By excising dissenting views from its report, the cartoon committee has acted worse than colonial era panels
The debate over the cartoons used in NCERT textbooks as
aids to learning have thrown up a range of issues. The discussion has
crystallised around a set of oppositions: motivated political
correctness of our elected representatives vs. the necessity of
preemptory parliamentary intervention on educational material
appropriate for schools; institutional autonomy vs. political
responsibility of a state presiding over a diverse and fraught society;
the hubris of ‘experts’ vs. the right of others to feel hurt, in this
case on solid rational grounds; the smugness of elite and upper caste
votaries of a new pedagogy vs. the claims of those at the receiving end
of Hindu society (and history) to articulate unfamiliar adversarial
intellectual positions; the celebration of the enabling learning curve
of the ‘average’ schoolchild vs. the violence inflicted precisely by
such homogenisations on the radically different life experiences of
children from disadvantaged groups; the blindness of India’s ‘left
liberals’ ensconced in their stockades vs. the insights of Dalit writers
and academics.
Volley of criticisms
The
report of the Cartoon Committee, as it has come to be called, has
brought forth a volley of criticisms and disclosures, along with a
certain amount of fire-fighting by its chairman. In view of the start of
the school session in July, the committee was given just one month to
come up with its recommendations. Some amount of sloppiness is bound to
creep into a hurriedly drafted report. What sense can one make, critics
say, of the suggestion: “The quotation” [from the great Urdu poet]
“Faiz” may be given in Urdu, and then it should be translated in three
languages (Hindi, English and Urdu)”? Or, for that matter, the
stentorian but weak-kneed sentence: “The word “Dalit” should be replaced
by SC or it should be verified from legal sources.” What sort of
political correctness is this which consigns a powerful ascriptive term
of social identity to the waiting room of the Law Ministry, awaiting the
nod of a Joint Secretary before it is allowed entry into Class XI?
Critics have also berated the recommendation to delete a large number of
cartoons from school books on ambiguous and spurious grounds.
The
committee, and especially its chairman, have drawn a good deal of flak
for dealing with the views of the 13 subject experts consulted in a
cavalier and patronising manner: “It is necessary to mention,” the
report says, “that the views given by 13 experts were used by the
committee as resource material after due consideration” (emphasis
added). Many of these experts have cried foul at the absence
(expunging?) of their considered notes — even names — from the main body
of the report. The chairman’s explanation given to a newspaper that
‘most [experts] did not want to be named’ seems a bit unconvincing.
The
most glaring omission is the excision of a note of dissent by one
member of the committee on rather curious procedural grounds, arrived at
in total disregard of the accepted practice in such matters. And this
takes us to the way in which evidence tendered and contrarian views
expressed were accommodated in the committees and commissions set up
during the colonial period. Take the famous Hunter Commission set up in
October 1919 to investigate the Punjab Disturbances, the imposition of
Martial Law and the notorious Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April of that
year. Headed by a Scottish Judge, Lord Hunter, it comprised a Judge of
the Calcutta High Court, a Major General, a British merchant, and three
Indian lawyers, Sir Chinman Lal Setalvad, Pt. Jagat Narayan and Sultan
Ahmad Khan. Though all the members were critical of the actions of
General Dyer, the “butcher of Amritsar” was grilled most severely by Sir
Chinman Lal, the distinguished legal luminary and Vice Chancellor of
Bombay University. We know this from the proceedings of the Committee.
The Hunter Commission which split down the middle on racial lines also
produced six volumes of written and oral evidence that were tendered
before it: unlike the Cartoon Committee of today, it did not “digest”
this evidence in the process of producing an end product — a
“unanimously arrived” report. And germane to the present controversy,
the Minority Report of its three Indian members, differing from the
majority of its British members in condemning the imposition and the
severity of the Martial Law in Punjab, was published simultaneously
along with the main report.
Had Lord Hunter followed
the minimalist approach of Prof. Thorat and his committee members, our
understanding of the ruthless ways of the Raj would have been the poorer
for it. To quote Gandhi on the dissenting report of the Indian members
of the Hunter Commission: “The minority report stands out like an oasis
in a desert. The Indian members deserve the congratulation of their
countrymen for having dared to do their duty in the face of heavy odds.”
Needless to say, in the structure of its power relations colonial India
was radically different from the parliamentary India of today. What
needs stressing is that a minority view can be productive of knowledge;
unanimity, howsoever arrived at, and in the service of the most lofty of
ideals can easily tip over into the land of intellectual sterility,
where conformity rules and unreason thrives.
Or take
again the Education Commission of 1882 which circulated a list of 70
questions for the benefit of the witnesses that appeared before it, and
produced several volumes of evidence, indispensable for understanding
the spread, limitations and possibilities of indigenous and western
schooling. It is in these volumes that one encounters Jyotibha Phule’s
condemnation of the casteist nature of our schools and the plea for
compulsory primary education, or the views of Syed Ahmad Khan and
Bhartendu Harishchandra, the literary luminary of Banaras, on the
changing role of Urdu and Hindi in north Indian society.
Colonial rule was a dispensation that, inter alia,
ruled by record; a racial autocracy from which Indians were excluded,
it needed to document the sentiments of the “natives” and keep a
vigilant eye on their activities. The collection, collation and
publication of things and views “Indian” — this colonial knowledge
economy — was an integral part of the exercise of colonial power.
Parliamentary India is very different: the distance between the ruler
and the ruled is sought to be bridged by universal franchise and
electoral democracy. Of course the need of the state to know its
population inside out has generated novel and technicist modes of
information recording — witness the Aadhar scheme.
Only official report
Still,
the developmentalist aspect of the Indian state has meant that its
problem-solving enquiries largely yield policy recommendations;
statistics, charts and histograms replace the evidences tendered and the
voices heard or raised during the course of an enquiry. Official
reports now literally digest what comes up before them. The evidence
volumes of yore no longer get printed or digitised and put on the web:
the official report takes over the entire space.
Thus
the lavishly documented Sachar Committee report on the state of Indian
Muslims not only held back community-wise prison statistics. Instead of
making “the public representations” submitted to it public, it suggested
that the evidentiary material submitted to it may be placed in a
well-known research library to be “accessed by the Government and the
people” in that order, “whenever required”.
With the
Cartoon Committee we seem to have reached the absurd — some would say
disingenuous — point where in the interest of presenting a “unanimous
view,” the Thorat Committee has decided “not to append” to the main body
of its report the note of dissent of one of its own members. The
reasons are put down in a long para 2.1.4 called “Decision Making
Process”, a first of sorts for a committee of enquiry.
The
NCERT has sought to make amends by deciding to place before the
National Monitoring Board the “unanimous” report of the Thorat Committee
together with the Note of Dissent and the submissions by the 13
experts. This to enable it properly to take a final call. Dare one say
that things would have been different in the bad old Raj!
(Shahid
Amin is Professor of History, Delhi University, and Rajni Kothari
Chair, Centre for Studies in Developing Societies, Delhi)
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