profiling of religious groups a la Modi? So in this intellectually reckless atmosphere, the idea of a collective university could give us the badly needed departure. And it needs to be encouraged. But would that stem the rot? To breathe the free air of democracy and liberal ideals in South Asia we really need to clean up our doctored school textbooks first and raise the level of discourse in the classrooms. That’s when a credible South Asian thesis could be written at the arriving university.
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