05-23-2006, 07:07 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>PM lets down peers </b>
The Pioneer Edit Desk
Knowledge takes a knocking ---- They are neither politicians nor MPs and their resignations will not destabilise the UPA Government in any way. Yet, the departure of Mr Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Mr Andre Beteille from the National Knowledge Commission is a distressing signal for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from what should have been his natural constituency - meritocratic, middle class academia. Insulted and humiliated by Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh, who publicly accused them of being ignorant of the Constitution and virtually suggested that they carried caste prejudices, Mr Beteille and Mr Mehta have put in their papers from the Prime Minister's showpiece panel. The Knowledge Commission, it may be recalled, was handpicked by the Prime Minister to design a blueprint for augmenting India's cerebral capacities, for effecting its grand transformation from an information society to a knowledge society. Built into its mandate was the need to ensure universal access to educational institutions, to craft a mechanism whereby economic and social disparities would not come in the way of specialised training and higher educational facilities. In a sense, Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh pre-empted the Knowledge Commission's recommendations by announcing 50 per cent reservations in the IITs and IIMs, and in Union Government run super-speciality medical colleges. Thus began the war between the Knowledge Commission and the HRD Minister who sees no merit in knowledge and celebrates mediocrity.
Much of this is of course well known. The immediate focus must, however, be on what one of the Knowledge Commission's beleaguered members has eloquently described as the Prime Minister's "silence". Mr Manmohan Singh has not, it would appear found the time to meet the members of a team he had personally put together, some of whom have been friends and colleagues for decades. He has no response to Mr Mehta's open charge that his Government "cares about tokenism more than social justice" and is hell-bent upon pushing through a "one size fits all" reservation regime for every institution in the country, from a non-descript school to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences. It is both a tragedy and an irony that India's 'most educated' Prime Minister should preside over a Government that is lacerating the sinews of the knowledge society. Here is a man who has come up the hard way solely because the Indian system made room for his scholarship to shine through despite personal economic hardship. Yet he allows a cynical politician, who cannot look beyond votes, sitting in Delhi's Shastri Bhawan, seat of the HRD Ministry, to throttle some of India's finest minds and hound them out of the Knowledge Commission. When a politician out to destroy India's potential simply because he subscribes to perverse vote-bank politics scoffs at intellectual accomplishment, there is little cause to be surprised. But when an apparently enlightened technocrat, one of the country's foremost public intellectuals, so let's down his peers, the sense of betrayal is far more greatly felt. In a sense, Mr Manmohan Singh has turned his back on the India he cherished and knew - as well as on the Manmohan Singh India cherished and knew. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
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The Pioneer Edit Desk
Knowledge takes a knocking ---- They are neither politicians nor MPs and their resignations will not destabilise the UPA Government in any way. Yet, the departure of Mr Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Mr Andre Beteille from the National Knowledge Commission is a distressing signal for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from what should have been his natural constituency - meritocratic, middle class academia. Insulted and humiliated by Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh, who publicly accused them of being ignorant of the Constitution and virtually suggested that they carried caste prejudices, Mr Beteille and Mr Mehta have put in their papers from the Prime Minister's showpiece panel. The Knowledge Commission, it may be recalled, was handpicked by the Prime Minister to design a blueprint for augmenting India's cerebral capacities, for effecting its grand transformation from an information society to a knowledge society. Built into its mandate was the need to ensure universal access to educational institutions, to craft a mechanism whereby economic and social disparities would not come in the way of specialised training and higher educational facilities. In a sense, Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh pre-empted the Knowledge Commission's recommendations by announcing 50 per cent reservations in the IITs and IIMs, and in Union Government run super-speciality medical colleges. Thus began the war between the Knowledge Commission and the HRD Minister who sees no merit in knowledge and celebrates mediocrity.
Much of this is of course well known. The immediate focus must, however, be on what one of the Knowledge Commission's beleaguered members has eloquently described as the Prime Minister's "silence". Mr Manmohan Singh has not, it would appear found the time to meet the members of a team he had personally put together, some of whom have been friends and colleagues for decades. He has no response to Mr Mehta's open charge that his Government "cares about tokenism more than social justice" and is hell-bent upon pushing through a "one size fits all" reservation regime for every institution in the country, from a non-descript school to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences. It is both a tragedy and an irony that India's 'most educated' Prime Minister should preside over a Government that is lacerating the sinews of the knowledge society. Here is a man who has come up the hard way solely because the Indian system made room for his scholarship to shine through despite personal economic hardship. Yet he allows a cynical politician, who cannot look beyond votes, sitting in Delhi's Shastri Bhawan, seat of the HRD Ministry, to throttle some of India's finest minds and hound them out of the Knowledge Commission. When a politician out to destroy India's potential simply because he subscribes to perverse vote-bank politics scoffs at intellectual accomplishment, there is little cause to be surprised. But when an apparently enlightened technocrat, one of the country's foremost public intellectuals, so let's down his peers, the sense of betrayal is far more greatly felt. In a sense, Mr Manmohan Singh has turned his back on the India he cherished and knew - as well as on the Manmohan Singh India cherished and knew. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
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