A desperate last ditch effort of the Karnataka government to stay the impact of the historic judgement of a three-judge bench of the Karnataka high court striking down the state government’s 1994 order mandating Kannada as the medium of instruction in all primary schools in the state, was thwarted by Justice H.V.G. Ramesh on October 20. In a terse order he directed the state government to give immediate effect to the court’s full-bench, 318-page judgement delivered on July 2 upholding the right of unaided school managements to dispense primary education in the medium of instruction of their choice, “without insisting on technicalities”.
In the landmark verdict delivered on July 2 in Associated Managements of Government Recognized Unaided English Medium Primary and Secondary Schools in Karnataka (KAMS) vs. State of Karnataka & Ors (Writ Petition No. 14363/1994), a three-judge bench of the high court headed by Chief Justice Cyriac Joseph and comprising Justices Manjula Chellur and N. Kumar had ruled that a state government order issued in 1994 mandating Kannada or mother tongue as the compulsory medium of instruction in all primary schools (classes I-V) statewide, is violative of the fundamental rights of the promoters/owners of Karnataka’s 11,954 unaided or independent primary schools. The long-awaited judgement in the writ petition filed by KAMS and 26 other petitioners in 1994 also upheld the fundamental right of parents and children to opt for a medium of instruction of their choice.
Nevertheless arguing that since the KAMS judgement had been delivered on July 2, a month after the new school year had begun, state government officials had warned private primary school managements to desist from “disrupting the education” of classes I-V children by switching to teaching in English after commencement of the new school year.
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Moreover, since prior to the delivery of the high court judgement, a large number of schools threatened with derecognition by the state government for violating the 1994 language order had signed a pledge to switch to Kannada or mother tongue as the medium of instruction, government educrats insisted they adhere to the pledge and switch to the English medium next year. Aggrieved by the refusal of state government educrats to allow them to switch to the medium of instruction of their choice as per the ruling of the three-judge bench in the KAMS Case, the Bangalore-based Good Samaritan Education Society filed an appeal in the high court which was disposed by Justice Ramesh as indicated above.
With the state government — under pressure from the Kannada language chauvinists lobby — having already declared its intent to file an appeal in the Supreme Court against the KAMS Case judgement, quite clearly the intent of education department officials was to buy time and preserve the status quo for as long as possible in the hope that the state’s appeal in the apex court will be heard before the commencement of the next school year. Nevertheless open defiance by educrats of a full-bench judgement of the high court has taken monitors of the education scene in Bangalore by surprise. “It’s a measure of the desperation of state government education officials to maintain the status quo, which offers them rich pickings, that they have risked a contempt of court petititon being filed against them,” says an unaided English medium school principal “liberated from the clutches of the education department mafia” by the July 2 high court order.
Behind the obduracy of state government educrats, which had the potential to cloud the future of over 1.6 million students enrolled in 11,954 unaided schools, is a murky mix of language chauvinism and commercial calculation. Confronted with the mass migration of children from middle class households into unaided (fees-levying) English medium primary-cum-secondaries, the possibility of even children lower down in the social scale following suit, and attendance in state government run Kannada medium schools falling consistently, successive state governments had resorted to forcing private primaries to also teach in the Kannada medium.
Moreover constantly falling enrollment in Kannada medium government primaries was bad news for down-market, slapdash vernacular textbook publishers and printers who are a powerful lobby in Karnataka politics. Hence they joined forces with the state’s language chauvinist politicians to create a massive captive market for regional language textbooks of dubious quality and scholarship. Now following the July 2 and October 20 judgements of the Karnataka high court, the state’s 11,954 unaided schools have indeed been liberated from the state government’s education mafia, much to the relief of their parents and managements.
But government educrats and the Kannada language textbooks lobby are unlikely to lose too much sleep over the escape of the 11,954 private unaided primaries with their 1.6 million students. They still have the captive market of the state’s 48,000 government (including private aided) schools with an aggregate enrollment of over 10 million children of the poor. Only God can save them.
Summiya Yasmeen (Bangalore)