State of sterile mind

The argument that funding a cultural or intellectual institution gives the govt every right to choose who runs it, how and what kind of ideas it produces, is a dangerous one.

On principle, you cannot question the Vajpayee government’s “clean up” of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA). What business does a political party, or worse, a dynasty, have to control a clutch of cultural and intellectual institutions mostly funded by the government? But the principle itself is flawed.

On the limited issue of challenging the Gandhi family’s control of the state-funded foundations, Culture Minister Ananth Kumar does have a point. But the larger argument, that if the government funds a cultural or intellectual institution it has every right to choose who runs it, how and what kind of ideas it produces, is a dangerous one. Unfortunately, it has now become an accepted norm.

It works in two ways. First, the Congress rewarded its own loyalists with these positions for 50 years. The Third Front did so even in its short reign. So what is wrong if the BJP “accommodates” those who had stood by it through its opposition years? And why can’t the state seek accountability from the institutions it funds?

Both arguments are rooted in an old, intellectually bankrupt mindset, and have blighted not only our intellectual and cultural wealth but even the quality of our democracy and governance. What is the point of creating expensive white elephants in the name of intellect and culture if they are to be held accountable by faceless figures marking time as joint secretaries in the ministries of culture, HRD and so on?

If you treat state-funded institutions as government departments they are bound to produce “intellect” with a sarkari stamp. A cultural or academic institution accountable to the state just because it pays for it is an oxymoron. That is not the way great, and more successful, democracies have built their intellectual capital. No democracy can become truly great unless it nurtures a free market of ideas. The government, here, is a benign and patient venture capitalist. It makes an investment, ensures the right framework for financial checks and balances, ensures intellectual freedom and hopes the investment pays in the long run. How do we pass that test?

Quite poorly. In India, the marketplace of ideas is the most protected one. Most universities function no better than government departments. Many allegedly autonomous institutions only produce inputs for the government, in keeping with the party line of the day and rarely challenge the status quo.

Such intellectual inbreeding is dangerous when the world is prospering through the widest cross-fertilisation of ideas. Here, even the venerable Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA) produces volumes of high-quality work advising the government. But when was the last time it produced a radically new idea that shook the strategic community? The finest of our strategic scholars have worked there for years. How come, then, that the institute has not produced any path-breaking work challenging establishmentarian beliefs or government policies of the day?

A Gerald Segal at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, London, can produce a provocative essay like “Does China Matter?” even while fighting terminal cancer and thereby challenge all prevailing Western notions of China’s emergence as the new superpower. A Samuel Huntington produces from Harvard his theory of the “Clash of Civilisations” so profoundly significant for us that we are still quoting from it. But how many Indian strategists do anything other than either rationalising government policy or suggesting what it should do instead? You cannot produce many new thoughts or challenge the status quo in a market where the state is seen as the only investor and also the only buyer.

Yet, why do some of our institutions still keep growing? Why is it so that the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TI-FR), the IITs, continue to be world-class centres of excellence? They wouldn’t be if the Tatas were not benign, patient venture capitalists who steadfastly refrain from interfering in the institutions they fund. Or if a clinical, foolproof nationwide selection process did not ensure a level-playing field at the IIT selection. No weighted interviews, no discretion of any kind for the government even though it underwrites the IITs fully.

The IITs are the best example of how even state-run institutions can prosper from autonomy. They do without the usual UPSC style sham of external examinations. In fact, even teachers are assessed by students every semester to build in accountability. No joint secretary in the HRD ministry needs to lose sleep over the taxpayer getting his money’s worth from the IITs without whom there may not have been any infotech revolution in the Silicon Valley. Hierarchy, control, patronage, even accountability are notions that don’t always work in the marketplace of ideas which, in a free society, can only grow laterally. Ideas can’t grow top-down. Building an institution, therefore, also means looking at the future and choosing, nurturing and empowering the best among the new generation. In the more successful Western democracies, the he-ads of institutions would often judge their success in terms of whether the place will grow after they leave. We, on the contrary, are victims of the “if the institution dies when I leave it means I was a great intellectual giant” syndrome. This dovetails nicely into the tradition of state patronage and, ultimately, intellectual sterility.

We must learn to cherish, nurture, encourage all kinds and hues of “ideas bodies”. An IGNCA, a Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, a Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Foundation or probably an EMS Centre are every bit as vital to our society as the Carter and Reagan or Woodrow Wilson Centres are to the US. Ideas need ideological breeding grounds. It is silly for the government of the day to de-ideologise them or put them in an administrative straight-jacket. We must learn to value and respect the BJP’s ideas factories as much as the Congress party’s or the Left’s. At the same time, it is as important to free the Prasar Bharatis, universities or even the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) from the control of the joint secretaries as it is to unshackle the public sector airlines. Here even our premier International Film Festival becomes an “official” event rather than one of our own film industry, probably hosted and organised by the FTII, where young students can work as volunteers, ushers and rub shoulders with the best in the world. Today, they might be lucky to cadge the odd pass from the Directorate of Film Festivals in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting of the Government of India, blah blah…

But you may ask isn’t that the way things always worked? Isn’t this how the Gandhi family used the institutions to reward their darbaris? Then why shouldn’t the BJP let some of their own bask in similar glory? You are perhaps right. But if you did not expect a paradigm shift of some sort, why did you vote for Atal Behari Vajpayee in the first place?