Communication

THOUGH possibly among the most respected of professors of political science in Maharashtra today, Suhas Palshikar has written a rather bland article (Seminar 620), which fails to reflect the sad and depressed mood of people here. There are two main reasons for this.

One, the sole qualification that the Congress high command seeks in a chief minister is that he be a ‘yes man’ and not attempt to carve out a distinct constituency and a base for himself in the state. Thus, the chosen one clearly knows that his survival and well-being depends solely on his mediocrity and incompetence. This requires that he seek consent from Delhi before taking any action. No wonder, decisions are not taken or indefinitely delayed. Proactive or creative governance is his last desire. The state thus withers. The alliance partner, NCP seems to have only one goal, namely to earn easy money. Now to turn to the opposition – the MNS and Shiv Sena are plainly opportunistic, occasionally fed by the above two parties out of political compulsions specific to the time and place. The BJP after the demise of Pramod Mahajan has yet to regroup and relies mainly on the effectiveness of individual MLAs. In brief, there is little to choose between parties and politicians. Maharashtra somehow seems to have no future unless it gets a CM free from Delhi’s control. Unfortunately, considering the fragmented nature of state politics, this appears a distant dream.

Ashutosh Diwan

Maharashtra

 

Patrick Heller’s article, ‘Transformation of Indian States’ (Seminar, April 2011) made good sense as I felt Professor Heller knew what he was talking about, till I came to his point that Madhya Pradesh had been ‘successful in promoting rural education’ under Rajiv Gandhi’s missions. Apparently, the perception of success MP has promoted is stronger than a social scientist’s quest for sense in the bewildering data put out by Indian states. Although Professor Heller does acknowledge that ‘it is alarming to realize how little we know about state-level and sub-state-level capacities’ and wonders ‘how good are local level bureaucracies,’ he does not treat MP’s self-publicized story of rural education with the urge one might expect in a scholar of repute to verify or investigate facts.

If I may say so, it is customary among political scientists and economists to accept at face value the educational data put forward by the different Indian states without critical analysis. Had Professor Heller focused even briefly on Madhya Pradesh’s story of education over the last 25 years, he might have felt that MP now symbolizes a hole in the heart of India, as far as education and health are concerned. During the 1990s, MP became a front-ranking state for offloading state responsibility in school education to local bodies and, in a parallel move, officially declared the full-time state-employed teachers as a ‘dying cadre’. The promotion of policies which permitted the contractualization of teaching at all levels has now led to a systemic collapse of capacity to improve the quality of education. Hopefully, it will not take long for the situation to get bad enough to be noticed by social scientists who have, so far, been accepting MP’s claims in education as a matter of faith.

Krishna Kumar

Delhi