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The Right to be Heard

It is not easy to be young in modern India. Nishant Bhardwaj, barely twenty, realised this when he went to college to get a degree that he thought would help him later land a job. He took his degree exams in May, got his results last month and applied for the Rajasthan University's law course. For he wanted to be a lawyer. To fight injustice, corruption and crime. Noble thoughts in a not so noble environment.

He himself was fine. There was nothing wrong with his studies or career. His school teacher father had taught him all the right things. But being young he was idealistic enough to look beyond himself and see how more than 100,000 fellow students (more than half the number of those studying in the university) were waiting, for months on end, to get to know the outcome of the exams they had appeared for. Many of them had missed deadlines for other competitive exams. Others were desperate to go out, get jobs and earn their livelihood so that they could stop being a burden on their not so well off parents.

Nishant joined them to protest. To protest against the callousness of the system. Its cruel indifference. To persuade the vice-chancellor (actually an acting vice-chancellor) to listen to their grievances. To try and help set things right so that students, particularly those who could not afford to hang around on the campus indefinitely, get justice and fairplay. But he got what most young people get today: a shut door. And complete silence. No one was ready to listen. The vice-chancellor played deaf and, despite the repeated pleas of so many hundreds of students, he refused to even come out of his room and give them a hearing.

For that was all they actually wanted. To be heard.

They are young but they are not exactly stupid. They did not expect miracles overnight. They simply wanted a hearing so that they could explain to the authorities their problems, their anguish. But there was no one prepared to listen to them.

So, frustrated and despondent, Nishant did what many of us feel like doing at times but lack the courage to. He poured kerosene on himself and lit a match. He torched himself. No, not for himself but so that thousands of others like him may be treated with greater respect in future. So that the fact that millions of lives and careers are destroyed every year by an uncaring academic establishment run by insensitive, inept bureaucrats and their lazy, corrupt thugs is brought to the attention of the media. So that the leaders of the nation figure out how frustrated our students are. Fighting a brute, wicked, deaf machinery that disallows them their most basic rights. Including the right to be heard.

Nishant died three days later in a Delhi hospital. But for a brief, shining moment he has succeeded in drawing nationwide attention to the fate of his fellow students. He has lent voice to the anger and frustration of millions of young people who rot in the groves of academe, waiting to get what is rightfully their's. A decent education. A certificate in time that can help them find a break in our rapidly shrinking job market.

Rajasthan University is not an exception. Most Indian universities are in a sorry, despairing mess. For the 1997-98 academic session, more than thirty universities are yet to conduct their exams. In fact, in some cases, exams have not been conducted for the past three years. Why? The reasons are many. Some genuine. Most of them specious. Mere excuses for keeping alive a terminally sick system that has outgrown the purpose of its existence. Employees and teachers have not been paid for months. And, in some cases, years. Grants have not been received. In many cases, the mandatory 180 teaching days have not been adhered to. The teachers have been too busy running coaching classes on the side to finish their classroom courses.

Yet, these very same teachers are fighting for higher wages all the time. For better facilities. More leave. More perks. They strike work at the slightest pretext. Because they know that the entire system out here depends on them, on the wobbly assembly line of shoddy products that they churn out wearily year after year. A system that no one can change or even buck simply because no one knows who is actually in charge of it.

What we fail to realise is that when you stop people, particularly young people, from protesting against corruption, crime and indifference you create far greater tensions in society, you unleash far more dangerous symptoms. That is how frustration multiplies and so does crime, violence, anger, resentment. By putting the nation's educational system in the hands of inept people who have no understanding of the young, who have no idea of how despairing they feel in an environment that offers them shrinking opportunities to showcase their talent, their skill, their ability to change the world, we are in effect sitting on a ticking time bomb.

When I watch my own girls go to college every day, when I see what they study, when I flip through their books, when I relate what they are studying to the kind of lives they will live in the new millennium that is about to come upon us, I feel equally scared. For I realise the complete irrelevance of the system that has trapped them. That has trapped them with the promise of a future that it is completely incapable of delivering.

The books they read, the ideas they are taught, the curriculum that hijacks their minds and soul are already way obsolete. But what is far more dangerous than all that is the way the academic system deadens them. By not teaching them anything of value but simply cramming their minds with useless, irrelevent junk that can, in no way, improve the quality of their lives. By, in fact, terrorising them to conform.

By forcing them to believe that this is the only way to enter real life.

No wonder so many young people are dropping out today. Or turning their face away from a system that offers them no hope, no challenge, no self respect. Just endless frustration, endless despair. And a deaf, stone deaf establishment that they have nothing but anger towards.

Nishant Bhardwaj is dead. But like many other young people before him, he has once again drawn our attention to the simple truth that the academic establishment we have built up in modern India is completely useless in dealing with the hopes and aspirations of the young and the talented.

It exists only to give jobs to retired bureaucrats and corrupt political leaders who want India to remain forever enslaved to its past. Who have no idea at all of what the young want, what they deserve. All they want is control. Control over their minds, over their lives. Over their votes.

Pritish Nandy

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