The Pioneer edit on how Arjun Singh and other moonbats are systematically killing education in India.

Conspiracy afoot

The Pioneer Edit Desk

UPA, Left out to kill higher education —- The UPA Government and its cheerleaders in the Left, it seems, are hell-bent upon destroying higher education with the explicit purpose of preventing India from emerging as a knowledge society. It is astonishing that while Prime Minister Manmohan Singh waxes eloquent on the need to expand the infrastructure for higher education, strengthen centres of excellence and encourage private sector participation by way of setting up colleges, his colleagues in Government and party are exerting to achieve exactly the opposite.

Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh, who is intellectually least qualified to decide the future of education in India and whose toxic mind can come up with the most regressive policies, has rung the death knell of higher education by pushing ahead with his 27 per cent quota for Other Backward Classes in institutions of higher learning. An effete Prime Minister, despite his public pronouncements on the need to nourish and promote merit, has quietly acquiesced to his Minister’s devious plan to undo the progress made by India in recent years. Now, we are told, the Cabinet is likely to approve a proposal that will effectively kill the possibility of foreign universities setting up campuses in India. Although the proposed Bill is ostensibly meant to “encourage” foreign universities to look at India as a potential destination, its contents are of a piece with Mr Arjun Singh’s warped vision which, if left unchallenged, will place a premium on ignorance, illiteracy and mediocrity. For no foreign university worth its name and any concern for academic excellence will accept the terms that the UPA regime plans to dictate through the proposed Bill. The Prime Minister and his men are welcome to believe that foreign universities will accept caste-based quotas and subject themselves to scrutiny by venal and illiterate babus of the University Grants Commission, or that they will meekly follow fee structures that have ruined Indian colleges and universities. But the reality is far removed from their flights of fancy.

In a sense, there is a concerted attempt by the Congress and the Left to pull back the country even as it is poised to take a quantum leap and emerge as a knowledge power. It is almost as if there is a conspiracy afoot to negate the major gains of the previous decade. Seen from the perspective of Mr Arjun Singh and his ilk, this makes sense: An impoverished nation with an unenlightened citizenry can be held in thraldom by the Congress and the Left; that is the only way they know to perpetuate their rule. For evidence, look at the report of the parliamentary standing committee headed by Congress MP Janardan Dwivedi. In its wisdom, the committee has recommended the imposition of a “graduate tax” on companies that hire graduates and an “exit tax” on students who wish to study abroad. As if these disincentives that place a huge discount on higher education were not enough, a committee member, CPI(M)’s Brinda Karat, has appended a note of dissent in which she has insisted that there should be no hike in university fees and that Government should not allow either private or foreign universities because that would erode state control over education. With leaders like these, India does not need enemies.

More power to this edit. It is now entirely up to the middle class to wake up before they see their dreams and hard work snatched away from them: the rural/illiterate folks have been too busy selling their votes every five years or so getting conned again and again and again and again. Not that I’m blaming them: they are shrewd and endowed with enormous street-smartness but our netas know how to turn this street-smartness against them.

So this is what the “great defeat of the Fascist Forces in Elections 2004″ has reduced the nation to.