Almost the full tenure of first BJP government is over and the elections of 2019 are looming over the horizon. But BJP has not even uttered a word on RTE, while five more cohorts of students have passed through the IOI system. This is a short post but explains the problem with BJP and RSS. There are two reasons-
(1) Lack of intellectuals- There is a strong anti-intellectual strain in the RSS. Having no intellectuals does not make a difference when you are in the opposition, but when in power, it destroys your policy making because you act as a headless chicken.
(2) Dishonesty- They never put out their points honestly, because they have an inferiority complex regarding their views. Being a rayta means that most would instinctively recoil from being associated with communalism.
This has led to a situation where BJP knows that a given law is anti-Hindu, but it never forms its opposition based on it being discriminatory and anti-Hindu. It always uses specious argument to delay that bill or gets it scrapped based on economics and caste.
If they want to win battle against IOI brigade, first thing they would need to do is get rid of mental blocks. IOI brigade would always try to paint bringing equality as communalism, but exposure to such propaganda and its refutation would make common people aware of RTE and its perils.
The biggest objective of controlling education and language is not to push in overt propaganda, but to use it to form affective associations so that people are programmed in such a way that they recoil at being associated with a certain concept.
Thus being unapologetic pays as it denies this pathway to your opponents. But is BJP ready to be unapologetic?
People worried- aloo, tamatar price increased by double in 10 years, but why school fees increased by 3-4 times?
Well, you don’t pay RTE (Right to Education) tax on tomatoes.
If RTE tax was applied on tomatoes, how will the world look like?
Suppose every time if you go to buy tomato, you buy four tomatoes at Rs 2 each. Now, if Sabziwala takes Rs. 8 and put 3 tomatoes in your bag, that is RTE.
You– why bhaiyya? Why steal one tomato from me, I paid for four tomatoes?
Sabziwala– one is for poor kids ji.
Then you see a Mulla ji buying tomatoes from neighboring Mulla ji sabziwala- and he gets 4 tomatoes for Rs 5.
You– but why is he getting it for so cheap?
Sabziwala– he has minority quota ji. He gets free land from govt, pays lower taxes, and he doesn’t have to give one tomato to the poor.
You– I pay taxes and govt does tamatar farming with that money. Why don’t they give tamatar to poor from their own farm. Why should I pay extra?
Sabziwala– their tamatar all foul, even poor doesn’t want them. So gobirmint asked us to charge you extra for one extra healthy tamatar and give it to the poor.
You– so your business going well? Extra tamatar you sell.
Sabziwala– no ji. This gobirmint is thief.
You– why?
Sabziwala– Because the gobirmint now want to fix price at Rs 1.5/tamatar. At this rate I can’t make any money to feed my kids. I will quit tamatar business.
You– No. Don’t do that. Where will I buy tamatar then?
Sabziwala– from the next door Mulla ji shop. He sells cheaper tamatar.
You– but I have heard he spits on tamatar before selling them. Chiiii.
Sabziwala– Sorry. Can’t help with that. You can always clean it at home.
Right to education act is being hailed as the landmark legislation in providing free and compulsory education to all Indian kids and is touted to be the greatest achievement of the UPA. The propaganda surrounding it is so severe that many Indians, who are otherwise sane, normal and anti-congress seem to think it is the best thing ever. They seem to have internalised the propaganda of the media and politicians that Free and Education are such good words that if they come together they will make the world even better. In the end, everyone seems to care more about the buzzword “free education” and the snake oil sales pitch, “Right to Education”, than its fine points or harmful effects on the ground. Even a brief analysis of the fine texts of the Right to Education act will tell a common reader, not fully drenched in propagandist nonsense, on how evil this law is. The government which has failed to provide decent education infrastructure in 60 years is now hell bent upon destroying whatever little is left in private education sector.
Quantity argument
Most of the support for RTE comes from the middle and poor class Hindus, who think that RTE is great because it forces the large private schools to collect less money than they otherwise would. But those Hindus don’t seem to understand that the RTE does more harm to the low tier, low budget private schools than it does to cap what the large schools will collect as fees. For example, many people don’t know that one of the RTE stipulations in many states, is to pay the teachers a minimum salary as recommended by 6th pay commission of India. For example, the teachers should be played a salary of 23,000 Rs/month in Delhi just like their government school counterparts. But most of the private schools in towns, villages and in some cases cities, are low budget/low tier ones where the fees they collect is minimal, to the tune of 500 to 1000 Rs/month. Do you expect them to pay their teachers the salary in accordance with 6th pay commission or shut shop? Also, there is stipulation that the student teacher ratio should be 30:1. Given fees of 500 Rs/month per students and 30 students per teacher, it gives a monthly collection of 15,000 Rs. So how exactly will the small school run after paying 30,000 Rs/month as salary to its teachers while getting a fee of 500 Rs/month per student? So either the small schools should increase the fees to make a profit or close down.
