Fears for the future

We need to put the astrology debate within the broader framework of the Government's education policy in general, writes Supriya RoyChowdhury.

HE IS our quaint R. K. Narayan character, located on the dusty road of Malgudi, sporting a forehead full of sacred ash and vermilion, professional equipment laid out on the pavement - a dozen shells, a square piece of cloth with mystic charts on it, a notebook and a bundle of palymra writing. Narayan forgot to add the inevitable parrot, in a small cage, which invariably accompanies the street side astrologer, ubiquitous anywhere in India. Suddenly this harmless figure becomes a symbol of deep ideological contestation, of serious debates as to whether astrology is science, as the modern Indian academician struggles with the notion of the ash-vermilion-parrot combination making its way into the portals of universities as Reader or Professor. What is a meagre living for an ingenuous, street-smart character, or a harmless pastime for some, suddenly has to become a part of our political discourse. This testifies perhaps that the boundaries of our political culture are limitlessly extendable, that the line between sense and senselessness is indeed thin, and more importantly, that power and intelligence are really at cross-purposes in the present political scenario.

As a recent editorial of Current Science puts it, the battle is not between astrology and science. Rather it is between the UGC - proposing to introduce astrology as a subject of scientific study in universities - and the scientific community. The dynamics of this battle say a great deal not only about a political party using state power to inscribe a particular ideology, but being able to completely ignore democratic procedures and norms in order to push this agenda.

Thus we need to put the astrology debate within the broader framework of the Government's education policy in general. The recently- concluded parliamentary debates on this issue highlighted the essentially undemocratic character in which the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF) was pushed through. It was pointed out, first, that the NCF was enacted without the Minister of Human Resource Development convening a meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE). The National Policy of Education, 1986, had laid down the centrality of the CABE in all matters pertaining to changes in education policy. The Minister justified the NCF on grounds that it had been considered by the NCERT and approved by State Education Ministers. In reality it appears that during the NCERT's annual general meeting the NCF was a fait accompli and considered as already passed.

This failure to anchor the process of public policy making in the broad domain of public debate is apparent at every stage of the unfolding drama in education. A large number of academicians has written to the Chairman of the UGC, underlining the non-rational and non-scientific foundations of astrology, and have called for the withdrawal of the scheme to introduce it in universities. The ineffectiveness of these measures of protest stands out. At least two universities have gone ahead with creating astrology departments. More importantly, the UGC chairman has not replied to any of these protest letters.

Ignoring protests in the expectation that they will die down is not an unusual strategy of governance in India. However, the UGC's blanket of silence underlines two things. First, the UGC possibly has very little to offer by way of a substantive defence in the face of the academics' criticism; second, the Government is obviously prepared to shield the UGC chairman's highly inappropriate behaviour in not responding to these criticisms. All of these are unpleasant reminders that the facade of democracy in India conceals a highly undemocratic culture of governance. In a statement released on April 18, more than 100 scientists in top scientific research institutions across the country called for the UGC Chairman's resignation, and for a broad-based movement to press for his dismissal. Expectedly, the Government has done nothing about this.

One may take a moment to look at the Government's broader justificatory framework for introducing courses in Vedic Mathematics and astrology. This framework underlines the need for value-based education, with a stress on our traditional values. The question of values, when anchored in texts such as Vedas and practices such as astrology, obviously refer to values associated with a particular religious tradition, and goes completely against the logic of a multi-religious nation. But even apart from this fundamental digression from the secular paradigm, it is extremely odd that a Government unashamedly committed to the introduction of a globalised market in the country should at the same time speak of values, traditional or otherwise. The culture that comes with an aggressively consumption oriented, highly elitist, and crudely inegalitarian model of market-based development, in the context of a desperately poor country, is nothing if not valueless. It is this double-speak that highlights the Government's hypocrisy more than anything else.

But then, as we also know, Governments are responsive and accountable to the extent that they are forced to be. It is interesting that not one of the national scientific academies has taken an official position in opposition to the Government on the astrology issue. Fellows of the Indian Academy of Sciences have written to the President of the Academy urging him to convey the critical views of the Fellows to the UGC Chairman. These initiatives have brought forth no action on the part of the President, not even in the form of a reply to these letters. (The only exception to this pattern of official silence has been an open letter to the UGC Chairman by Prof. G. Srinivasan, in his capacity as President of the Astronomical Society of India as well as President of the Division on Space and High Energy Astrophysics of the International Astronomical Union.) This discrepancy between the clamour of protests within the scientific community and the failure of the Academies to express an official critique of the UGC's astrology agenda is obviously due to the reluctance of the scientific establishment to engage in a substantive dispute with the powers that be. The scientific establishment's close dependence upon the state is not only for research funding, but also for things like high profile positions of power within the Government's scientific agencies and committees, and similar largesse that the state is in a position to offer. This provides a partial window to the ineffectiveness of the academics' critique of the Government's education policy.

To their credit, the struggle goes on, as far as the academic community is concerned, supported by organisations such as SAHMAT who have initiated a national debate on the general issue of communalisation of education, and sought to engage a broad spectrum of critical citizens on this question. In a context where many of the pillars of our democracy are crumbling, the value of such critical dissent cannot be emphasized enough.

One wishes, though, that the academic community's critical discourse was not so imprisoned within the immediacy of the astrology/saffronisation issue. Universities in India have been in a state of decline for many years now. The elite of the academic science community, ensconced in the comfort of top research institutions, and inhabiting, for all practical purposes, an international (read western) professional habitat, has rarely, if ever, reacted to the rapid degeneration of the university system. This curiously ostrich-like approach fails to recognise that a declining university system cuts at the roots of higher education in any context, and in fact potentially destroys the foundations on which these elite scientific research institutions stand. Therefore, if the protection of universities and of science education is the broad concern, one needs to acknowledge that saffronisation maybe the biggest threat, but not the only one. There would be a greater measure of credibility, and perhaps power, in the academics' protest if it was anchored within the broad issue of institutional erosion in education.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Opinion
Previous : Voices of reason
Next     : Debatable positions