Textbook route to cartoon trouble

The ultimate nightmare for a stand-up comedian is this. He comes up with what he thinks is a terrific one-liner and the audience, far from bursting into spontaneous laughter, is actually waiting with bated breath at the funny line that it thinks is about to follow.

For a cartoonist, a similar nightmare is when he thinks he has come up with a clever exaggeration to make a point and the audience takes him literally at his word.

Had cartoonist Shankar been alive today and followed the debate in Parliament, he would have, perhaps, felt that he would have been better off as a painter of election graffiti on compound walls than take to a career in cartooning and edit a political weekly.

The central theme in what has now become an infamous cartoon is that the process of framing a constitution for the Indian State has become excruciatingly slow, much to the exasperation of the then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Ambedkar too gets sympathetic treatment in that he is conscious of it and is, therefore, chivvying the members to speed it up. That was depicted as Ambedkar sitting atop a snail.

Framing the Constitution

Members of Parliament had, of course, no objection to Ambedkar being depicted as a driver. It is another matter that he was far from being the sole architect of drafting the Indian Constitution, as is being made out now.

I recall that, in my school days, we were always told that there were five individuals who actually took care of the drafting. Besides Ambedkar, there was Alladi Krishnanswamy Aiyar, K. M. Munshi and two other names which, I forget. It was almost a given that the eighth standard final exam in history would have this question and five marks went with it! But I am digressing.

Now, if you are driving an animal-drawn cart, you are, of course, expected to hold a whip in the hand and be prepared to use it on the animal, if it shows signs of flagging.

That too was acceptable to our MPs. Never mind that, in the process, the 500-odd members who represented the Constituent Assembly, including such venerable names as Rajendra Prasad, Acharya Kriplani, Kamaraj, and so on, were reduced to being whipped into showing some quick action. This was seen as perfectly acceptable and falling within the realm of artistic freedom.

The cartoon offended the sensibilities of our present-day leaders because it also had Nehru pointing a whip at the driver of the snail.

At his point, the cartoon ceased to be an exaggerated depiction of Nehru's impatience with the slow process of law-making, and became a grotesque and insensitive portrayal of Ambedkar.

The depiction of the public as going after the law-makers with sticks, stones and God knows what else, was not seen as the cartoonist's impression of public impatience at the slow pace, but an incitement to violence and an insult to Ambedkar.

Quality of education

But none of this should be taken as an endorsement of NCERT's (National Council of Education Research and Training) approach to upholding the quality of secondary education in the country. They had no business to be commissioning the preparation of textbooks in the first place.

By that logic, the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE), the regulator charged with the responsibility of upholding the quality of higher education in the country, should be preparing textbooks in computer science, because the Nasscom says that the engineering graduates passing out of the system are not readily employable by the IT industry.

Even if one concedes that issues in higher education are vastly different from that of secondary education, it still does not make the case for NCERT to be getting into textbook preparation.

It is common knowledge that the school system, complete with classroom instructions and standardised NCERT-approved text books, still doesn't prepare even the best of students to crack the Joint Entrance Examination for admission to the IITs and other premier institutions for engineering education in the country without their getting some supplementary inputs. And it is the market that provides those inputs.

Entry barriers

The coming into existence of a tutorial-cum-coaching industry all over the country that is worth thousands of crores in value addition, is a clear testimony to the fact that there is a market-based solution to the business of quality in education.

We may disagree with one another as to what constitutes ‘quality' in these matters.

But what cannot be denied is that the coaching industry does deliver, within certain narrowly defined parameter of ‘quality', results with practically no investment by the public sector.

The reason why the coaching industry delivers results, but the formal system of approved educational institutions is seen as somehow failing to measure up to public expectations is this.

The former faces no entry barriers, while new entrants to the latter face enormous regulatory barriers, not to mention corruption. Consequently, an incumbent faces no competitive pressure and, hence, is under no compulsion to innovate.

As a regulator for secondary education, the NCERT should focus more on removing entry barriers and finding innovative solutions for enabling new entrants to overcome infrastructural constraints of land, capital, and so on, rather than get into the business of preparing textbooks. There is another more compelling and a structural objection to the NCERT getting into the textbooks business. It is natural for human beings to see and define themselves along narrow identities.

At its zenith is the desire to define oneself as a unique individual. But just below that are such sub-identities as defined in terms of religion, caste, region, and so on.

Corruption, political greed, administrative sloth, inequality have combined to cast an enormous burden on sustaining a national identity in the minds of Indian public.

A common textbook is an attempt at enforcing a central identity. In today's atmosphere, that is bound to be challenged.

The objection to the Ambedkar cartoon is in a sense an assertion of a Dalit identity rather than a criticism of a cartoon.

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