Education News

Church shadow over St. Stephen’s

There is much head-shaking and anguish in the groves of academe in Delhi over a decision taken on June 14 by the supreme council of St. Stephen’s College (estb. 1881), widely regarded as the country’s premier liberal arts college, to reserve 40 percent of its annual intake of 400 for students from the country’s 24 million-strong Christian community. Although a minority education institution entitled under Article 30 of the Constitution to reserve upto 49.5 percent of institutional capacity for Christian students, thus far successive liberal managements of St. Stephen’s have refrained from mandating a formal quota for Christian students, who currently comprise about one-third of the student body.

Now the reservation of a formal 40 percent of annual intake for Christian students — and creation of a new sub-quota of 25 percent for ‘dalit Christians’ — is widely being interpreted in academic circles and beyond, as an assertion of intent of the Church of North India (CNI) to play a larger role in the management of St. Stephen’s. Hitherto management of this high-profile college founded in 1881 by the Cambridge Brotherhood — an association of Church of England dons of Cambridge University (UK) — was the province of liberal Christian academics who took pains to highlight the college’s broad secular ethos and character. But with the supreme council accepting the ‘voluntary resignation’ of St. Stephen’s principal Dr. Anil Wilson, on leave since January 2007, at its June 14 meeting and appointing pro-Church hardliner Valson Thampu as the new principal, St. Stephen’s is all set to assert its "Christian heritage" more aggressively and unapologetically. Wilson who served as the college’s 11th principal for 16 years (1991-2007) was criticised as a secular liberal who had diluted St. Stephen’s Christian identity.

However although he put in his papers on June 14 when he opposed the formal quota and sub-quota proposals, Wilson who is now vice-chancellor of Himachal University (his alma mater) didn’t go quietly. In a penned 800 word article featured on the front page of the Delhi edition of Times of India (June 19), Wilson questioned the advisability of changing the status of St. Stephen’s from a Christian college to a church institution as indicated by its new admissions policy. "A Christian institution is at the service of mankind-at-large: eclectic, cosmopolitan and ecumenical in the widest possible sense. A church institution is at the service of the power structures of the political establishment within the church: insular, blinkered, dogmatically sectarian and concerned only about I, me and mine," he wrote.

Like Wilson, influential St. Stephen’s alumni have questioned CNI tinkering with the college’s broad liberal ethos. But dalit Christian activists have welcomed the initiative of the CNI establishment to reassert the college’s Christian identity. "These moves will go a long way in removing the impression that the church runs only elite schools for the rich and powerful without concern for the poor. These revolutionary measures will also go a long way in the empowerment of 60 percent of the Indian Christian community which had fallen out of the development net of the church and were also ignored by the state," says a statement of dalit Christian groups which met on June 23 in New Delhi to voice support for Thampu and the Church.

Liberal educationists in the national capital ascribe the entry of religious and caste identity politics into the hitherto liberal environment of St. Stephen’s to the reservation and caste politics of Union HRD minister Arjun Singh who recently piloted the Central Education Institutions (Reservation and Admissions) Act 2006 through Parliament. Under the Act, an additional 27 percent of intake capacity of Central government sponsored institutions is now reserved for OBC (other backward caste) students. Against this backdrop it’s hardly surprising that CNI and dalit (i.e. OBC) Christians are demanding religious and caste-based quotas in the showpiece St. Stephen’s College.

In the name of affirmative action, yet another institution of repute has been dragged into the cauldron of caste and community politics — a development which could radically transform the carefully crafted secular character of this widely respected 126-year-old college.

Autar Nehru (Delhi)

Testing tragedy

In India’s most populous (180 million) Hindi heartland state of Uttar Pradesh, where corruption and lawlessness are rampant, the suicide on June 15 of Dilip Kumar Gautam (19) is just another statistic. But behind this statistic is a tale of shocking official carelessness and neglect. Gautam threw himself before a speeding train a day after the state government’s Combined Pre Medical Test (CPMT) 2007 list indicated that he had failed the exam.

As suggested by its name, CPMT is a common entrance exam for admission into UP’s 26 government and 22 privately promoted medical colleges which together offer a mere 3,556 seats.

Gautam was one of 80,572 students who wrote the CPMT conducted by Jaunpur’s Veer Bahadur Singh Poorvanchal University on May 22. Of these candidates, 15,086 were declared as having passed on June 14. Immediately there were protests with unsuccessful students alleging that the results were suspicious, as many of those who had qualified in other nationwide medical entrance exams failed to make it into the state list.

But despite widespread student protests in Kanpur, Meerut, Agra, Gorakhpur and Lucknow, Poorvanchal University vice-chancellor K.P. Singh denied negligence or wrong-doing. "I challenge anyone to come and prove the results wrong," he told the media.