But raising the school fees above a point in villages and towns would make the parents leave the schools in favour of undermanned and under quality government schools, which successive governments have completely ignored till now. This is exactly how the small schools are getting closed down in India, with some estimates suggesting closure of 10,000+ schools till now. If you take an average student population of 500 in each of these closed schools, it is a total of 50,00,000 (50 lakhs) students who are forced to study in a school which is below par what they were studying before RTE came into force. Thanks to Jholachaps sitting in AC offices, these poor students are now studying in rag-tag government schools instead of low tier/low budget but better private school. Think logically why would the parents pay 500 Rs/month for a private school if they did not think that those schools were better quality than the neighbouring government schools, which were giving free education anyway. Also, those 10,000+ closed schools would have turned into 100,000+ schools if not for the fact that RTE is not implemented properly in many states and many schools bribe RTE enforcing officers as that is the only way for them to stay afloat. This is one of the examples where corruption is better than following law at giving results when the law is ridiculously stupid. Is it any wonder that in many areas poor Hindu students are forced to be educated in madarassas, since the advent of RTE has forced closure of Hindu schools but has exempted all minority ones? Also, the same presstitutes who ran horror stories on big school fees and pimped for RTE are now completely silent on the destruction of the Hindu schools under RTE. In which country except India the closure of 10,000+ schools will not be news worthy and remain confined to internet and social media?
As per RTE, the government has made it mandatory for the private schools to admit 25% of its students free of cost. Since schools are a service provider just like any service provider, they need profits to operate as they are not in the business for charity. Since 25% of the students will get education for free and schools are not there for social service, so someone needs to foot the extra bill. Who else but the remaining 75% students and their parents had to bear this cost to subsidize the 25% freeloaders. To prevent hue and cry against it, the government being a good Samaritan that it is, decided to help the 75% as well by stating that government would take care of the cost of those 25%. But schools, just like any service provider like IT industry or retail shops, would have taken advantage of the free government subsidy for the poor students and increased the fees for the education, in the hope that Government would pay for it any way. Given this incentive problem the government decided to cap the maximum fee that schools can charge from their students. So you can see how government created layers of problems and then laws to solve the initial problem.
The above maze of laws has created a big misconception that since the government subsidises the private schools for the 25% costs so there should be no problem. But this government subsidy for the 25% is based on the average school fees for the average student and hence the government subsides for the poor/low tier/low budget schools would still be only 500 Rs/month which is inadequate to help them. The government subsidies will only help the top tier schools which are already collecting 30,000 Rs/year or more as fees. But even they are not so lucky as the government subsidy for the poor students do not reach these schools in time, sometimes running arrears to the tune of 3-4 years. So in the short term, those schools have to face big financial crisis. One can only imagine how great it would be to run a business with 75% of the revenues which you are supposed to get at some point but don’t know when.
Quality argument
This fairy tale sounds perfect until one looks at the effect such law will have on school quality. The middle class wanted the schools to be cheap and found this proposal very good as they all see the schools as rip-offs, even though they voluntarily send their kids to these schools after fully knowing their fees. But since the government has now put a maximum cap on the school fees, the schools cannot increase the quality of the education nor the amount of extracurricular activities since they can’t afford any new activities given this fee cap. This has lead to stagnation of the quality of education in the schools. So not only schools have closed down but RTE has also had an effect on school quality.
So the middle class parents, who are now better off due to income increase or are simply ready to sacrifice to ensure better quality of education for their kids, need to find a new school and this new school will invariably be a Christian school since Christian schools are exempt from the RTE. These Christian schools can charge whatever fees they want and pay whatever salary they want to their employees. They can invariably operate under a profit and hence afford new extracurricular activities in their schools like horse raiding, tennis, swimming etc and leave behind all other schools operated by Hindus.
