Tag Archives: education

The Next Ten Years

27 Tue Jun 2017

Posted by in India, Israel, Middle East, Opinion and Response, South Asia

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As Narendra Modi embarks on his trip to Israel, many await the outcome of this historic trip. Modi will be the first Indian prime minister to ever visit Israel and symbolically, the Indian prime minister will not stop to visit the Palestinian Authority while in Jerusalem. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is rumoured to share a good personal chemistry with Modi and has tweeted warmly, welcoming the Indian leader to Israel. Netanyahu has cleared his schedule for the two days Modi is in Jerusalem and plans to spend the entire time in discussions with him.

Ahead of Modi’s visit, the Israeli cabinet has proposed several measures to strengthen relations with India. They include a joint fund to encourage Indo-Israeli business cooperation, an expansion of cooperation in water management and agriculture, and the promotion of tourism. There is already some speculation about the several arms deals the Indian prime minister will also be signing during his trip.

There is no question that relations between India and Israel have been on an upward trajectory for at least the past decade and have achieved an even steeper gradient since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014. Trade has increased as has cooperation in the realm of security and neither show any signs of slowing down in the near future. As Israel’s ambassador to India, Daniel Carmon, prophesied about his country’s ties with India, the best is yet to come.

However, the ambassador also made a perceptive point in an interview with the Indian media: for relations to become truly strategic or special, they must move beyond the purely transactional sphere. Towards this end, Carmon pointed to the cooperation between his country and his host country in agriculture and water management. Such interactions bring what Israel has to offer to the doorstep of every Indian. Nonetheless, there is yet tremendous scope for the blossoming of Indo-Israeli relations at the non-governmental level.

The truly special relationship between two states in the modern era must be the United States and Britain. Srdjan Vucetic, a professor at the University of Ottawa, makes a compelling case that this relationship was based, at least initially and for a substantial period, on racial affinity than a congruence of interests and values. India does not share any racial kinship with Israel or the Jewish people. Regardless, the Anglosphere is a good example of what harmonious relations should look like. Despite their differences, the five countries – America, Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand – have supported each other diplomatically on the international stage; Australia has even provided soldiers for every major conflict the United States has found itself in.

Not bound by race or even a shared history, India and Israel can nonetheless base their bond over the fact that the former remains one of the few, perhaps the only, major country that has never had anti-Semitism in its history. This, combined with the obvious strategic imperative and economic opportunities should serve to foster people-to-people relations between Indians and Israelis. While political pressures will motivate strategic cooperation and economic realities will propel trade on their own, both governments must take an effort to encourage cultural connections. This is best done through education, tourism, and the arts.

India may not have too many universities that Israeli students might be interested in but it still has a few good medical and engineering colleges, at least at the undergraduate level. Scholarships should be created for Israelis wishing to study at these institutes, with opportunities for work-study and internships. There is no substitute for living in a country for four years or more to become familiar with its work ethic, politics, and culture. Similarly, avenues should be created to facilitate Indian students who wish to study at Israeli universities or intern at their think tanks. Already, hundreds of thousands of Indians seek intellectual enrichment in the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia; there is no reason Israel cannot be a destination for Indian scholars, especially given its reputation in information technology, trauma medicine, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

University exchange programmes – for lecturers as well as students – may well serve in improving Indian education. An inflow of foreign students could increase pressure to update curricula, spark off research programmes, improve university governance, and ameliorate financial woes. The power of educational exchanges must not be underestimated – the role played by the British Rhodes scholarship and the American Fulbright Programme in influencing young minds world over in the Anglo-American way of thinking comes to mind.

Another important industry that is open to more than just young scholars is tourism. Both Israel and India are ancient cultures with histories that go back at least five millennia. Several historical sites in both countries are even dated several millennia earlier. More than for just history buffs, India also offers a bewildering array of cuisines and terrain that will excite and entrall tourists. Israel’s beaches and adventure sports are similarly a powerful draw for visitors. While Israel has already started to entice Indians to tour its treasures, there is much for India to do on this front. Cleanliness, adequate bathroom facilities, and protection of the monuments from the picnicking masses would be a start; accurate information in multiple languages available online and multilingual tour guides would be another measure to bring Indian tourism to even basic standards. On the larger scale, lodging and transportation need to be improved to tourist destinations.

