Youth for Equality, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Donate Generously

Youth for Equality, JNU Chapter has always maintained that the proposed OBC Reservation Policy is only a vote-bank gimmick aimed at dividing the student community and increasing the differences within the society. YFE-JNU has continued its struggle against the irrational policies of the Government. Our 33 days of Hunger Strike has gone down the pages of history as a symbolic of Youth Power. We have continued holding Candlelight Marches, Public Talks, Mass Mobilisation Programmes and Rural Contact Programmes to raise awareness about the pernicious and divisive policies of caste-based reservation that only help reinstate caste-barriers!!

We need your help and encouragement in fighting for the noble cause. Please send your suggestions/ ideas to y4ejnu@gmail.com


(1) To contribute by cheque/DD(*), make it payable in New Delhi to YOUTH FOR EQUALITY, JNU CHAPTER.

(2) Direct Transfer to our Bank Account- YOUTH FOR EQUALITY, JNU CHAPTER (Account No. 4152 [Savings Bank Account], Corporation Bank, Vasant Vihar, New Delhi)

(3) To contribute funds by cash payment you can contact us at y4ejnu@gmail.com(#) or (011)-26179751 (ask for Ms Manpreet).


    (*) Cheques/DDs may be dropped either in any Corporation Bank ATM Centre/ Cheque Collection Centre with the Bank Account details included (given in point 2 above), or post-mailed/couriered to Youth for Equality (JNU Chapter) c/o Prof Rakesh Bhatnagar, Lab No. 122, Centre for Biotechnology, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 110067.

    (#) If you contact us by email for fund-contribution, please include     "FUNDS" in the Subject line.

    posted by Youth for Equality, JNU at 11:45:00 AM | 1 comments

    Samta Yatra on 23 July 2006








    posted by Youth for Equality, JNU at 9:53:00 AM | 0 comments

    Friday, July 21, 2006

    IP and JNU fight back

    Photos from the Candlelight March on July 21 (Click here for more)

    Youth for Equality in JNU organised a Candlelight march on 21 July to subvert the Government's plans of introducing the caste-based OBC Reservation Bill in the coming Monsoon Session. The march was a huge success, with approximately 250 concerned students of JNU having participated. The march that started with 100 students swelled to 250 as it took a serpentine path from Ganga Dhaba to Chandrabhaga Hostel in JNU, covering most of the hostels and dhabas.

    Slogans like "Jaat ke naam pe baata hai, desh ko maara chaata hai" and "Students united shall always be victorious, government frustrated shall always be defeated"- ruled the show apart from the opportune "Na paani hai na bijli hai, aarakshan ki khuji hai" (there was load shedding while the march was progressing).

    JNU is a premier Central university of India whose students are proud of their socially sensitive campus. The marching students were of the opinion that the proposed Bill on OBC reservation will divide the student community on caste-lines and increase differences within the society. They re-emphasised their demands of (a) roll back of the casteist OBC reservation policy, (b) a judicial review of the existing reservation policies to see if they have really helped the needy sections, and (c) implementation of innovative measures beyond reservation, to forward the cause social justice.
    YFE has become a new brand in the JNU campus- many students in the march were seen flaunting their YFE T-shirts!!!

    JNU students also condemned the police high-handedness meted out to their counterparts in IP University. IPU had observed a token hunger-strike of 12 hours today, wherein 92 students had participated. While the students were peacefully observing the strike, CRPF was deployed in the campus to cause threat and unrest. Later, when the students started their candlelight march the police blocked their way and manhandled many of them. Despite the police cordon, some 40 students reached the Red Fort and broke their hunger-strike there. The police arrested 31 students and harassed them for about an hour before they were released. The police alleged that this had been done because they were carrying mashaals, while all that the students were carrying were candles!! SHAME ON THE UPA GOVERNMENT FOR PURSUING THE WITCH-HUNT AGAINST OUR DEMOCRATIC RIGHT TO FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION.

    SPEAK AGAINST THE PERPETUATION OF CASTE BOUNDARIES, STAND UNITED!!

    posted by Youth for Equality, JNU at 11:57:00 PM | 1 comments

    Light a Candle

    posted by Youth for Equality, JNU at 7:55:00 PM | 0 comments

    Sunday, July 16, 2006

    Who will reap your Quota's benefits


    Times of India, Bangalore, 14 July 2006

    ARJUN SINGH SHAME SHAME !!

    WHO WILL REAP YOUR QUOTA’S BENEFITS IF YOU REFUSE THEM SCHOOLING ??

    VOTE-BANK POLITICS, DOWN DOWN !!