On the other hand UP’s newly elected chief minister Mayawati was quick to react. Twenty-four hours after declaration of the results, she ordered a re-evaluation. Immediately a nine member expert team, comprising medical education and computer experts, was despatched to the university and the vice-chancellor’s office was sealed.

On June 21, a fresh list declared that 53,735 candidates (as against the 15,086 declared earlier), had cleared the CPMT exam written on May 22. Of those included in the first list, only 4,000 made it to the second — a clear admission of large-scale assessment and marking errors in the evaluation of June 14. While releasing the new list and announcing his resignation, Singh offered the following explanation: "Errors and leaks happen in the best of exams, even the IITs are not exempt. Yet this kind of furore is unprecedented. My conscience is clear and I did not do anything deliberately." But Singh’s resignation speech didn’t impress the newly installed government. In a formal announcement it said that Singh had already been removed from his post, hence there was no question of accepting his resignation.

In the revised list Gautam was awarded a rank of 9,850 which was pushed up to 735 given his SC (scheduled caste) status. This rank was good enough to get him admission into a dentistry course. But by then stunned by the omission of his name in the first list, he had taken his own life.

In its recommendations the nine member expert committee made ten suggestions to ensure that such tragedies don’t recur. It has proposed that 2 percent of answer sheets be manually checked to verify the final results and ‘correct’ answers be published on the internet the day after the exam, and that the answer sheets of the first 20 and the last 20 in the merit list be manually checked. Lalji Verma, the state’s minister for medical education, promises that the government will look carefully into these suggestions. "We cannot afford to play with the lives of our children. This is a serious matter," he says.

The 41-year-old CPMT has been dogged by controversy in recent times. In 1994 the results of 43 candidates were cancelled by the high court as they had forged their Plus Two documents. In 2002, there were reports of as many as 450 answer sheets being tampered with. In 2003, three dozen proxy candidates were apprehended. Two years ago, the question papers were leaked from Agra University which was conducting that year’s exam. Use of fake caste certificates is also rampant.

This year’s imbroglio has also reached the high court. A writ petition seeking a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into the whole episode has been admitted.

But for Gautam’s grieving family, the ameliorative action is a case of too little, too late.

Vidya Pandit (Lucknow)

High court rap

The Madras high court has come down heavily on several CBSE affiliated schools in Chennai and beyond for denying high school (class X) students admission into their higher secondary (Plus Two) schools. On April 27, Chief Justice A.P. Shah and Justice Chitra Venkataraman upheld a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by educationist Dr. S. Ananadalakshmy, convenor of the Chennai-based Concerned Citizens Committee (CCC), against some prominent CBSE schools in Chennai. They ruled that schools should not consider their own high school (class X) students as fresh candidates for admission into higher secondary school (class XI). The bench sharply criticised the emerging practice of school managements issuing transfer certificates to class X students and re-admitting some of them on the basis of stipulated cut-off percentages into class XI. The court held this practice is against the rules and admission guidelines stipulated by the Union ministry of human resource development and CBSE.

Subsequently the high court expanded the ambit of its April 27 order on June 11 while passing orders on a writ petition filed by K. Mohamed Wasif who charged the Don Bosco Matriculation Higher Secondary School, Chennai of denying him admission into class XI while admitting students of other schools who had averaged less in the class X board exam. The court ruled that the admission regulations prescribed for the 166 CBSE schools in Tamil Nadu by the April 27 order are applicable to all the 3,019 state board, 3,474 matriculation board and 41 Anglo-Indian board schools in the state. Following the high court order, the state government also directed government and government-aided higher secondary schools in the state to comply with the ratio decidendi of the high court’s April 27 ruling.

"The atrocious practice of denying automatic admission to students who clear the class X boards into class XI in the same school is typical of the rampant commercialisation of education. The root cause of this practice is unhealthy competition among CBSE schools to produce the maximum number of toppers in class XII board examinations which would enable them to make lofty claims of being the best schools in the state. Since vacancies were thus artificially created in the higher secondary sections of the best schools, parents were driven to offer donations to get their children into class XI of certain reputed schools in the hope that their wards would become better qualified for admission into prestigious institutions of higher education after class XII," says legal practitioner Dr. V. Suresh, one of the convenors of CCC.

Ironically, the errant CBSE schools followed these practices despite the proclaimed directive of CBSE to "provide a stress-free learning environment" and rules which clearly state that students who fail in class X should be admitted to class XI in the same school on condition that they clear the ‘compartment examinations’ held in July/August of the same year. Moreover a Supreme Court judgement in Principal, Cambridge School vs. Payal Gupta (1995), instructing schools not to deny admission to their own class X pupils into class XI, had been conveniently ignored by several highly reputed CBSE affiliated schools including Padma Seshadri Bal Bhavan Senior Secondary School, P.S. Senior Secondary School and DAV Higher Secondary School among others in the city.

