NEP Is Not To Create Citizens For A Democratic Society: Talking To Prabhat Patnaik
By Nitheesh Narayanan
In this interview with Nitheesh Narayanan (NN), leading economist Prabhat Patnaik talks about several issues, ranging from COVID-19 and the country’s response to it, pandemic and populism, the Global South, but most importantly, about the National Education Policy 2020. Patnaik gets into the nuances of what he feels are the problems of the document, which, according to many, will be detrimental to the future of education in this country. He covers aspects like the NEP’s attempts at pushing vocationalism and saffronisation as well as its disturbing silences about issues like campus democracy, committees against sexual harassment, reservation and the like. It is not only aimed at the creation of obedient slaves to capital, but at not creating citizens for a democratic society, says Patnaik. Read on.
Nitheesh Narayanan (NN): You have aptly characterised the New Education Policy (NEP) as a ‘great leap backwards’. Among a range of problems, one of the most striking is the wide emphasis on ‘vocational education’. How do you understand this emphasis?
Prabhat Patnaik (PP): I see the NEP as very different from the way it has been generally commented upon. People see it as part of the various steps the government is trying to take and their limitations and so on. I see it differently. I believe that the idea of uniform education, based on a common syllabus and education to a large number of people, is really a modern idea. It is a capitalist idea. You didn’t have it in feudalism because there was no labour market under feudalism. People didn’t go out of their villages, other cities for jobs. Capitalism creates a labour market, and it also creates an administrative structure that itself operates internationally. So the requirement of common education for large numbers of people who would serve the interests of capitalism, including as intelligentsia, is something which is felt essentially under capitalism. But on the other hand, the idea of universal education is not a capitalist idea. Capitalism didn’t have universal education in the 19th century. You remember Charles Dickens’ novels and you find school-going aged children being engaged in all kinds of activities, including economic activities. The idea of universal education is a modern one that arose with the rise of socialism and social democracy in Europe under the challenge of socialism. It is a post-war idea. In India, it arises as part of the anti-colonial struggle. So on the one hand, you have this business of universal education at least up to some level, which is a promise. On the other hand, you have capitalism, requiring a certain amount of education, but a certain limited amount of it.
Therefore, the real issue is how to disenfranchise a large number of students, while at the same time, giving the impression that you are providing universal education. This is the way I approach the NEP and what it does is, on the one hand, gives education to the kind of people in terms of numbers it requires for providing international finance capital as well as the domestic corporate oligarchy. Basically, those are the people who work for the state machinery, work in the university and occupy the executive positions in all these corporate sectors and firms. They are the people who need to be educated for the requirement of capitalism. On the other hand, as far as a large number of people are concerned, while you have to have a certain impression as if education is being universalised, you, in fact, make sure that many of them drop out of the education streams through vocationalisation and so on and at the same time they basically compete for a few available jobs in the sense that you know.
If there are fifty jobs available and a hundred applicants, in that case, you ration out those jobs among the hundred applicants. So there is one sector where you are providing education to suit the requirements of capitalism and the bourgeois state, and there is the other sector in which you are actually providing vocational education to large numbers of people, who then compete for limited numbers of jobs which are then rationed out among them. So that is the kind of dualism that this New Education Policy is promising to develop. In some sense, it has been developing for some time, but this NEP makes it very clear, and therefore, the whole emphasis on vocational education.
In a democracy, as everyone votes and elects a government, people must have an awareness of issues around them, and therefore, democracy requires a minimum amount of general education of its citizens. If you take people off to the vocational stream without giving them the minimum general education, then you are not creating citizens for a democratic society. This is what the NEP is all about, and therefore, the wide emphasis on vocationalisation. It appears for many that, as Modi said, the NEP is aimed to create job creators instead of job seekers — that is not the actual reality. What it means is that you take people out of the general stream of education, for which they should have a right, and put them in vocational streams after which they compete for a few numbers of jobs.
NN: RSS’s Sevabharti owns one of India’s largest private school networks and aims at the saffronisation of school education. The NEP, in the name of promoting partnership with ‘philanthropic organisations’, gives space for such educational networks. Moreover, RSS affiliates have stated that 60% of their demands have been incorporated in the NEP. How do you delineate NEP’s push towards saffronisation of education?
