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The Cockroach Janata Party is the cynosure of India’s public engagement even after more than three weeks of its prime achievement. Eulogies about the unprecedentedness of the moment range from CIA-Chinese-Pakistani to Khalistani-backed regime change actions and genuine worries about sustainability.
A generation that presented itself in languages that three older generations – Boomers (born in 1940s and 1950s), Gen X (born in 1960s and 1970s) and Millennials (born in 1980s and 1990s) – thought too vague to be effective, too shallow to be listened to and too ruptured to be socially or politically even counted has just brought back accountability – that core democratic element – into the life of the country through forcing the Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign.
Gen Z has substantiated for many of us the Boomers-Gen X-Millennial bunch (All of them collectively could be called boomers not only for all three of those generations share their values but also Gen Z treats them as one in the caught-on insta reply on conversation dead ends: “OK, Boomer!), the audacity of hope, and, understandably, we want to appreciate and cherish this moment against political arrogance and institutional callousness. But, as a boomer teacher, I ask myself, does our collective responsibility extend beyond this?
This entire movement was about education, accountability in education, and the accountability that had gone missing from education. We need to realise Dharmendra Pradhan was a shorthand for a series of things that went wrong with education in India. He is not an endpoint but something to begin on. One could start the course correction with the removal of an educational minister who, in a regime’s arrogance, looked beyond any sort of accountability but to think of this as exhaustive is to abandon responsibility for a crisis we all have contributed substantially towards.
How exactly?
We, as boomers, were silent when our political system became vacant in ethics, dead in imagination and drained in energy. The ruling establishment knew how to either monetarily allure or bureaucratically terrorise a majority of the opposition and render it ineffective. The legacy media juggled between fear-mongering and cheerleading the powers that be. “The political”, as Emmanuel Levinas reminded us, “must always be interrogated from the ethical", and our political system had become incapable of even asking ethical questions. None of the political parties could take up any of the valid issues with any vigour, and the CJP comes from outside our spheres of intervention. What they have now set ringing is our very emptiness!
Socially, in our institutions, be that educational centres or families, how much have we been listening to them?
As a member of the teaching community, there are specific questions.
We, as teachers who invigilate and organise exams, know the basics: a paper leak cannot be an accident. Given the security measures around setting a paper, moderating, printing, distributing it to centres, receiving it, sending it out to rooms and invigilating an exam, there are just too many firewalls for any paper leak to be a casual affair. If year-after-year, exam-after-exam, papers are leaking, if that is the norm in our country, it clearly shows the collapse of a series of institutional mechanisms. And we teachers have been silent or worse still, some of us even presided over this over the last few years.
I struggle to understand why there wasn’t a national-level protest by medical college professors about last year’s or this year’s paper leak? How is it only a student’s issue?
Why didn’t CBSE, ICSE and state board schools and teachers protest when their marks were invalidated by the quick, ill-consulted introduction of the Central University Entrance Test (CUET) — a test the organisation of which was given to the remarkably ill-experienced National Testing Agency (NTA) without participation of the universities? Why did academic and executive councils of Universities make National Educational Policy an excuse for introducing changes they themselves would privately concede were a joke?
Let us not blame it on Dharmendra Pradhan or the BJP government at the Union, for universities are autonomous bodies, and it is for a reason. The Academic and Executive Councils have so many professors who are either non-aligned to any political party or against the ruling party. Nobody becomes a professor without at least 16 years of service, and their teaching career precedes the current dispensation. These learned bodies and personnel not doing their jobs are central to the dumbing down of higher education and it must be recognised.
It would be unfair not to recognise the pointless extra work and complicated requirements inflicted on teachers that mar teaching and mentoring in higher education centres, but we need to form collectives to understand and spread awareness about these. In a democracy, rights are not given; they are taken.
Other than professional well-being and survival, how many of us, including me, have voiced issues that have been plaguing our teaching and learning in any effective manner to the public? How could we all be so nihilistically complacent or mindlessly selfish in implementing orders without ever asking the basic question in education: WHY?
The celebrated four-year undergraduate programme is in crisis at Delhi University, the pilot university of the project, to such an extent that the students don’t want to stay on for the fourth year. The university even had to propose to colleges to run cluster classes combining students of different colleges, but none of us wants to say a word about what kinds of steps led to this.
Let us just count the number of seats vacant in different universities and colleges and ask how we got here through managerial corruption, bureaucratisation, academic laziness, lack of creative imagination, lack of any collective response and parental apathy. Add to this the redundancies brought in by AI to our teaching and evaluation systems, and we might have a substantial list of how our higher education system got into the present state it is in.
I have been through a moment that rhymed with this: One of the most iconic political movements Delhi has seen, to me, is in 2019 when ad hoc faculty threatened with degradation in professional status occupied the Delhi University Vice Chancellor’s office for a couple of days. Their immediate anger was against an obscure office memo, but it was not just about the Ministry of Human Resource Development but about inconsiderate Principals, exploitative heads and discriminatory senior faculty. Improving the situation needed a multi-level engagement after introspection.
The CJP worked with strategic brilliance by focusing on one agenda, but we must recognise the cumulative factors that constituted it. An anecdote is told of a soldier who asked Picasso whether he painted the iconic anti-war work of art, Guernica. Picasso replied: “No, you did it.”
Gen Z can turn around and tell us, teachers: “You too made this for us.”
By definition, transgression belongs to students and not to teachers due to the very nature of the mediation we have to do. We are also part of the system, however revolutionary and romantic we are in our self-image. True, we could use some borrowed energy for protest, but our job goes far beyond.
Let us teachers do some soul-searching with all humility. Start our introspection. Do an incisive review of our work and institutions. We need a plan of social reconstruction, of building our institutions anew, actualising the promises of the Republic, of truly becoming “we, the people”. If not along with the government, let us think away from it.
And thus, by doing our job conscientiously and with a commitment to the future may be how we complement, do justice to and further the Gen Z moment we have been handed upwards.
NP Ashley teaches English at St Stephen’s College, Delhi. Views expressed are the author's own.