The Bharatiya Janata Party has reacted typically to the outbursts of its ministers on the medium of instruction imbroglio by telling them not to express out loud their personal opinion. A day after Environment Minister Rajendra Arlekar said the decision to give grants to English medium primary schools was wrong, Deputy Chief Minister Francis D’Souza said that the government should give parents the right to decide the medium of instruction for their children and that the medium of instruction from primary to the high school should be in the same language. Reacting to Arlekar’s statement, Fisheries minister Avertano Furtado said the Environment minister’s views were unacceptable and ill-advised. It didn’t take long for Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar to tell his ministers that airing their views in public was ill-advised.
That’s how the BJP wants to silence its ministers, keeping them from making public their views on burning issues. Parsekar even went on to state that such politics take place in the Congress, where the government takes a decision and the ministers speak a different tune. “We don’t want BJP to become a Congress,” he said. The BJP may not want to become a Congress, where indiscipline leads to the party threatening to take disciplinary action against its members for their outbursts, but the BJP should realize that it is no longer the disciplined party that it promised to be and prided itself on being. There is dissent and the party needs to face this.
While it is now amply clear that there is dissent in the BJP and in the government, the medium of instruction is one of the main issues on which the dissent is being made public. As the weeks and months progress, MoI is going to be the vehicle through which the party members are going to voice their dissent. It has already started. In the issue that has remained burning for months, party members see an opportunity to grab the headlines and also score some brownie points with those on either side of the MoI fence their statements and views would attract.
It is unfortunate that as issue as serious as the MoI, which is the language in which young children learn their three Rs, has become a political tool that disgruntled BJP members and supporters are using against the government. The BJP may keep patting itself on the back that the decision on MoI that was taken was the best possible solution to the issue, but it should realize that there are people in the government, its own party members included, who are not in agreement with the decisions. In announcing that aided primary schools that made the change to the English medium in 2011 would continue to get government grants, the then Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar had played an ace and had walked off smiling. There was no trump card the opposition could play, even if they had wanted to, to attack the then chief minister. The silence that had greeted the BJP-led government’s announcement of a status quo on the medium of instruction policy said much more than words could. The opposition to that decision, came much later, and has come from within the party and its supporters.
The government, its party members and its supporters must realise that the medium of instruction is not a weapon to be used for political purposes. It is time to stop the allegations and the opposition to the decision. The Chief Minister has said that a decision on this cannot be taken by favouring any one side, but all aspects have to be taken into consideration. The issue has to be looked at purely from the point of view of the child’s future. There cannot and should not be politics in children’s education. Politicians need to rise above this and let the Bill be presented and passed in the Assembly. Only then can the issue be put to rest.
