UP Ko Angrezi Ka Saath Pasand Hai

Thousands of two-room dusty tutorial centres across small towns and villages in Uttar Pradesh relish being called St Thomas school or sometimes they fancy the St Xavier’s signboard. They are filled with children who somehow have managed to escape the static confines of government schools. The rate at which such centres have spread in the state always told you that the moment will come anytime soon. It did come this month. In a decision that had an air of inevitability about it, UP government announced that English will be taught as a compulsory subject from Standard 1 in government schools.

In more ways than one, this move is a defining moment for the process of political and policy narratives in UP adjusting to the aspirational churnings in society. Five years ago, the first major sign of this adjustment could be seen in the run-up to the 2012 Assembly elections in the state. Eager to shed its anti-computer and anti- English image, Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party promised in its manifesto to provide a free tablet to every student passing Standard 10 and a laptop to students passing Standard 12 from a government school.

It wasn’t a regular campaign promise — it was reversing a key subtext of Lohiaite socialist politics in the state. It sought to dismantle the ideological edifice of anti-technology populism — one of the many planks on which Samajwadi Party rose as a political force to reckon with in the post-Mandal phase. While opposing computers as job-snatchers and English as a colonial relic and elitist privilege in 1990s and the first decade of this century, Mulayam Singh Yadav was merely mouthing shibboleths with which Ram Manohar Lohia had filled socialist rhetorics in 1960s.

In a state where the government was the major employer and private sector had very limited presence, such stand had an initial appeal as English wasn’t a requirement to get into most of the state government jobs. Anti-English approach ensured that a generation of government job seekers would not be pushed out of their comfort zone to learn English as it wasn’t tied with their employability — an important consideration for pursuing education in India. Samajwadi Party leader’s notorious indifference to cheating in school and university examinations could also be seen in this context — facilitating the easiest route to formal educational eligibility for jobs.

In early 1990s, implementation of Mandal Commission recommended job reservations also meant that a sizeable number of job seekers would come from sections of society, which are even more distant from access to English. Along with that, the demonisation of computers reinforced the anxieties of technology eating up jobs in government offices.

However, the appeal withered away since it ran against some powerful parallel developments in the same period. Demographic dividend kept on adding to the number of young people seeking jobs on a scale that the government couldn’t offer. The country was witnessing growth in private sector jobs in wake of economic liberalisation. India was also on the cusp of information technology revolution, which had ensured that a large number of such opportunities were in service sector where knowledge of computers and English language skills were pre-requisites.

The ripples were felt beyond that too. The opening of air waves through satellite television and greater exposure to the world through information highways of cyberspace had convinced even the people in hinterland India of the aspirational centrality of English to the world they wanted to access. For instance, this new aspirational surge could be seen in some pages of even Hindi dailies of the state on which MTV-type Gen Next Hinglish ruffled the lingual sensibilities of the careful practitioners of Hindi language.

Clearly, Lohia wasn’t fitting in the globalising world, his anti-English politics had outlived its utility.

In neighbouring Bihar, one still remembers the irony of how in 2001 another avowed Lohiaite and Rashtriya Janta Dal president Lalu Prasad Yadav had ridiculed the then Vajpayee-led NDA government’s drive to promote information technology in governance. He had quipped “Ye IT-YT kya hai ?Kya computer doodh deta hai?” (What’s this IT? Does it give milk?). The irony of the remark wasn’t missing as he had got one of his daughters married to an IT professional who had once worked at Infosys. The irony isn’t missing now either as he is one of the most active politicians on Twitter, and unsurprisingly, so is his son and Deputy Chief Minister of Bihar  Tejaswi Yadav.

When Mulayam’s son Akhilesh decided to junk this moth-eaten piece of party’s ideological baggage, the party ideologues had to explain the U-turn. They did so sometimes in banal ways, but sometimes the reasoning was interesting enough. One of them being Lohia’s approval of small machines and computer, by all accounts, is a small one.

Beyond Samajwadi Party, some Lohiaite voices still see English as a class privilege that shouldn’t be a criterion for upward mobility. One may cite how social scientist and Swaraj Abhiyan leader Yogendra Yadav attacked the idea of making Civil Services Aptitude Test  (CSAT) performance, having an English component, as contributory ( not merely qualifying) to the preliminary score of the three stage examination. Within SP too, Mulayam too has drifted occasionally even after his son’s revised position on it. In 2013, he had gone to the extent of demanding the ban on the use of English in Parliament.

This didn’t, however, sway the Akhilesh government from keeping its ear to the ground, it detected a churning. According to a report in The Times of India, 47 lakh schoolchildren (6-14 age group) enrolled in government schools left studies midway in 2013 alone to join private English medium schools. The report also informs that in Allahabad alone, around 51,000 students had left schools at primary and junior schools. To check this exodus, Basic Shiksha Parishad of UP government decided to identify two paradesiya schools in every district for imparting English medium education. However,  it didn’t go all the way by making learning English compulsory from the primary stage for all the students in government schools.

People in the state, as in other parts of the country, have always been aware of the hypocrisy of the political elite in denying them access to English under the garb of ideology, while sending their children to English medium schools. Apart from realising it as a language of aspirations, they have also seen it as an instrument to bridge social distance since English continues to be the arbiter of cultural capital and lubricant of upward social mobility in this country. Mushrooming of private English medium schools is a sign of this realisation.

This is not a new development. A case in point is how the leaders of the marginalised Dalit community have viewed English in recent years. An interesting aspect of Dalit political discourse has been how it has cherished Macaulay and resultant English education as a liberating force. Dalit ideologue Chandra Bhan Prasad has gone to the extent of deifying English as devi and celebrates Macaulay utsav.

Despite its advocacy of Hindi, Bharatiya Janta Party, or for that matter its ideological parent body Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), have never undermined the value of English. Their support for Hindi, as articulated from 1960s onwards, has not been at the cost of English. With the new push to Digital India and Make in India drives, English seems to be a natural ally of party’s developmental agenda. UP government’s decision to introduce English from Standard 1 in all government schools fits neatly into that blueprint of hinterland aspirations.

A letter written by a Bihar schoolboy to Prime Minister last August asked for English to be taught from Standard 1, something he should have asked the Chief Minister to consider. This shows how the aspirational surge would soon expect the same from the neighbouring states of Hindi heartland. Without being swept away from their rooted sense of identity, people need a language to engage and compete with the world — they have chosen English. Political leadership seems to be waking up to the reality of children flocking to poor versions of St Xavier’s and St. Thomas in the hinterland. To re-phrase a popular catchline of recently concluded UP Assembly polls — UP ko angrezi ka saath pasand hai

The author can be contacted on Twitter @anandvardhan26