Parrikar used to be a popular politician in Goa, and the thing people seemed to like most about him was his IIT background. Of course, there were also those who liked him for belonging to the RSS or to the Saraswat community. But there is little doubt that his IIT degree was his biggest credential, which worked even among those who would otherwise never dream of voting for either the RSS or Saraswats.
Now, however, Parrikar’s personal popularity has taken some beating, thanks not just to all the failures, U-turns, and power-hungriness of his government, but also for the destructive corporate-driven ‘development’ that it is fostering across Goa. What with the coal corridor choking Vasco city; the PDAs, RP21 and the newly-proposed CRZ, all designed to uproot Goan forests and communities for the benefit of the real estate and tourism lobbies; the avalanche of plastic garbage blocking gutters and creeks; the ever-proliferating casinos and other anti-social forms of tourism, including the drug racket in which BJP members are indirectly implicated… you name it, Goa has become a government-made disaster zone for ordinary Goans. The latest is of course the discovery that there are deliberately-added carcinogens in fish, our staple diet.
The venal nature of this government was on show in this latest scam. It took days of lies and wishy-washy reassurances before a ban was declared on fish imported from outside Goa. Nobody has been arrested so far, nor any government officer even suspended. Instead the government is acting as if the 15-day ban is a solution. They clearly hope that Goans will forget the issue by then, which, given the rate at which new disasters crop up, may well happen.
How does all this tally with the CM being an IITian? Social media are awash with stories about how Parrikar gives the IITs a bad name. But is there really a dissonance in the CM’s qualifications and his performance? The truth is that Parrikar’s corporate-driven governance, and his consistent lack of support to demands for social justice, is one with his IIT upbringing.
The IITs are over-exalted in India as institutions of excellence, primarily as a result of the good jobs that their graduates land in the global corporate world, but also for their teaching and infrastructure, better than any private engineering college. It is noteworthy that they were set up, and continue to be run, by the Indian government – the same which commonly provides primary level education in dilapidated buildings (in Goa too), often leaking and stinking, sometimes without basic facilities like blackboards, toilets, or teachers. Criticism in India of the condition of government schools usually earns the riposte: what do you expect, they are government schools! But why are the government-run IITs (as also the Kendriya Vidyalayas) so different? The answer is obvious: Brahmanism. The latter were set up for the upper castes, and the government schools in villages, towns and municipalities for the bahujans.
This is something that bahujan students have themselves discovered, after overcoming the most difficult circumstances to make it to the IITs. They are consistently made to feel unwelcome, via low grades, taunts from teachers (almost all of them upper caste), and humiliation of all kinds, e.g. even with food, for brahmanical diets are upheld in IIT messes. The IITs are supposed to implement caste-based reservations for admission, but it appears that some implement these more for expulsion – like the Kanpur IIT which was reported in 2017 to be expelling students of only the Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), and Other Backward Classes (OBC). The same IIT had increased its faculty strength from 348 (2012-13) to 394 (2015-16), but the number of SC teachers remained at either 2 or 3, while the number of ST and OBC teachers remained at zero.
The Delhi IIT even organised student-teacher protests in 2008 against a government order to implement reservations in faculty recruitment. It was the same year when 22 SSC students, expelled from Delhi IIT after failing one or two papers, approached the Supreme Court, won the case, and had their expulsion cancelled. And when it comes to student suicides, although SC student population in IITs is only 10% of the total, they account for 70% of the suicides.
Goa under Parrikar shares this attitude, with reservations not even being implemented where they are mandated by the Constitution, and it is ignoring public demands for the same.
The casteism of the IITs stems from the Brahmanical belief in upper caste ‘merit’, and that high marks/grades prove this ‘merit’. This ignores the centuries of discrimination and violent oppression – which continue today – that ensure that some communities are born to high grades while others have to struggle to achieve them. It is not that IIT undergraduates have no exposure to subjects like sociology and history, or that issues like caste or social discrimination are not discussed on campus. It is that all this happens in ivory tower environments, with the focus not on changing society but on academic success. The aim is to create global technocrats ready with ‘smart’ solutions, and arrogant about their own merit.
Parrikar was touted by his fans as a good administrator. And he is – but in the IIT tradition which means, not administering Goa for the ordinary Goan, but administering it for the benefit of the corporate world, whether via new casinos, nationalised rivers, expanded (and polluting) ports, continued (and illegal) mining, unnecessary bridges, village-destruction but golf courses and marinas, or CCTVs for a drowning Panjim. So, the real benefit of having an IITian CM is that you get to realise, at first-hand, how hollow are the claims to excellence of these agraharams.
(Amita Kanekar is an Architectural Historian and Novelist)