PP: You are absolutely right. The NEP, on the one hand, is carrying forward the neoliberal capitalist agenda. On the other, it is carrying forward the Hindutva agenda. There is absolutely no conflict between these two because of the fact that both these want to create a group of people who won’t ask questions and are obedient to whatever that is provided to them; who do not resist, protest, or assert themselves. It actually wants to create very obedient servants of capital. So Hindutva reinforces the tendency to produce obedient servants of capital, under the era of neoliberalism, which is there anyway. So the two agendas go very well together.
Look at it this way, what should be the purpose of education? The purpose of education must be to build a better society. There can be no doubt about it. To build a better society, you must be dissatisfied with the existing society. If you think the existing society is the best you can get, then there is no point in building a better society. So to build a better society, you must develop a critical outlook vis-a-vis the existing society. Against caste, for instance, or untouchability, the oppression of Dalits, minorities, women, the poor and so on. So the whole idea of education must be to produce a questioning and critical mood amongst students, where they feel angry about the existing inequalities in society in order to build a better society. But if you look at the entire emphasis in this document, the idea is to produce conformism. “Nishkama Karma” (self-less or wage-less labour) is the term they have used. How can you have class-struggle if you believe in “Nishkama Karma”? Similarly, the idea is to talk about fundamental duties, not fundamental rights of the citizen. They say to be ‘proud of being an Indian’.
There are many things wrong with this society, and the students must, therefore critically look at society rather than being in the uncritical business of ‘proud of being an Indian’. This is where the Hindutva agenda and the neoliberal agenda converge, and the idea is to produce conformism.
NN: How do you understand the NEP in the context of the ongoing nationalism debate? What kind of nationalism does NEP promote? What is your take on the argument that it is a colonial document as its objective and contents are not much different from the education policies of the colonial period?
PP: There is no conflict between colonialism and the Hindutva version of nationalism. There is a conflict between colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism. But Hindutva is not anti-colonial nationalism. The RSS was never part of the anti-colonial struggle. On the contrary, after Independence, Golwalker, the then chief of the RSS, actually thought that Indians couldn’t manage their own affairs and they would have to call the British back. So the point is that there is absolutely no conflict between the Hindutva version of nationalism and colonialism. In the colonial period, the whole purpose that was visualised for education was that the educated should not feel angry with the existing state of affairs. Gandhiji asked the students to leave their colleges and universities to join the civil disobedience movement. In other words, the whole idea was that the students were getting an education to become bureaucrats and to become conformists in the British Raj, which really was not what the people of India wanted.
The anti-colonial struggle wanted an education that would actually create the ‘organic intellectuals’ of the free Indian people. But on the other hand, what Hindutva nationalism demands is something which is very much in tune with what international finance capital demands — to produce a whole lot of people who would be the ‘organic intellectuals’ of the international finance capital and who would be conformists, so that there is no revolt against the hegemony of the international finance capital and the domestic corporate oligarchy.
NN: In a neoliberal world, education becomes the sole site for social mobility of the oppressed. The NEP is conspicuously silent on the issue of social justice and access to education. Similarly, it’s silence on aspects like GSCASH (committees against sexual harassment), campus democracy etc. are also worth noticing. How do you read these silences?
PP: The Hindutva-corporate agenda, as I said, is to produce an education system that seeks to create the canon-fodder for capital but no critical-thinking attitude. This requires a number of things. Firstly, it requires campuses without any political engagements by the students. If on the campus, you have a union, general body meetings, bringing out periodicals and writings — then that’s bad from the point of view of this NEP. Therefore, the suppression of campus democracy is a very important item in this. Secondly, the whole idea is to exclude the socially oppressed and the economically poor from the ambit of education. You mostly push them into vocational training, and ensure that they never receive education on par with everybody else. There is no mention in the NEP about affirmative action in the form of reservation. In my own university, JNU, reservation is gradually given a quiet burial. And this is a university located in New Delhi, right under the nose of the central government and nothing happens here without the permission of the central government. Therefore, this is the official thinking now, that quietly there would be a negation of affirmative action. So keeping Dalits out and secular and democratic values out, is something that is very much part of this NEP.