About 40,000 Israelis visit India every year. Most of them are young people who have just finished their mandatory military service, have financial constraints as they are yet to start working, and prefer the peace and quiet of remote towns in the foothills of the Himalayas than Ellora, Khajuraho, or the Taj Mahal, at least initially. Better connectivity and infrastructure in these areas might not only persuade more Israelis to visit India (rather than South America, the other favourite destination after military service), but entice them to stay longer. Better upkeep of tourist destinations may not immediately interest this crowd but it will attract their parents – who may have spent six to twelve months of their youth in India too – to make a second trip to India. More importantly, development of tourist places is not an Israel-specific project but will make India’s attractions bearable for people all around the world.

Towards bettering tourism traffic, both countries could take several steps in making travel easier. First, visas can be made easier to apply for via an online application process that accepts scanned documents as well as the application form. Two, criteria for tourist visas can be relaxed. Three, keeping in mind the nature of Israeli tourism to India, the period of e-tourist visas can be extended to a year. All these steps would be towards the eventual goal of eliminating the requirement for visas for tourist travel between the two countries. Admittedly, some of these measures have been partially put in place. However, there remains much progress to be made.

Additionally, connectivity between India and Israel stands to be substantially improved. There is only one carrier that flies directly between Israel and India – that is the Israeli airline El Al, with two weekly flights between Tel Aviv and Bombay. Such things are largely commercially influenced but it is not inconceivable that additional carriers operating at least weekly from India’s IT hub, Bangalore, and Delhi might find passengers.

On the cultural front, Delhi and Jerusalem must do more to promote their music, art, literature, and language in each other’s countries. There is some very intelligent Israeli cinema and theatre that have not made it to India except, perhaps, on torrents, because of the language barrier. Sponsoring tours by theatre groups and promoting foreign language films can be a great way to expose Indians and Israelis to each other’s societies. As the French have their Alliance Française and the Germans their Goethe-Institut, Israel could promote Hebrew via its literature and philosophy. Stronger business and educational ties will spur an interest in learning Hebrew among Indians. Similarly, India can promote Sanskrit and Indian philosophy in Israel, which, for some odd reason, seems to have a fair number of people interested in Indian thought and literature.

It must be remembered that culture is by its very nature an elite preoccupation and will not have too many takers. However, the rewards will be ample from those who do take advantage of the new options and become ambassadors of their culture to the other. What makes it worse is that unlike defence or economics, culture remains ambiguous both in its promotion and reception. It is not possible to have clear metrics of investments to results, it is perfectly possible that some visitors either to India or to Israel had some personal experiences that left them with a bitter taste of the other’s culture. One only hopes that familiarity breeds brotherhood.

Over the next decade of Indo-Israeli ties, both Delhi and Jerusalem must indeed strengthen defence cooperation in terms of sales, joint ventures, and manufacturing. On the economic front, the free trade agreement that has been languishing in the doldrums since 2004 would be a welcome catalyst to increasing trade. However, the absolute numbers will not be much – Israel is only slightly larger than Nagaland with the population of Bangalore – but the value will be in the reliability of the relationship. It is the people-to-people connections that will ultimately be the bedrock of ties and give meaning beyond the mundane. Unlike security and trade, culture needs support, encouragement, and nurture. This should be the next focus in both capitals.

Where is India’s Hindu Party?

11 Fri Mar 2016

Posted by in India, South Asia

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Pace secularism, it is perhaps India’s longest-running political farce that the Bharatiya Janata Party is a Hindu nationalist political party. Any mention of the party in the print media is usually prefaced with those two adjectives and the international press has also unquestioningly copied the locals in the custom. However, it is difficult to discern any Hindu agenda in the BJP’s governance either between 1998 and 2004 or since 2014. Although the party has used been using the label to its benefit for years, even fed it with wild rhetoric from time to time, the BJP has hardly taken up the Hindu cause as it is so often accused of doing.

BJPlogoIt is disheartening to see that few can even identify Hindu issues, such has been the impact of the jejune blaring from the media houses on India’s public sphere. Were an outsider to peek in for a second, he would assume that the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya and the Uniform Civil Code are two important political issues for Hindus – and he would be wrong. The former is largely symbolic – and yes, symbols do have power – but it does not have a large enough impact on the Hindu community to accord it such primacy among issues. As for the latter, it hardly affects Hindus except in an intellectual way – legal systems of other religions, for all their flaws, do not impact Hindus; the inequality of various communities before a national judiciary is philosophically unpalatable but ultimately of little consequence to the narrower interests of the Hindu community.

Arguably the most important item on the Hindu agenda is the liberation of their temples from government control. The Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act, first passed in Madras in the 1920s, was ostensibly enacted to introduce better management and eliminate corruption in temple administration. The law applied, as its name suggests, only to Hindu organisations; it is farcical to assume that these challenges do not plague religious organisations of other faiths or, indeed, that the government of a weak democracy is capable of better management or is freer of corruption than a private entity.