    CASTEIST POLICIES, DOWN DOWN!!

    posted by Youth for Equality, JNU at 3:25:00 AM | 0 comments

    Thursday, July 13, 2006

    ...my continuation on the commission will serve no useful purpose.


    Dr Pratap Bhanu Mehta speaks in JNU (Top)
    The large audience hangs on to every word (Below)
    (for more photographs visit http://y4ejnu.multiply.com/photos/album/37)

    Dr Pratap Bhanu Mehta, while speaking on Knowledge and Society in the 21st century to an overwhelming audience in JNU exposed the shortcomings of Higher Education in India and also expressed concern about how gimmicks like the Reservation issue will only create blocks within the student community.

    Here's a summary of points Dr Mehta picked up, during his talk-

    1) The status of Education in India is in such shambles that it needs an urgent argument and a Public Debate to be able to move ahead in any positive direction.
    2) When we talk about methods of improving our education system while ensuring social justice we should also ask if there are methods better than the one we are using, that can facilitate these objectives more effectively. If we pre-emptively abort the pursuance of such alternatives because of mutual mistrust, it will be tantamount to admitting defeat before we embark.
    3) It is unfortunate that the Indian polity thinks and propagates such misleading ideas as "India is a world leader in higher education." This is NOT the same thing as "India supplies the world with highly qualified professionals." Indians doing well abroad CANNOT be counted as the symbols of India's success in Higher Education! To make a comparison- for every 1 Indian in India who holds a patent, 28,000 Indians do that abroad. Our situation is so precarious that if Indians who go abroad to explore educational opportunities stay back here- it will only result in higher demographic pressure on our education system- depriving larger numbers of their aspirations of education.
    4) To compare with H.E. in China, of whom India was marginally ahead in the 70's, now India is behind by many orders of magnitude. Around 5000 Indian students are enrolled in China for courses in Medicine. Also, while China has taken out massive recruitment drives to pull teachers/professors to China (both Chinese and foreigners) to teach, India has not made any such efforts.
    5) India has some 300 odd universities, of which only 20% impart professional education like medicine and engineering. Yet, most of the money of Higher Education is siphoned off into these areas. This is in stark contrast to what is seen in most other educationally sound countries- and is counter-productive.
    6) While most serious countries spend about 16% of their budget on education without raising public tax, India needs to levy an Education Cess to increase its expenditure in Higher Education. Anybody saying that there aren't enough resources to put into Higher Education is SIMPLY lying!! The budget of JNU is nothing compared to that of Ashoka Hotel!!!!!!!!!
    7) India is probably the only country in the world where even setting up an undergraduate university needs an Act of the Parliament! This and other bureaucratic tapes in the education system in India keep everything under such suffocating control that growth is almost impossible. A system where the teachers cannot design their own courses, where the students cannot choose their own courses, where these courses/teaching will be tightly controlled by the authorities above- little growth is possible.
    8) India must have different kind of institutions for students of different needs- it is neither essential nor required for everyone to do a PhD!! If there are students who want quick employment, courses should be available for such needs. A good example can be University of California (Berkley) and the California State University (Long Beach) - while the former has formidable standards of entry, the latter is obliged to admit any student who wants to enter. This kind of dual system ensures that each student gets what they want.
    9) China has seen a tremendous growth in the number of private universities in the recent past, and this has been due to the acute demographic pressure in that country. If the State cannot or is not willing to spend money to bring up enough opportunities for education, our demographic pressures demand that we catch any help that may be possible. Thus, private institutes of learning are a dire necessity!!
    10) Unfortunately, the debate of education is so ludicrously focussed on the inputs- never on the outputs. We all are focussed on who gets in, not on whether who gets out is worth it. In a recent survey in Delhi- it was seen that 50% of the medical practitioners perform only as good as quacks!! This clearly tells us that our institutes of learning are not doing enough to teach students. Our top institutes like the IITs/IIMs are not institutes of learning, but institutes of screening for entry. This will have to change. Quality standards should also be imposed on the outputs- not on the inputs alone.
    11) Best society is that which allows everyone to meet their aspirations and that is where the need to provide opportunity arrives. Yet, to uphold standards is also very important- we have to respect the intrinsic autonomy of the sphere of every field. If athletic skills are the ones that matter in athletics- they should be the major yardstick to choose athletes. Replacing this yardstick by other criteria (like regional/ caste bias) is dangerous.
    12) In terms of Social Justice, the miserably low percentage (less than 10%) of people within the SC/STs having benefited from our current schemes is a stark teller of how poorly such schemes have fared. Yet, the polity's ignorance and lack of vision is so high that they see social justice and reservation as synonymous!
    13) Much is being made of the South Indian success. With >80% of the private institutions of the country thriving in South India, it is not hard to guess the hollowness of the argument. Also, when such a large section (75%) of the South Indian population is covered under some form quota- the objective of quota stands defeated!! Before we say that South India has been a success, we must ask- what was the objective of the South Indian experiment with massive quotas. If it was marginalising the forward castes, it definitely has been a success- the FCs of the south have done a mass exodus from the states. But, if the objective was social justice- the success story needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.
    14) We should refrain from accepting the blocks the Indian polity assigns us to- SC, ST, OBC, OC and the like. These identities should be given up by us!!