NN: One of the arguments in favour of the NEP is that foreign universities will launch their campuses in India, which will supposedly enhance the quality of education in India. How do you respond to the argument about “globalising Indian education” by giving room to foreign universities?
PP: The idea that having foreign universities in India will enhance quality is a wrong argument, for two reasons. Firstly, I believe that an education system in India has to be different from an education system in the West. Take my subject, economics. If you are teaching economics to an Indian student, you want to look at the problems of the Indian economy. To understand the problems of the Indian economy, you have to look at the history of the Indian economy; you have to look at the ways in which colonialism pauperised the people. You have to look at the history of Industrialisation. So, the point is that it is impossible to teach the Indian economy without teaching about colonialism, about the drain of surplus from India. Now, this is not taught in Harvard, Oxford, or Cambridge. Therefore, Indian students have to be taught specifically the things which are not necessarily what a British or an American student is taught. There is no such thing as a common syllabus across all universities in the world. Therefore, to abandon what should be of relevance to Indian students, in the name of inviting foreign universities, is not useful. For example, the British universities who might set up a campus here are not going to teach about British colonialism. So when you are inviting foreign universities here, you are fundamentally abandoning the syllabus that an Indian student must be taught to know what is going on around here. All education, as I said, must, therefore, be concerned with improving the state of the people, and therefore, be concerned with the environment in which people live. The environment here is not the environment of Oxford or Harvard, because of which this move will amount to abandoning the curriculum that we have had all these years, in order to accommodate foreign universities.
Secondly, let’s be very clear, when Oxford, Harvard or Cambridge comes here, they are not coming here to actually set up another Oxford or Harvard or Cambridge in India. They just take this as a money-making enterprise. It would be an exclusive affair for the rich with no commitment and accessibility for the poor. Let’s not have delusions about it; it will be solely a step towards commodification of higher education.
NN: You have been writing about the crises of capitalism. The pandemic has made visible these crises on several levels, and we have been witnessing that even far-right neoliberal regimes are taking a ‘socialist turn’ in managing the pandemic. However, in India, the opposite is at work. We see the abrogation of labour laws and no socialisation of healthcare — like a war against people. What’s your take?
PP: The pandemic has created a huge crisis, not only in India but also in the rest of the world. It has given rise to a huge contraction in output and a huge increase in unemployment. In Britain, for instance, they haven’t seen such a wage repression in ages. In the United States, similarly, unemployment is an extremely high level. In this context, the response in many of the advanced capitalist countries is quite different from the response in countries like ours. The advanced countries are thinking in terms of activating the state in order to undertake larger expenditure. Boris Johnson said, if necessary, they are going to tax the rich in order to finance this expenditure, so that there is aggregate demand generated in the economy which would increase the output.
However, in countries like ours, on the contrary, you find austerity. Even though large numbers of uprooted migrant workers had to walk back home, the government didn’t provide any cash assistance to any migrant worker. Everyone was saying that the government should provide some aid of at least Rs. 7000 per family to about 8% of the population and the government did nothing. The government is listening to the dictates of international finance capital which doesn’t want either taxation of the rich or a larger fiscal deficit.
Therefore, in the economies of the south, what we have is a movement towards authoritarian fascism. In the advanced capitalist countries, there’s a movement towards a greater role of the state, increase in taxation of the rich and public expenditure and some assistance to the workers and so on, and here, we have exactly the opposite — greater tax relief for the rich, greater burdens on the poor, and greater austerity measures.
NN: The pandemic has occurred at a time when right-wing populism is on the ascent across the globe. It is also noteworthy that the pandemic has affected the most in countries with authoritarian regimes. How do you see the relationship between pandemics and populism and its future?
PP: I don’t prefer the term ‘right-wing populism’. I use the word ‘authoritarian fascism’. Now the point is that there is a big difference between the conditions of the inter-war period (the 1930s) and now. In the 1930s, you had authoritarian fascist regimes coming to power in a large number of countries, and those governments increased military expenditure and therefore generated employment. So even though they were right-wing governments, they actually, for a while before the Second World War really began, brought their economies out of the depression through militarisation. How did they do that? They spent by enlarging the fiscal deficit.