Since the middle class Hindus are too cool, too selfish and too intelligent to live with their parents, the children of such middle class Hindus would be raised in Christian schools, without any one teaching them their actual tradition and history. These same children would then grow up to be Hindus in name only(HINO) and die hard liberals who would think Hinduism is bad and illiberal while corpse worship and ritualised cannibalism of Christianity is a great tradition. They would end up thinking how Secularism is synonymous with anti-Hinduism and progress, just like how most urban Hindus educated in convent schools think today. Is it any wonder that UPA under the evangelical waitress Sonia Gandhi decided to come up with this brilliant education bill and got ample support by the anti-Hindu and anti-India Marxist cabal as well as the Hindus in name only brigade of BJP? Now you know why the American with brown skin and Hindu name i.e. BJP chief minister Devendra Fat Novice (oops Fadnavis) is more than happy to educate his daughter in Christian convent school.
Would RTE be less evil if it includes minority schools?
Even if this act is implemented in such a way that the minority institutions are to be included under it, it still won’t help the lower middle class Hindu parents, who want their sons and daughters to study in a school where there is a better quality of education than the one provided in the government schools but cannot afford to send their children to fancy convent schools or big shot private residency type schools since the RTE act is especially vicious against the low-tier private schools. So instead of news like how Hindu students are forced to go to madarassas, there will be news on how Hindus students are now stacked in low quality government schools. Of course, the media would ignore that those Hindu parents and children had no option of low-tier, low budget private schools, which were closed off due to RTE act, just like how media is ignoring the closure of more that 10,000+ schools since the implementation of this act. Hence, the suggestion by the pathologically altruistic and brainwashed Hindu middle class that RTE is flawed only because of its non-applicability to religious minority institutions and can be fixed by enforcing it on minorities is equally stupid.
In short, RTE is a travesty of justice to the educational rights of poor Hindu children, designed specifically to kill off Hindu educational institutions and to re-establish the hold on the private school education which the Church had before liberalization of Indian economy in 1991. The subsequent level playing field for Hindu educational institutes was destroyed in one strike by RTE by masquerading under a wonderful buzzword called “Free Education”. The useful idiots i.e. Hindu middle class still can’t see how they have willingly placed this dynamite under their own civilization. So long as destructive policies like RTE are supported based on personal feelings of goodness, disregarding the destruction they can cause to the future of the very same people they are supposed to help, there is no hope for a better India. Closure of 10,000+ schools has already denied a better future to 50 lakh students, how many more lives are you willing to destroy for feeling good about yourself and stoking your ego with fake charity whose cost will be ultimately borne by the dark future of poor students?
This is the second article in this series on explaining the problems with emergence of a real Hindu party. Read Part 1 and Part 3.
The media and intellectual environment has been so anti-Hindu in India that most issues which pass off as pro-Hindu issues hardly pass the smell test when looked at carefully. Given this hostile environment, it is no surprise that entire generations of Hindus have been brainwashed and converted into such meek cows that they have lost the mental faculty to challenge and question the narrative which goes around as pro-Hindu.
The benchmark criterion to decide whether a policy is pro-Hindu or not is to look at it and ask the question: are Hindus the only beneficiaries of this policy? If a policy helps all Indians then it cannot be pro-Hindu, so call it a nationalistic policy. Similarly, all policies which bring Hindus to a level playing field with other religions are again not pro-Hindu as they only correct historical bias against them, so call them secular. Using this criterion we can now look at some long-standing issues to understand whether they are pro-Hindu issues or not.
Uniform Civil Code: It does not help Hindus explicitly in any way. Hindu civil law is almost modern and Hindus will hardly gain anything if Muslims cannot divorce their wives through triple talaq or have four wives. It is a secular issue and if India really is a secular country, as the libtards claim, then they should support implementation of UCC. Implementation of UCC will not really help Hindus but it will definitely bolster the secular image of India by dismantling religion-specific civil laws.
Article 370: J&K as a region is important for national security given that it can connect India to Central Asian republics and also provides a connection between India’s two big rivals, China and Pakistan. It is in India’s interest to integrate J&K completely into the country and wrest back PoK. So again, repealing Article 370 does not help Hindus alone and is an issue of national importance. Any person opposing it is helping Pakistan and China against India and weakening India’s security environment.