    15) Youth for Equality has done a great job in making the government sit up and take notice. It is for the students to assert what they want and not for the polity to dole out what it likes. Now, YFE has to strive to do a wider job- to bring about a paradigm shift in the way our system works; to build trust, hope and confidence and become the Pressure Point that demands for a change!!

    posted by Youth for Equality, JNU at 2:09:00 AM | 2 comments

    Wednesday, July 12, 2006

    Dr Pratap Bhanu Mehta speaks

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    Below is the full text of the resignation letter Dr Pratap Bhanu Mehta sent to the Prime Minister on Monday, 22 May, 2006 (Source: The Indian Express, New Delhi, 23 May 2006)

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    Dear Prime Minister,

    I write to resign as Member-Convener of the National Knowledge Commission. I believe the Commission’s mandate is extremely important, and I am deeply grateful that you gave me the opportunity to serve on it. But many of the recent announcements made by your government with respect to higher education lead me to the conclusion that my continuation on the commission will serve no useful purpose.

    The Knowledge Commission was given an ambitious mandate to strengthen India’s knowledge potential at all levels. We had agreed that if all sections of Indian society were to participate in and make use of the knowledge economy, we would need a radical paradigm shift in the way we thought of the production, dissemination and use of knowledge. In some ways this paradigm shift would have to be at least as radical as the economic reforms you helped usher in more than a decade ago. The sense of intellectual excitement that the commission generated stemmed from the fact that it represented an opportunity to think boldly, honestly and with an eye to posterity. But the government’s recent decision (announced by Honorable Minister of Human Resource Development on the floor of Parliament) to extend quotas for OBCs in central institutions, the palliative measures the government is contemplating to defuse the resulting agitation, and the process employed to arrive at these measures are steps in the wrong direction. They violate four cardinal principles that institutions in a knowledge based society will have to follow: they are not based on assessment of effectiveness, they are incompatible with the freedom and diversity of institutions, they more thoroughly politicise the education process, and they inject an insidious poison that will harm the nation’s long-term interest.

    These measures will not achieve social justice. I am as committed as anyone to two propositions. Every student must be enabled to realise his/her full potential regardless of financial or social circumstances. Achieving this aim requires radical forms of affirmative action. But the numerically mandated quotas your government is proposing are deeply disappointing, for the following reasons. First, these measures foreclose any possibility of more intelligent targeting that any sensible programme should require. For one thing, the historical claims of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and the nature of the deprivations they face are qualitatively of a different order than those faced by Other Backward Castes, at least in North India. It is plainly disingenuous to lump them together in the same narrative of social injustice and assume that the same instruments should apply to both. It is for this reason that I advocated status quo for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes until such time as better and more effective measures can be found to achieve affirmative action for them.

    Some have proposed the inclusion of economic criterion: this is something of an improvement, but does not go far enough. What we needed, Honorable Prime Minister, was space to design more effective mechanisms of targeting groups that need to be targeted for affirmative action. For instance, there are a couple of well-designed deprivation indexes that do a much better job of targeting the relevant social deprivations and picking out merit. The government’s action is disappointing, because you have prematurely foreclosed these possibilities. In foreclosing these possibilities the government has revealed that it cares about tokenism more than social justice. It has sent the signal that there is no room for thinking about social justice in a new paradigm.

    As a society we focus on reservations largely because it is a way of avoiding doing the things that really create access. Increasing the supply of good quality institutions at all levels (not to be confused with numerical increases), more robust scholarship and support programmes will go much further than numerically mandated quotas. When you assumed office, you had sketched out a vision of combining economic reform with social justice. Increased public investment is going to be central to creating access opportunities. It would be presumptuous for me to suggest where this increased public investment is going to come from, but there are ample possibilities: for instance, earmarking proceeds from genuine disinvestment for education will do far more for access than quotas. We are not doing enough to genuinely empower marginalised groups, but are offering condescending palliatives like quotas as substitute. All the measures currently under discussion are to defuse the agitation, not to lay the foundations for a vibrant education system. If I may borrow a phrase of Tom Paine’s, we pity the plumage, but forget the dying bird.