Today, we live in a world in which governments belong to the nation-state, while on the other hand, finance is globalised. Therefore, as finance doesn’t like larger fiscal deficit and since finance is globalised, the nation-state has to listen to the dictates of finance capital. Otherwise, there will be a massive outflow of finance because of which you would have a series of financial crises. Therefore, finance manages to have its way, and there is no possibility of a larger fiscal deficit and because of that, what you find is that the capacity of even these authoritarian governments to overcome the economic crisis is zero.
So authoritarian fascist governments like Modi’s in India may give concessions to the rich, smash trade unions, come down heavily on workers, make land available to the big corporates by evicting tribal people, but none of it is really going to make an impact as far as overcoming the crisis is concerned. That requires stimulation of aggregate demands, which can be done through larger state expenditure, financed by larger fiscal deficit and taxing the capitalists. But taxes on capitalists are not going to be levied and the larger fiscal deficit is out of the question, because of which, these governments are incapable of resolving the crisis for the people, even in the way that the 1930s governments were capable of. Now that being the case, the only thing they can do is to divert popular attention by talking about building a temple to Ram, dividing people by religious lines, and giving concessions to capitalists — all of which again is not going to work. So these are governments, which are fundamentally bankrupt in terms of ideas and agendas, and the only clear agenda they have is a combination of repression and communalism. All this acts as a screen behind which multinational corporations, finance capital and domestic capitalist oligarchy are given a free hand to run and loot the economy.
NN: Amid all these crises, Hindu nationalists are finding their way forward with the Ram Mandir issue, the abrogation of Article 370, and so on. Do you think Hindu nationalism would be able to continue their march by concealing the existing crises and contradictions for long?
PP: We should be clear about one thing: The ‘Hindu Rashtra’ is not for the Hindus. It is a complete misnomer, because the Hindu Rashtra is going to further oppress those Hindus who are workers, who belong to trade unions, whose labour rights are being trampled upon — all of them are going to be suppressed. There are Hindus who are in universities, who are democrats, students, teachers, and so on. What they do is to emphasise only on one identity in a person who has multiple identities. A person may be a worker; he may belong to the Hindu religion, he may belong to the state of Bengal, or Uttar Pradesh and so on. So there are several identities that we all carry, and out of that, they pick out one identity while suppressing all the other aspects of life, to which the same man belongs. You suppress the trade union, not because all workers are Muslims. It is not as if all the migrant workers who had to walk back to their home during the pandemic were all Muslims. Of course not.
So the idea that majoritarianism is for the majority is wrong. When we talk about the Hindu Rashtra, it is not for the Hindus, but an authoritarian fascist state. It would be dominated by a combination of Hindutvavadis on the one hand and international finance capital and domestic corporate oligarchy on the other. So majoritarianism doesn’t mean a state for the majority, it is a screen behind which an acute minority is trying to impose its authoritarian rule by getting a momentary sanction of these large numbers of people. It is a way of hoodwinking people, who give sanction to an authoritarian regime that is actually bent on fighting the working class, the peasantry, petty producers and so on, in the interest of big capital.
NN: Finally, with the aggregating challenge of neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism, how do you see the way forward? What kinds of struggles are the need of the hour?
PP: I think there are two kinds of things that we should be fighting for. One is the defence of class interest and the rights of the working people — the working class, peasants, fishermen, craftsmen and the like. Secondly, in order to defend the rights of the working people, we have to defend the rights of everybody, because after all this is an authoritarian regime. Therefore, the struggle for democracy and the struggle of the working people to defend their rights and livelihood has to be gelled together. I think this is where the Left can play a vital role — in bringing about a large gathering of democratic forces, and uniting them, not only on a democratic agenda but on a minimum agenda of defending the rights and livelihood of the working people.
Nitheesh Narayanan is the editor of Student Struggle, a Central Secretariat member of SFI, and a PhD scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy.
Cover Art: By Sreelakshmi Santhini Bahuleyan, IIT Guwahati
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