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EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE
NEW DELHI, Oct 22: Minister for Human Resource Development Murli Manohar Joshi today had to accept defeat when angry protests from state education ministers (one, of whom embarrassingly, was from the BJP ally, Akali Dal) forced him to drop the Hindutva plank for the national education conference.
Not only did he withdraw the ``non-official'' part of the agenda which was largely inspired by the RSS offshoot Vidya Bharati, he also had to cancel a presentation by Calcutta-based industrialist and President of Friends of Tribal Societies, Purshottam Das Chitlangia. Among other things, the non-official agenda proposed making sanskrit compulsory language till class XII and a course on housekeeping mandatory for girls.
The intensely political day began with a walkout by education ministers of 12 States (among them Tota Singh of the Akali Dal in Punjab) over the Saraswati vandana at the beginning of the function. It was BJP's ally again, Telugu Desam, whose representative Andhra Pradesh Education Minister K.Pratibha Bharathi set off the stir, saying the vandana would set a wrong precedent.
The Left ended the day claiming victory on ``two-and-a-half counts''. West Bengal Education Minister Kanti Biswas said they had managed to force the Minister to include the National Anthem (in place of the Saraswati vandana) in the day's programme and drop Chitlangia's keynote address as well as the ``non-official'' agenda, which ``is virtually an RSS paper''. Biswas said: ``We told the Minister an assurance would not be enough, he would have to declare that the agenda had been withdrawn.'' Though the entire meeting after Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's inaugural speech was kept off limits for the media, the Government was unable to control the damage as minister upon minister hogged television time declaiming against the Government.
Biswas from West Bengal protested against the planned keynote address by Chitlangia on the grounds that he had no locus standing. ``The keynote address is usually by the Government. Howcan an RSS man deliver the agenda that we have to discuss?'' he asked angrily.
Ravindra Chaube, Madhya Pradesh's Education Minister, also brandished the tentative programme that had been circulated prior to the meeting, which clearly described Chitlangia as being from Vidya Bharati. He also passed around copies of the recommendations of the National Education Conference held in August, organised by the Vidya Bharati Akhil Bharati Shiksha Sansthan, which apart from the introductory paragraph were the same.In his speech, which followed Vajpayee's, Joshi was on the defensive. He said the Government was committed to the ``economic and educational development of the minorities''. On the ``non-official'' agenda, he said: ``What we have circulated is one among several suggestions we receive from time to time from educationists and others who are interested in education.'' But he kept to his insistence on Sanskrit getting a ``rightful place'' in the curriculum.
Oddly enough, the Prime Minister's speech struck acompletely different note. He said: ``Universities and colleges should be de-politicised and de-bureaucratised.'' He added that there must be no place for religious bigotry or intolerance.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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