Following the April 27 and June 11 rulings of the Madras high court, city academics are hopeful that errant schools will now be forced to comply. "School managements will now have to adhere to the ruling or be hauled up for contempt of court. After all they are partly responsible for a student not performing well in class X. If schools cannot prepare students who have been with them for over ten years to meet their own academic standards, they cannot absolve themselves of blame," says Dr. D. Rajaganesan, retired professor of education of Madras University.

Following the judgement of the court, school managements and class XI students across the state are confronted with the problem of unscrambling a mess. Schools which have excluded their own class X students are being pressurised by their former students. And external students who have been admitted into new schools are not sure if their admissions are valid. But this is being described as a temporary problem. From next year onwards class X students of schools offering higher secondary education can breathe easy, or more accurately, easier.

Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)

West Bengal

Celebratory amnesia

In consonance with the fundamental tenets of totalitarian Marxist ideology, West Bengal’s CPM (Communist Party of India — Marxist)-led Left Front government keeps a tight leash on public and private schools in the state. A full-fledged ministry headed by dedicated leftist school education minister Partha De discharges this important function.

For this ministry the law of the land which protects minority-run educational institutions (aka missionary or convent schools) from government interference has long been a bone in the throat. But this bone is about to be dislodged if the Left Front government has its way. A new Act is being drafted to bring the state’s 85 missionary schools — aided and unaided — under direct state government control. Confirms S. Mahapatra, joint secretary of the school education department in the state government: "All private schools, including minority institutions will be covered by the new legislation which has been formulated to ensure better and smoother functioning of these institutions."

Far from being reassured, the managements of minority schools are aghast that the wide purview of the proposed legislation includes "fees rationalisation and parents’ participation in school administration". According to them, this is the thin end of a wedge that will enable the Left Front government to totally control their administrations.

"The provisions of the proposed Act should not be applied to minority institutions," says Herod Mullick, general secretary of the Bangiya Christiya Pariseba, an organisation of churches and people of the Christian community. "Christian missionaries have provided quality holistic education across Bengal for more than two and a half centuries independently of government control. There’s no cause to interfere with the status quo."

Within the inner councils of the state’s missionary schools there’s widespread apprehension that communist apparatchiks and cadres will interfere with student admission processes, teacher recruitment and tuition fee structures.

Minority school managements are particularly alarmed by a ‘school mapping’ proposal included in the draft legislation. This means that if the management of any existing school wants to set up a new branch, the state government will have a say in selection of the site. "The church and/or its missionaries have never run a school for making commercial gains," thunders Mullick. "Therefore government cannot dictate our choice of sites for new schools."

Quite obviously a major courtroom battle is in the offing. The Constitution clearly confers a fundamental right upon all minorities, "whether based on religion or language", to establish and administer education institutions of their choice (Article 30). This fundamental right has not only been confirmed but expanded by full benches of the Supreme Court in the landmark TMA Pai Foundation (2002) and the Inamdar vs State of Maharashtra (2005) cases.

Quite clearly in its anxiety to do right by Marxist ideology, the school education ministry headed by Partha De forgot to consult the law ministry. Consequently a sharp reprimand and comeuppance from the judiciary is in the offing for the Left Front government.

Currently celebrating 30 years of uninterrupted rule in West Bengal, the state’s comrade commissars seem to have forgotten that the republic doesn’t have a communist-style ‘committed judiciary’ as yet.

Sujoy Gupta (Kolkata)

Sisters brave fight

With state governments preoccupied with wasteful spending unable to provide minimal law and order services to their captive publics, and so-called secular political parties competing with each other to pander to obscurantist and regressive elements within India’s 120 million strong Muslim community, it’s hardly surprising that self-styled defenders of the faith are emboldened to impose their regressive interpre-tations of the holy Koran upon progressive, law abiding citizens of the minority community. On June 11 a shocked division bench of the Bombay high court admitted a petition filed by two women students of the University of Mumbai and directed the city police to forthwith provide protection to them against Muslim vigilantes preventing them from attending college.

Samina (19) and Zarina Sheikh (18) who reside in a one-room apartment with their parents and seven siblings in the lower middle class Nagpada locality in central Mumbai, recently moved the high court praying for a restraint order against several Muslim zealots terrorising them and their family for pursuing collegiate education. Samina is a science student at the upscale St. Xavier’s College while Zarina is a commerce student of the Maharashtra College. In a petition submitted to the high court on June 11, the two sisters stated that their family had been terrorised by their neighbour Mohammad Ali Nisar Ansari, his sons and other Muslim zealots who object to the sisters continuing with their higher education which in their opinion, is prohibited by Islam.

On March 7 this year Samina, (who speaks fluent English and tutors younger children in the building) was physically assaulted. Subsequently on May 11 Ansari and some family members trespassed into the Sheikh household and inflicted severe injuries to the girls’ parents and elder brother, with the latter hit on the head with a cricket bat. Following this incident, the family lodged an FIR at the Nagpada police station but with the men in uniform failing to arrest the criminals, the sisters filed a writ petition under Article 21 of the Constitution ("No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law").