    Second, the measures your government is contemplating violate the diversity principle. Why should all institutions in a country the size of India adopt the same admissions quotas? Is there no room at all for different institutions experimenting with different kinds of affirmative action policies that are most appropriate for their pedagogical mission? How will institutions feel empowered? How will creativity in social justice programmes be fostered, if we continue with a “one size fits all” approach? Could it not be that some state institutions follow numerically mandated quotas, while others are left free to devise their own programmes? The government’s announcement is deeply disappointing because it reinforces the cardinal weakness of the Indian system: all institutions have to be reduced to the same level.

    Third, and related to diversity, is the question of freedom. As an academic I find it to be an appalling spectacle when a group of ministers is empowered to come up with admissions policies, seat formulas for institutions across the country. While institutions have responsibilities and are accountable to society, how will they ever achieve excellence and autonomy if basic decisions like who they should teach, what they should teach, how much they should charge are uniformly mandated by government diktat? As you know, more than anyone else, the bane of our education institutions is that politicians feel free to hoist any purpose they wish upon them: their favourite ideology, their preferred conception of social justice, their idea of representativeness, or their own men and women. Everything else germane to a healthy academic life and effective pedagogy becomes subordinate to these purposes. Concerned academics risked a good deal, battling the previous government’s instrumental use of educational institutions for ideological purposes. Though your objectives are different, your government is sending a similar message about our institutions: in the final analysis, they are playthings for politicians to mess around with. Nations are not built by specific programmes, they are built by healthy institutions, and the process by which your government is arriving at its decisions suggests contempt for the autonomy and integrity of academic life. Your government has reinforced the very paradigm of the state’s relations with educational institutions that has weakened us.

    In this process, the arguments that have been coming from your government are plainly disingenuous. It is true that a constitutional amendment was hastily passed to overturn the effects of the Inamdar decision. At the time I had written that the decision was property rights decision that was trying to unshackle private institutions from an overbearing state. But since the state had already displaced its responsibilities to the private sector it decided that the ramifications of Inamdar would be too onerous and passed a constitutional amendment. One can quibble over whether this amendment was justified or not. But even in its present form it is only an enabling legislation. It does not require that every public institution has numerically mandated quotas for OBCs. To hear your government consistently hiding behind the pretext of the constitutional amendment is yet another example of how we are foreclosing the fine distinctions that any rigorous approach to access and excellence requires.

    Finally, I believe that the proposed measures will harm the nation’s vital interests. It is often said that caste is a reality in India. I could not agree more. But your government is in the process of making caste the only reality in India. Instead of finding imaginative solutions to allow us to transcend our own despicable history of inequity, your government is ensuring that we remain entrapped in the caste paradigm. Except that now by talking of OBCs and SC/STs in the same narrative we are licensing new forms of inequity and arbitrariness.

    The Knowledge Economy of the twenty-first century will require participation of all sections of society. When we deprive any single child, of any caste, of relevant opportunities, we mutilate ourselves as a society and diminish our own possibilities. But, as you understand more than most, globalisation requires us to think of old objectives in new paradigms: the market and competition for talent is global, institutions need to be more agile and nimble, and there has to be creativity and diversity of institutional forms if a society is to position itself to take advantage the Knowledge Economy. I believe that the measures your government is proposing will inhibit achieving both social justice and economic well-being.

    I write this letter with a great deal of regret. In my colleagues on the Knowledge Commission you will find a group that is unrivalled in its dedication, commitment and creativity, and I hope you will back them in full measure so that they can accomplish their mission in other areas. I assure you that the commission’s functioning will suffer no logistical harm on account of my departure.

    I recognise that in a democracy one has to respectfully accede to the decisions of elected representatives. But I also believe that democracies are ill-served if individuals do not frankly and publicly point out the perils that certain decisions may pose for posterity. I owe it to public reason to make my reasons for resigning public. I may be wrong in my judgment about the consequences of your government’s decisions, but at this juncture I cannot help concluding that what your government is proposing poses grave dangers for India as a nation. On this occasion I cannot help thinking about the anxieties of a man who knew a thing or two about constitutional values, who was more rooted in politics than any of us can hope to be, and who understood the distinction between statesmanship and mere politics: Jawaharlal Nehru. He wrote, “So these external props, as I may call them, the reservations of seats and the rest, may possibly be helpful occasionally, but they produce a false sense of political relation, a false sense of strength, and, ultimately therefore, they are not so nearly important as real educational, cultural and economic advance which gives them inner strength to face any difficulty or opponent.” Since your government continues to abet a politics of illusion, I cannot serve any useful purpose by continuing on the Knowledge Commission under such circumstances.

    With warmest personal regards.

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    posted by Youth for Equality, JNU at 5:18:00 PM | 0 comments