EDITORIAL

The Karnataka High Court verdict on choice of medium of instruction for unaided schools has come as a big relief for all those communities that faced a Hobson’s choice while running their educational institutions in the State. The verdict restores the right of recognition of nearly 3,000 schools which were derecognized two years earlier apparently for imparting instruction in English. By all means, it is a landmark judgment. It has said what could not have been expressed by simple mortals in a state where constitutional rights had come to be interpreted in very narrow terms.

Translated in simple terms, the verdict enables the unaided schools to adopt any language as a medium of instruction. The State will have no right to withhold recognition if the schools adopt a language other than the mother tongue of students or Kannada. Effectively it means the government cannot refuse recognition to privately run English medium schools and coerce the minorities to run schools only in their mother tongue. Two years ago, the Janata Dal Secular government had swooped down on English medium schools and served ban orders on 3,000 of them, mainly in southern parts of the state.

The judgment comes as a huge relief to Marathi, Konkani, Tulu, Urdu, Malayalam and Tamil speaking communities as they can now run English medium schools. It neither denies the Government’s right to fund only Kannada medium schools, nor does it bar it from introducing Kannada as a compulsory subject under the 3-language formula. The policy so far restrained the linguistic minorities from choosing a language of their choice as medium of instruction and in cent per cent cases, the choice used to be English.

The verdict gels with the linguistic demography of the state. Karnataka is the most polyglot among the four south Indian states. While in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, over 92 per cent of people speak Tamil and Malayalam, in Andhra Pradesh, nearly 88 per cent speak and use Telugu. But only 67 per cent people in Karnataka speak the regional and official language, Kannada. Nearly nine per cent speak Urdu, five per cent Tamil, and equal number Hindi and Telugu. People in the three coastal districts use Tulu, Beary, Navayathi and Konkani. However, all these communities are united on one count: their own mother tongue does not adequately equip them with market skills and compelling them to choose it as the medium of instruction will ruin the prospect of economic integration.
But inherent in the judgment is a threat to Kannada. The verdict undoubtedly boosts prospects of English medium education in the State which acts as a powerful magnate to attract outsiders. With Kannada speaking people already reduced to a minority in a cosmopolis like Bangalore, the heat would be on other cities under the new liberalized language policy.

Living communities need to be accommodative in behaviour, elastic in principles and flexible in conduct. Just as no society is ethnically pure, no faith can claim to remain unalloyed over the course of centuries. Every foreign influence should not be necessarily construed as corruption. If not the doctrines of the faith, the ethos, cultural norms, customs, languages, dietary habits, dressing modes of the people have to essentially imbibe the influences from the society around. So while professions of faith could remain tethered to the scriptures, same cannot be expected—nor demanded—from the people and their social and ethical mores. They interact, influence and infect each other. Cultural osmosis is an ever ongoing process. As communities of faithful spin out into the larger geographical orbits, they grow more distant from the people at the core inasmuch as only the umbilical cord of doctrine holds them together.

Similarly, words, texts and scriptures could timelessly exist on paper, could be stored in archives, preserved in tomes. But not the people. Times change and urge people to change. Those who resist, find themselves on the waste heap of history. Science and technology shape habits and forces of urbanization, industrialization and modernization alter the mode of social organization. As time advances, societies fuse together, skills consolidate, cultural fault lines become indistinguishable. All these place demands on people to live down differences except those that are integral to their faith.

It is in this context that we, the Muslims, need to take a look at ourselves. Time and geographical climes are constantly urging modifications that seem to be beyond our grasp. Determination not to change is pushing us into a blind alley of time. Refusal to acknowledge the urges of plural societies, two-way traffic of human rights, according the minorities within us due space, graduating up on the scale of gender rights, transition from consultation (shoora) to democracy (jamhuriyyet), and loosening the terms of discussion on matters religious is reflective of our fossilized mindset. Unless we begin to think and change, there does not seem to be any diversion from the road going downhill.