Home Education 6% Cap On NET: Towards The Annihilation of Higher Education

6% Cap On NET: Towards The Annihilation of Higher Education

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On May 10, 1933, there was a huge gathering of thousands of students in front of the square at University of Berlin. These students had gathered, after being inspired by the advent of Hitler to Chancellorship just a few months earlier, to burn all books (by German and non-German authors) against ‘German thought.’

On June 14, 2017, the University Grants Commission, the statutory body set up by the state to deal with all matters of higher education in India, conducted a similar ‘bonfire’ of their own. Based on a judgment by the Kerala HC, they have deemed the relaxation of minimum marks for reserved category students as unconstitutional and biased against general category students. This judgment was passed based on a writ petition filed by Nair Service Society which claims to work for the ‘service and upliftment of Nair community'(Nairs are a dominant upper caste community from Kerala who has traditionally hegemonized economic, social and cultural spaces in the state). This was a symbolic bonfire on the back of a barrage of exclusionary policies passed by UGC in the past few years which have especially intensified under the rule of the present Modi government.

A Contemporary History

This is not the first time that the present state power has tried to make educational spaces (especially higher education) exclusive and accessible only to the privileged communities in our society. Within a year of coming to power, non-NET fellowship, a basic stipend given to research scholars (MPhil/Ph.D.) of central universities was scrapped. Following agitations and the Occupy UGC movement, a partial victory of the restoration of the fellowship was established. Last year, a notification dated May 2016 which recommended scrapping of entrance examination as having any weight-age in the final selection of research scholars in universities was adopted (albeit with strong opposition from certain quarters of student communities of JNU). It made the entrance examination merely a qualifying exam, reducing the entire weightage of selection on the viva-voice; a move which is clearly elitist and Brahmanical in nature due to the fact that most of these interviews are conducted in English and require power of articulation, both of these aspects are something which the upper castes and upper-class students have access to.

Now, UGC has proposed to cap the percentage of candidates being declared as NET qualified across all categories from top 15 % to top 6 %. Moreover, it has proposed to conduct the exam annually rather than bi-annually.

Such moves shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the state’s policy on education since BJP came to power. There has been a clear attempt to brahamanize educational institutions and this is also evident from the education budget which only received a marginal absolute increase this year after having been cut down in absolute terms for the past two budgets.

A (un)holy Coupling: Brahmanism and Capitalism

This brings us to a specific historical conjecture which we find ourselves at. BJP and the Sangh Parivar had been clear about its intentions from day one. They wanted to ‘saffronise’ educational spaces and make it more ‘Hindu’-centric. In other words, they wanted to inculcate among the youth a sort of loyalty to the state through a school curriculum which would glorify the likes of Savarkar, define dark as ugly, prescribe body sizes which count as ‘ideal’ body shape, objectify women, glorify all Hindutva icons and appropriate everyone from Ambedkar to Gandhi. However, in today’s day and age, a move to brahamanize educational institutions can’t take place without engaging with realities of a globalized world. Capitalism has made its inroads into the interiors of India thanks to successive ‘development-as-displacement’ policies passed by the past and present parties of power in the center. In a society where one needs to engage with dialectics of a global and local context, one can’t ignore what has happening to education at the global level. The policies under neo-liberal regime have systematically led to cut of welfare expenditure, de-regulation and increasing privatization of many essential institutions such as health and education. RSS-BJP has had to subtly alter its mechanism and approach to satisfy its ultimate goal of a Hindu nation. While RSS has been running it’s shakhas to streamline Brahmanism among Hindu-born children and youth; BJP is trying to put a ‘human face’ to this by privatizing educational spaces in a phased manner. The attempts of its youth wing ABVP to capture student spaces, which have had a long established history of being democratic and open spaces, have already failed or backfired in many universities (JNU, HCU). Thus, if one can’t capture spaces through extra-judicial means then why not ‘legal’ measures themselves? Ambedkar knew the empowering potential of education. He knew that the only way to actually achieve the goal of a democratic republic which not only believes but practices liberty, equality, and fraternity would be through education agitation and organization of the Dalits, Bahujan, Adivasis, minorities and the working class of the country. Unfortunately, Brahmanical society knew this. Hence, their foremost attack has been consistently on educational spaces beginning with FTII, ICSSR, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and the host of other institutions where their stooges have been placed. The purpose is plain and simple, once educational institutions have been privatized by selling it to the highest bidder (defeating the purpose of education as a right) and the remaining state universities brahmanized through such UGC regulations, the very source of the most vehement dissent against the state would plummet. The student population amongst the universities has been at the forefront of many anti-caste, anti-capitalist agitations against the state in the past couple of years. It was no surprise that Modi had launched his campaign for BJP from the auditorium of SRCC in Delhi University. He knew how malleable young minds could be and without engagement, with critical education (which the author was privileged to receive) one can easily end up as a plank for the politics of hate and violence.

The Problem at Hand

While there have been fresh protests which have demanded the revocation of this planned proposal, the past agitations against such arbitrary and autocratic UGC rulings do not bear many positive signs on how things will proceed. Just when the student community was trying to grapple with the Brahmanical move to make the selection of a research scholar solely based on their viva-voice interview, they have been hit by another blow. However, it may be premature to arrive at any judgment on how the future course of struggle and resistance against such a fascist attack on education will take place, the problem at hand is a massive one. Not only will it exclude people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds but even those students who may wish to gain some sort of financial autonomy or independence away from their families who may not be supportive of their decision to study further. Thus, multiple identities have simultaneously been attacked in one swift move. However, times of darkness and repression breeds resistance, and if there’s one thing history has taught us, nothing is set in stone.

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