Given the ease with which our governments change their decisions and policies, the Forum for Rights of Children’s Education (FORCE) is justified in their demand. What they want is to ensure that their children have the right to choose the language they want to study in and the way the parents see this will be ensured is by making the Medium of Instruction (MoI) policy into law. They can’t be faulted in that.
Yet, at the same time, parents sitting at the Azad Maidan on a chain hunger strike demanding that the MoI policy of the government be introduced as a Bill and thence passed into an Act and notified, need to also consider that mere legislation of a policy does not give it any permanency. It can at best give it legitimacy, but as has been seen in the past, there is no irreversibility attached to any piece of legislation. Laws can be changed just as frequently as policies can and are, and this can be done by the government of the day depending on its ideologies and its constituency.
The prime reason for the demand to legislate the policy is the fear that the government may change its mind and stop giving grants to English medium schools at some point of time in the future. The parents and the FORCE behind the agitation need to only throw back their minds to just a few years ago when a government passed an ordinance to amend a law to overturn a Supreme Court ruling to save a starred hotel’s structure from demolition. If that is not enough of an example of how a law can be changed, this year the government, despite facing much protest, amended the Panchayat Act via an ordinance to have village panchayat elections on party basis and then, following the ruling party’s rather indifferent showing in the elections, has now decided that the municipal elections slated for October this will not be held on party lines. This, after the Legislative Assembly passed the amendment in the previous sitting in March this year. Or for that matter, how about the Tenancy Act that is to see another change in the ongoing Assembly session to amend the amendment that has been objected to by large sections of the people.
It will never be easy for the current government to justify the passage of the MoI policy as an Act. Their manifesto, especially of the BJP that is the major partner in the government having a majority of its own, had promised grants to primary schools imparting education in the regional language and the politicians in power today had protested on the streets when the Congress government had announced grants to English primary schools. The law being sought is the exact opposite of what the party promised and what it wants that pubic to believe it stands. Though this government is being known for its many U-turns, this is one U-turn that the chief minister will not want to take. He has assured at various points of time and even this week in the Assembly the grants to the existing English primary schools will continue. That is a large constituency that this government cannot afford to alienate further by taking back grants.
Looking back to the time when the MoI policy was announced, the then chief minister Manohar Parrikar had described it as an ‘administrative decision’. What he was saying then was that the government did not want to disturb the situation following the previous government’s decision as any change would affect a large number of children and so adopted a kind of status quo on the issue by announcing that aided primary schools that made the change to the English medium the previous year would continue to get government grants. The then chief minister Manohar Parrikar had played an ace and walked off smiling. Neither could the Opposition fault him, nor could his party proponents object vociferously. It was a consensus that suited almost all the sides and was quietly accepted.
FORCE will not find it easy getting the government to pass this MoI Bill in the Assembly. The forum feels that each day the government is postponing translating the policy into law it is keeping alive the fear that the decision can be changed. That has to change and it can only be done, when the cabinet decision becomes a law, however, tenuous that law may be.