Right to Education Act: Hindu institutions are taxed under this law while minority institutes have no obligation to give quotas to SC/STs or follow the stringent requirements of this law. Minority institutions are thriving thanks to this law while thousands of Hindu schools have closed down. So again, repealing this law will put Hindus on par with other minorities. It is therefore a secular issue and not pro-Hindu in any way. In any other country with a basic framework of law, this discriminatory tax on schools operated by the majority would have been quashed by the courts on first hearing. It was in fact quashed by the courts before Congress brought in the 93rd Amendment to strangle and kill Hindu schools.
Temple Control: Money from Hindu temples is siphoned off and used by greedy governments while they pay Hajj subsidies to Muslims. Churches and mosques are free to receive all donations they can and use their own funds in whichever way they deem important. Hindu organizations, on the other hand, are helpless against this state intervention and watch meekly while government takes away their donations. So freeing temples and putting them on par with other religious institutions is not a pro-Hindu but a secular agenda, requiring the state not to rob money from temples and hand it out as Hajj subsidy.
Jallikattu ban: This is an assault on local traditions while minorities are allowed to mutilate small children under freedom of religion. A secular state has no mandate to dictate how religious festivals should be organized. Freedom to practise one’s religion and celebrate festivals in ways one deems important is not a place for government intervention, which again makes it a secular issue. If Muslims can slay thousands of meek goats on Bakrid, it reeks of hypocrisy when courts challenge healthy Jallikattu bulls under the pretext of animal rights.
Some of the above-mentioned issues have been paraded around as pro-Hindu issues, but a careful look demolishes the whole narrative. Most gospel truths about pro-Hindu policies are taken at face value by gullible Hindus, while actually they hardly help Hindus in any way. It is like asking a runner to start 20 metres behind everyone else in a 100-metre race. When this runner demands to start at the same position as everyone else, the thekedars in the racing fraternity rule against him, citing that they cannot put him on par with other runners as it gives him an undue advantage, completely ignoring the initial bias.
Given the above-mentioned policies don’t explicitly help Hindus, what can be classified as pro-Hindu policies?
Ram Temple: This is a long-standing issue and important for collective Hindu consciousness given the importance of Lord Ram in Hindu history. Hindus are the rightful owners of the land in Ayodhya. One random mosque hardly counts for Muslims and they don’t think twice before demolishing one in the Islamic nation of Saudi Arabia. It is Muslim iconoclasm which stands in the way of showing a big heart and allowing Hindus to build the temple of one of the most important Hindu icons at his birthplace. In case government decides to solve this issue in favour of the Hindu temple using its legislative powers, then it can be classified as a pro-Hindu issue. However, current litigation in the Supreme Court just makes it another property dispute rather than a pro-Hindu issue.
Ban on proselytization by non-Hindus: A policy which disallows missionaries from converting the local population would fall under this category. Banning conversions for all religions does not make it pro-Hindu. Only a policy which bans conversion out of Hinduism while allowing Ghar Wapsi can be called pro-Hindu. Under the current Constitution, covert policies can be implemented to stop missionaries. For example, in tribal belts under the garb of protecting local culture, missionaries can be denied entry into the whole region while allowing Hindus to target Christian converts. This is not explicitly pro-Hindu but covertly achieves the same agenda.
Birth-control restrictions on Muslims: To maintain demographic superiority of Hindus, it is very important to reduce the current boom in Muslim population. Any policy which explicitly or implicitly reduces Muslim births while having no impact on Hindus can be called pro-Hindu.
Force minority institutes to implement reservations: Reservation benefits are restricted to Hindus in most cases, so if minority institutes are forced to educate SC/STs, it will increase opportunities for Hindus while reducing them for minorities. If a 50% quota can be implemented in minority institutes, it can be called a pro-Hindu policy as it will educate Hindu masses while minorities foot the bill. This is not a big tax given minority institutes will still get a chance to preserve their culture, but at a small cost of educating backward Hindus.
Throw out illegal Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh and give citizenship to minority Hindus from Bangladesh and Pakistan.
The above examples clearly show that many other similar policies can be designed with explicit benefit for Hindus. But it is essential for Hindus to push back on unnecessary tags awarded to policies which do not pass the pro-Hindu criterion. Policies that do not exclusively help Hindus need to be declassified and placed under secular or national policy headings. Implementation of pro-Hindu policies will only be feasible after Hindus dismantle the narrative and repeal anti-Hindu policies. But the first step is to stop classifying secular policies under the pro-Hindu basket. This brings us to the million-dollar question: is there any political party which can really claim to be pro-Hindu?