Although hundreds of temples are administered by the government, it is the rich temples that are the prize. Offerings by devotees run into hundreds of crores annually and the wealth is siphoned off to government coffers. To add insult to injury, the committees in charge of temple operations are not necessarily drawn from the community the temple serves or even pious Hindus. For example, Abdul Rehman Antulay was appointed a trustee of the famous Siddhivinayak Temple in Bombay, and the Marxist takeover of Kerala’s devaswoms is well-known. For all the talk of Hindutva by both, the media and the BJP, the party’s agenda on making temples autonomous is unclear. If indeed there exists such an action plan, it is so vapid that it does not come to mind.

An equally critical arena of Hindu interests is education. Through the innocuously named Right to Education Act (RTE), the government has essentially commandeered private school capacity to further its populist agenda. Although the Act is portrayed as creating a quota for the economically underprivileged, that number is but a small portion of the total reservation which primarily benefits other categories. Minority institutions are exempt from this state hijacking of infrastructure.

It is far more difficult for Hindus to start their own schools, training colleges, and universities than it is for minorities. Even before the RTE was passed, minority institutions also controlled their student admissions and teacher hiring criteria; they were not subject to any quotas or other regulations non-minority institutions have to follow. This effectively changes the divide in Indian education from private/public to minority/non-minority. The BJP has disappointed many of its supporters by not repealing the RTE or even attempting to put all schools minority and non, on an equal footing.

The problem is not simply about quotas, though the social engineering of the Hindu community deserves attention too. It would be quite entertaining, for instance, to see the Indian government take similar interest in Muslim affairs and legislate quotas for Ahmadis, Shia, Zaydis, Sufis, and women in madrasas.

A greater problem lies in the syllabi prescribed by the various boards of education in the country. Although everyone can agree that there ought to be some balance and rigour in the curriculum, dozens of examples of sycophancy to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and an overly rosy interpretation of the Islamic conquest of and rule over India’s overwhelmingly Hindu population fill the pages of history textbooks. In this context, it was ironic to see an MP of an allegedly Hindutva party declare in parliament just a few days ago that she was not guilty of saffronisation.

Finally, a third major plank of a core Hindu agenda would be the reversal of a  relentless assault on Hindu customs, traditions, and rituals. The law against superstition and black magic(!), the ban on Jallikattu, the sudden chorus of environmental appeals timed to perfection around Deepavali and Ganesh Chaturthi, the demand to open up temple entry to all, the call to abolish made snana, are all facets of the same agenda to delegitimise Hinduism. The BJP’s record on defending against these assaults ranges from non-existent to abysmal.

It should be noted that there are already pre-existing laws that adequately cover any real damage arising from black magic or whatever else outsiders find offensive. Between them and the voluntary nature of some of the rituals, there really is no need for interference by the state except to socially re-engineer Hindu society; it seems Hindus are the only community not guaranteed protection by the constitution from the arbitrary powers of the state.

Only a party that has a coherent position on these issues can be considered to be a Hindu party. The BJP, sadly, is not such a party although many of its individual members may indeed be devout. For those who support it on cultural grounds, it is seen more as the least anti-Hindu political party than a Hindutva party; it is the tyranny of There-Is-No-Alternative. Interestingly, the demands on these three core Hindu issues is only for equality with other faiths; no special dispensation is sought from other communities nor any largesse from the state. Were any other party to champion these very reasonable causes, it might even put a dent in the BJP’s electoral fortunes. Of course, such a move would also need to take into account media spin and the impact on other votebanks.

As for that other adjective – nationalist – that is hurled as an insult at the BJP, one would hope that all parties that seek to govern India are nationalist. Geopolitics is not a graduate history seminar where one has the intellectual luxury of sitting on the fence, above the fray; rather, it is about clearly picking your team and giving it your full-throated support. So about that Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party… Hindu, I doubt it; nationalist, I certainly hope so.

This post appeared on FirstPost on March 13, 2016.

Why Study Sanskrit?

22 Sat Nov 2014

Posted by in India, Opinion and Response, South Asia

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Why would anyone want to study Sanskrit? Is it not a dead language that no one speaks anymore? Of what use could it possibly be in this globalised age of informatics? Do we really want to be bogged down in the past when a brave, new world beckons? As one significant other put it, संस्कृत तोह सिर्फ पूजा-पाठ के लिए होता है (Sanskrit is only for religious rituals)! Surely, there must be more important things to learn?

