Communist Party of India [CPI(M)] Polit Bureau member Brinda Karat has said she is “very distressed” to know that Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes employees had to form their own “associations” to collectively address their issues.
Inaugurating the 57th State conference of the All Kerala Government College Teachers’ Association here on Friday, she said caste still remained a convenient tool in the hands of elitists to filter out oppressed people from the mainstream.
The Left’s demand for SC/ST recruitment to various faculties in the Delhi University was opposed both by the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the premise that it would affect efficiency and lower academic standards.
A prison
Ms. Karat said that caste was a glass ceiling for some and a prison for all, chiefly women. If a woman loved outside her caste, she was ostracised, in some instances conveniently charged with being a jihadist, and in extreme cases killed in the name of honour.
She said only 42 per cent of young women reached higher education institutions.
“Why not 100 per cent?” she asked.
She said Union Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani was promoting the RSS strategy to ideologically enslave students by indoctrinating them with a subverted version of history. Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself promoted unscientific and irrational thinking, she said.
The BJP’s right wing narrative was loaded with toxic formulations against women, Dalits, tribal people, and minorities. It crushed the right to dissent and question, Ms. Karat said.
Education should be for liberation, not enslavement. It should address the universal angst for emancipation. Children of migrant workers had little access to education. The Central government’s deregulation of private educational institutions would open the sector for entities that were opposed to the country’s secular democratic polity, she said.
Teachers should be in the vanguard of alternative politics, the only secular bulwark against such trespasses. They should tell students what was the country’s true history, at least as far as its scientific and social advances were concerned, Ms. Karat said
K. Sampath, MP, spoke.
