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St. Stephen’s: education and social conscience

Valson Thampu

AGAINST THE backdrop of ongoing media rumblings about the St. Stephen’s College admission guidelines for 2007-2008, Vir Sanghvi called for a national debate (Hindustan Times, July 1, 2007) on the subject. I welcome the proposed national debate for two reasons. First, what is not debated is hardly understood. “A little knowledge,” said an English poet, “is a dangerous thing.” Advocacies in partial knowledge lead us from what little light we have to greater darkness. Secondly, the culture of wholesome debate is in a state of decline at the present time. Debate is basic to democracy. The alternative to debate is violence — by which sound prevails over sense. Symptomatically, the format for debate in a popular TV Channel is named ‘Big Fight’!

What holds the field in the domain of minority rights today is the 2002 judgment of the Supreme Court of India’s 11-judge bench in T.M.A Pai Foundation & Ors. vs. the State of Karnataka and Ors. This judgment holds: “ ;To effectuate Article 30(1), minority educational institutions, while giving preference to students of that community, may admit students of non-minorities up to 50% . . .” It is thus obvious that admission from all other communities and categories to a minority educational institution should not exceed 50 per cent. This is so because, as the Supreme Court acknowledges, admissions have a shaping influence on the character of an institution. A minority institution loses its minority character when the minority community becomes a minority in that institution. Article 30(1) is meant, primarily, to enable religious and linguistic minorities to meet their educational needs.

According to the Guidelines for Admission 2007-2008, 40 per cent of the seats in St. Stephen’s are set apart for Christian applicants and an equal percentage for non-minority applicants. Both admissions are done strictly on the basis of inter se merit. Of the remaining 20 per cent of seats, 5 per cent is meant for sports admissions and the remaining 15 per cent accommodates social justice (SC/ST students). It is out of the 40 per cent seats for Christian applicants that 25 per cent (or 10 per cent of the total seats) is set apart for Dalit Christians. The admission of Christians from socially degraded backgrounds, or Christian Dalits, does not therefore affect the interest of non-minorities in any way.

Those who know St. Stephen’s College — the vision of its founding fathers in the late 19th century, its history, its traditions and, in particular, its commitment to nation-building and social transformation — will appreciate that the college wants to regain its temporarily misplaced social conscience and be a catalytic agent for activating the social and intellectual assets that remain frozen in the underprivileged segments of our society who comprise the ‘un-shining’ bulk of India’s population.

St. Stephen’s was never intended to be a bastion of prestige and privilege. It was intended to be a prophetic intervention in the unfolding destiny of India in an attitude of profound respect to the vibrancy of India’s spiritual heritage.

St. Stephen’s was subversive of the colonial project, as is evident from the fact that at the earliest opportunity an Indian Christian (S.K. Rudra) was appointed Principal. In turn, he motivated C.F. Andrews to join Gandhiji’s struggles: first, to uphold the rights of Indians in South Africa and, later, to lead India to freedom. St. Stephen’s understands education as ‘liberation’ and not as a market-driven commodity. Arguably, it is the latter that underlies the idea of merit today.

The foremost tragedy in this country is not illiteracy. It is a system of education — from the primary level to higher and professional education — that perpetuates the status quo, aggravates social cleavages, obstructs national integration, and shuts the door on the hopes and aspirations of the poor. A veneer of legitimacy is cast over this systemic injustice with the label of ‘merit.’ Merit, as an American billionaire said some years ago, often implies little more than the accident of being “conceived in the right womb.” The time has come for us to make a distinction between ‘individual merit’ and the merit of a society. A meritorious society is one in which the hidden merit of all its members is enabled and expressed fully. Seen in this light, we are an ‘anti-merit society.’ Our very notion of merit militates against merit in the social sense. It is high time we shifted from a hierarchic to a democratic and socially pro-active idea of merit, the sort of merit that would have found favour with the Father of the Nation.

I am deeply concerned that Christian educational institutions all over the country are losing their Christian character. It needs to be stated unapologetically that the Christian engagement with the educational empowerment of India, hugely in excess of its numerical strength and economic resources, flows naturally from the genius of the biblical faith. Jesus came to “preach the good news to the poor” and to “set the captives free.” His stated goal was that all people (not just the elite) must have “life in its fullness.” God, according to Jesus, is in solidarity with the oppressed and the suffering; and being in solidarity with them is the essence of being ‘poor in the spirit,’ which, according to the Beatitudes, is the secret of blessedness.

Seeking profit and prestige via education is utterly incompatible with the soul of Christian education. It is in its vision, priorities, and purposes, and not in the syllabi, that education becomes Christian. This may seem like ‘modified communalism’ to the custodians of class and caste privilege, but those who get intimidated by this discourse become irrelevant to Christian education. Writ large over the teachings of Jesus is the ever-challenging insight that the pursuit of profit will perforce result in the denial of the poor and the forfeiture of the contextual relevance of Christian education.

I am not only a Christian; I am a law-abiding citizen, first and foremost. The dilemma I face is whether or not I am free to obey the law of the land within the matrix of prestige in education. Respect for the rule of law is, sadly, not a strong point in our society yet. Not infrequently, people showcase their clout by defying the law. The verdicts of the Supreme Court have the effect of ‘law declared.’ They are binding on citizens, regulatory authorities, and governments. As a law-abiding citizen of India, I am bound by the pronouncement of the Supreme Court of India to which I have to give effect, whether or not it humours certain lobbies.

It will be frightfully embarrassing if teachers and other self-styled custodians of excellence in education cry wolf against implementing the law of the land. Nobody has said yet that the Admission Guidelines for 2007-2008 fall foul of law. It is only assumed tacitly that the prestige of St. Stephen’s exempts it from the pronouncements of the Supreme Court regarding the rights and responsibilities vis-À-vis minority rights. That is dangerous and unacceptable.

The proposed national debate should not mistake a tree for the forest. It should not be about a few seats this way or that in St. Stephen’s. It should be about the mythology of higher education in this country and the operative socio-political consensus that conspiratorially excludes the vast majority of young men and women from the fruits of national development and material progress. Only 7 per cent of India’s children in the corresponding age group can, as of now, afford the luxury of higher education of any sort. The discourse on 9 per cent GDP growth needs to be humanised and humbled with the corollary as to who is benefiting from it and what needs to be done, via education, to ensure that economic development is coupled with distributive justice and human dignity. “A system that enables,” wrote President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 1960s, “a man born of a poor peasant as I was some sixty years ago to become the President of the U.S. is the system that deserves to be ranked among the best philosophies of the world.”

Let me conclude with an episode from Admissions 2007-2008, if only because this can give a human face to the proposed national debate. Looking timid but eager, a young man walked into the Principal’s office to attend the interview. From the space designated in the application form asking the applicant to state his or her interests and goals, these words stared at me: “I want to eat good food...” My heart stopped for a moment. The applicant had 76 per cent. Given his background, ‘good food,’ was the ‘object of desire’ for him. My heart whispered: “Here is the reality that needs to be at the centre of the national debate on education.”

If only St. Stephen’s could empower a few more young men and women to find food, even good food, for the stomach not less than for the mind, its motto (Ad Dei Gloriam, or ‘To the Glory of God’) would be fulfilled. If, in the process, the prestige of the institution dims a little in the short term, so be it.

(The author, the Reverend Valson Thampu, is the Principal [OSD] of St. Stephen’s College.)

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