Following stringent criticism by the two judge bench (Justices Ranjana Desai and Dilip Bhosale), the Nagpada police station began probing the assaults on the Sheikh household on June 13. Statements of Samina and Zarina as also of over 15 other women residing in their building have been recorded by the police. Moreover chief public prosecutor Satish Borulkar informed the court that the local police had convened a meeting on June 23 in the building where the petitioners reside, to invite and record similar complaints.

Comments Dr. Veena Poonacha, director of the Research Centre for Women’s Studies at Mumbai’s SNDT Women’s University: "There are several women from the minority Muslim community secretly enrolled in our distance education programmes. There is a deep-rooted fear within many communities in India that if women excel academically, they will demand their constitutional rights. The high court’s severe strictures against the police will hopefully send out the message that all citizens have a fundamental right to education and self realisation."

Yet what Poonacha has implied but not stressed is that when the law stands idly by, reluctant to interfere in theological disputes, the most socially regressive elements in all religious groups tend to run amok. That’s the moral of the yet unfinished tale of the Sheikh sisters and their brave fight to enforce their right to education.

Gaver Chatterjee (Mumbai)

Tenuous compromise

The imbroglio over derecognition of Karnataka’s 2,215 private primaries which committed the cardinal sin of teaching in the English instead of Kannada medium (in which they were licenced to teach), has become more complicated and murkier. After hearing a writ petition filed by school managements grouped under the umbrella of KUSMA (Karnataka Unaided School Managements Association) on June 25, the Karnataka high court issued a complex order directing the schools to partially toe the government line.

The two-judge division bench headed by Chief Justice Cyriac Joseph ordered the erring schools to file affidavits undertaking that they would teach class I students admitted in the current year solely in Kannada or the mother tongue as per the terms of their licences. But simultaneously it allowed them to continue teaching classes II-V students in the English medium. Stating that the offender 2,215 schools need not be closed down but should teach all newly inducted primary school students in the Kannada medium until class V, the bench reverted the substantive issues of whether these schools can continue teaching all classes in the English medium and whether the state government is entitled to impose a fine on them for breach of their licence, to the single bench judge against whose order dated May 24, the appeal of June 25 was filed.

"Prima facie, the action of the government to de-recognise erring schools on account of violation of norms cannot be said to be illegal or arbitrary. The single bench will consider these aspects and pass the judgement," observed the bench.

But according to G.S. Sharma, the octogenarian founder-president of KUSMA, the issue of member schools teaching all classes in their preferred English medium is not yet settled. "Our argument before the single judge will be that the Supreme Court’s judgement in the TMA Pai Foundation Case (2002) has conferred an unfettered right on school promoters to establish and administer education institutions of their choice. This full-bench judgement confirmed by another full-bench judgement in Inamdar’s Case (2005) overrides all other issues," says Sharma.

Behind this bitter battle between government and private school managements, which almost jeopardised the education of over 300,000 students enrolled in the impugned schools, is a murky mix of language chauvinism and commercial considerations. Although most upwardly mobile middle class people in the state (including education minister Basavaraj Horatti) enroll their children in private English medium primary-cum-secondaries, purportedly to keep the state’s Kannada language alive, government schools offer only Kannada as the medium of instruction. But with attendance in Kannada medium schools consistently falling, the incumbent Janata Dal (S)-BJP state government and Horatti in particular have targeted private schools to also teach classes I-V in the Kannada medium. Moreover according to sceptics, large Kannada textbooks printing contracts are at stake.

Curiously, the state government’s Kannada (or mother tongue) only in lower primary school order was passed in 1994. Therefore with successive state governments reluctant to licence English medium schools for the past decade, private school promoters routinely signed forms and affidavits agreeing to abide by the official medium of instruction policy while actually teaching in the popular English medium. This arrangement suited Karnataka’s notoriously bribe-hungry educrats and school inspectors admirably. Consequently notwithstanding the Kannada-only policy, the number of English medium private primaries grew from 2,500 in 1990 to an estimated 7,500 currently. However last year Horatti felt obliged to disturb this cosy, mutually beneficial arrangement. Reportedly under pressure from the Kannada textbooks lobby, he insisted that all primaries started after 1994 adhere to the terms of their licence, i.e teach classes I-V solely in Kannada. Hence the prolonged — and yet — unsettled litigation.

Quite evidently Karnataka’s contentious medium of instruction issue is nowhere near closure although students already enrolled in the impugned schools have been granted temporary relief. Meanwhile a tenuous compromise is enabling the state’s 2,215 schools to continue business as usual. Almost.

Srinidhi Raghavendra (Bangalore)