This obtuse and philistine view has come to the fore since last month when India’s Human Resource Development minister, Smriti Irani, decided to replace German with Sanskrit as the third language in Kendriya Vidyalayas; German, however, would still continue to be offered but as a hobby. Furthermore, there appear to be some questions over how German came to be offered in the first place after a memorandum of understanding was signed between the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan and the Goethe Institut in 2011.

Regardless of the bureaucratic irregularities, the question has now arisen whether Sanskrit, a relic of the past, should be made mandatory in schools at all. It is saddening to see such retrograde, utilitarian, and dare I say – insular – views being held by so many in prominent positions. There are umpteen reasons why Sanskrit should not just be taught but be at the core of school curricula alongside Maths and Science, and most of these reasons are accepted broadly about classical languages worldwide as Latin and Greek are offered in Europe and classical Chinese in China.

First, Sanskrit lays a firm basis for the rapid acquisition of other Indian languages. In a polyglot country such as India, the value of this skill cannot be overestimated. Not only is Sanskrit the root of many North Indian languages but it has also undeniably influenced South Indian Dravidian languages. A firm grasp over Sanskrit can improve cognition of words and ideas in several languages alien to the speaker. Can this not be done with other languages such as Urdu or Bengali? The short answer is no, not as effectively as with Sanskrit.

Second, Sanskrit is known for its highly ordered and efficient linguistic and grammar rules. The use of cases, dual plurals, and other features of Sanskrit forces students to be more precise in their use of language and develops logical and reasoning skills via sentence structure. A knowledge of Sanskrit helps in understanding not just the grammar of other Indian languages but also several foreign ones such as German, Russian, and Latin which, for example, also use cases and Arabic and Hebrew which have dual nouns.

Third, moving from crass utility to meta-utility, learning Sanskrit opens the door to the culture of ancient India. What richer source of literature, philosophy, and history – with the exception, perhaps, of Tamil – can there be for ancient and medieval India? Sanskrit literature is of many hues and not all of it is religious; there is secular work as well as erotic writings in the language which would do a world of good if popularised. Children will be able to access their favourite stories in the Mahabharata, Kalidasa’s plays, and the poetry of Sriharsha. In other words, Sanskrit nourishes the inner world of the child. As their counterparts in Greece and elsewhere, the Sanskrit classics gently teach children virtues like honesty, fidelity, and courage which one hopes they will imbibe along with differential equations and pericyclic equations.

Perhaps one of the most important tasks the classics do is imbue a sense of community in children. One of the purposes of education in a state is to nurture citizenship. In a country as diffuse as India, Sanskrit remains one of the few things truly common to the overwhelming majority if not all its people. Whatever differences Indians may have in their cuisine, language, or dress, they are all descendants of the same scholars, saints, and emperors. To deny that education plays this role or should play this role – usually through the Classics and History – is contrary to all known practice worldwide.

The most obtuse charge leveled against learning Sanskrit is that it in some way represents the ‘Saffronisation” of education. This is almost as bad as arguing that Sanskrit was once the language of the privileged and so it should not be taught today. There are many hues to this fear of the saffronistas. Yet consider this: if a language is what radicalises a people, don’t look now but ISIS suddenly got a couple of hundred million new recruits! Thousands of Indian children living with their parents in the Middle East or Europe compulsorily learn Arabic or Latin and yet this hardly makes them more Muslim or Christian and less of their faiths. How is Sanskrit any different?

The greatest pity of it all is that everyone is talking about utility as early as primary and secondary education. Back in the day, school was meant to provide a child with a broad and liberal education which would enable him/her to tackle the world; it was university that was meant to professionalise young people and some wondered if that should not be postponed to graduate school. For now, one hopes that it can be agreed that school is too soon to think about utility.

Even if Sanskrit is useless, so what? How many newspaper editors in India use the calculus they learned in school at their jobs? Does any accountant care how to tell the difference between an aldehyde and a ketone? The thing about a good education is that one never knows how a tangential lesson may suddenly provide an answer to a problem in the present.

India’s past is undeniably Sanskritic and the real question ought to be why Sanskrit was not emphasised more all these years. Learning the language does not produce Indian supremacist automatons any more than learning English makes everyone involuntarily genuflect towards the Windsors. Sanskrit gives access to a most incredible world called the past, and most delightfully, it rebels against the creation of mini-consumers as cogs in the world economy.

This post appeared on Daily News & Analysis on December 11, 2014.