Why Mohandas Pai’s understanding of both education and taxation is horribly flawed

Dear Mr Pai,

I read your piece on ndtv.com  titled ‘Dear JNU Students, We Fund Your Studies, and Not Your Politics’ . You make several points about the Left, the state of education in India, the state of JNU particularly the use of public resources for subsidizing education, the notion of sedition, and more.

I do not necessarily agree with many of your points that are mostly rhetorical, weak and lacking in evidence. While I differ from your position, I accept your democratic right to share your views on a public platform and, similarly, would like to make my thoughts known to you as you did yours to the rest of us.

Honestly I am angry at you! And yes, we have been together on several TV debates and more often than not, I have agreed with your stance. Not today, not on this issue, for you have called my friends and me, names and I will defend my position.

I often find it difficult to be polite on these issues, especially in the face of such condescending views as yours but in the interest of the larger audience who may read this I shall appeal only to common sense, decency and logic.

For a person who is Chairman of the Board of Manipal Global, (your contribution to trade and industry has been recognized with a Padma Shri), you demonstrate a surprisingly naive understanding of education and the purpose of educational institutions.

According to Paulo Freire, one of the tallest educationist of the 20th century and the architect of ‘critical pedagogy’ “There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” Conformity, Mr Pai, it seems is the only purpose of education in your world-view. Words of experts aside I’m certain your hefty experience with education would have unveiled to you many discoveries and evolution of social and political views. Colleges do that, subsidsed or not.

You seem to be equating educational institutions as factories with assembly line production, where pupils enter from one side as an empty vessel i.e. with no independent thought process of their own, and exit from the other side with the ‘vessel’ filled.

You also seem to misunderstand that schools are not an extension of ‘Make in India’, instead it’s about ’Think in India’, critically.

While education spans a range as vast as the universe it is also local and contextual, it’s also about real issues that surround the people who attend institutions of education. By design an educational institution is supposed to be as much a place of learning as well as a cultural and political body. Passive acceptance or agreement with the system or uncritically accepting the state point of view is surely not education.

Therefore, India’s premier Social Sciences University JNU is well within its pedagogical belief to inspire or even promote young minds to be political, rather than become an institution of extended drudgery of passing an examination or become a feeder institution of mere job seekers and job doers.

You may be aware that most of the protests in America against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s were initiated and led by students. No one was charged with sedition by the US Government or US courts. Most recently in India, the Nirbhaya protests for Jyoti Singh were spearheaded by none other than students and the youth of this country, many of whom were from JNU.

The accountant in you may find these numbers interesting. They represent the ‘Academic Output’ of JNU for the period 2011-2015, as published by JNU on its official site. JNU produces over 100 books each year on an average, undertakes over 300 research projects each year, awards over 300 PhDs each year, and hosts over a thousand conferences and workshops each year.

It is the same University that has produced some of the most famous economists, politicians, bureaucrats and lawyers. It’s a University where aspirants sit through a competitive examination to qualify for admission. And mind you this is purely based on merit and gets the brightest minds together. There must be something great about this Institution that it attracts thousands of students from all over the country and the world.

When you write “Students (of JNU) were often the worst sufferers as studies were sidelined. The faculty and the students always held themselves out as liberals except that they did not allow the flowering of alternate views, nor outsiders who could challenge them. They were a shut shop, a world in themselves”, you clearly have very little idea what this University has achieved over the years.

Then there is your rant about taxpayers. Your patronizing attitude suggests as if you are doing a favor by either paying tax and/or as if you are the only one paying tax. You, Mr Pai alone do not “fund” JNU and its students, the entire country does. If at all, you pay tax for a better lifestyle of your own. Incidentally, only 3% of India’s population pays Income Tax. The rest of the tax earning is collected from EVERYONE including the poorest of the poor. Even a daily wage-worker pays tax. Every person who studies in JNU pays tax. In fact these regular folk are more honest to the tax regime of the nation than perhaps some among your corporate capitalist fraternity. Students of JNU pay tax and so do their parents.

Hope you don’t ask the poorest who disagree with your political views to stop eating because you fund the gas or fuel subsidy to these ‘anti-nationals’ and they should be using ‘your’ tax money only to eat and not think. Your rant reeks of capitalist arrogance with a bleak understanding of welfarism or of a welfare state. By the way, no debts, of the lower or even the middle class of this country, are ever converted to ‘bad debt’ and waived off by the State. They either pay their loans through their sweat and hard work or through their blood by killing themselves. The basics of taxation and its purpose is taught in Class ten high schools (subsidized or not) economics books which you have clearly missed out on.

JNU is not an anti-national institution. Indeed, if it is as you claim an anti-national institution, you may wish bring this to the notice of the authorities to take appropriate action. Far from being anti-national, JNU is one of the few spaces ‘left’ where people still demand justice and equity, respect women and fight for the rights of the poor.

The students of JNU need to be commended for raising important contemporary issues and lend their voice for strengthening social justice, the principles of democracy and upholding the Constitution of India down the years.

These student leaders that you want to crush or foul-mouth are intellectually very strong, many coming from the remotest areas of this country. Kanhaiya Kumar, the JNUSU President who has been accused of sedition, perhaps is more patriotic than you are. His values are far more nationalistic than yours, or mine!