Many thoughtful people believe that the dominance of a small English-speaking elite in the social and intellectual life of India that has continued long after decolonization has been an important factor in arousing the hostility of a segment of the vernacular proto-elite that has felt excluded and hence has gravitated towards the Bharatiya Janata Party; that the BJP in other words represents inter alia a revolt against the dominance of a small English-speaking elite in the affairs of the country. There may be an element of truth in this, and let us for argument’s sake agree with this view for the time being.

The means of breaking this dominance of a small English-speaking elite is obviously through a democratization of education, especially of higher education, so that quality higher education becomes available over time to so many persons that the privileges hitherto accruing to a small elite begin to wither away. The BJP that has been cashing in on this sense of exclusion felt by many, should, one would think, be democratizing quality higher education, making it accessible to an ever-widening circle of hitherto excluded students, and breaking down the monopoly of a few reputed educational institutions that are instrumental in the process of self-perpetuation of a small elite through the privileged access of its progeny to such institutions, by starting many more quality institutions.

This however is precisely what the BJP-led government has not been doing. Its focus has been not on the democratization of quality education but on the destruction of quality education. The few public institutions of quality in the realm of higher education, such as the Jawaharlal Nehru University, which catered not so much to the children of the elite as to a wider segment of the population because of their inclusive admissions policy, have been systematically sought to be destroyed. Far from spending vastly increased sums on education that such a democratization agenda demands, the government has been cutting down severely on its education budget. Its objective has been to privatize higher education, which makes it so expensive that children from non-elite backgrounds simply lack the means to enter the portals of these new private institutions. Instead of a few reputed institutions that produced the elite earlier, we now have a few more reputed institutions also engaged in producing just the elite, though of a different kind, and quite consciously aiming to do so. The process of exclusion, the opposition to which is supposed to have made the BJP attractive to many, continues with a vengeance, indeed with even greater force than in the  years immediately following independence.

While the democratization agenda has thus been given the go-by, starving public educational institutions of funds (which entails their being grossly understaffed for years so that hardly much teaching takes place in them), recruiting teachers not on the basis of their competence in their subjects but on the basis of their professed loyalty to the Hindutva agenda, and dropping, for no conceivable academic reasons, large chunks of subject matter from the syllabi (such as the Mughal period from the teaching of history in several schools), ensure that public educational institutions are reduced to abysmally low academic levels. Since private institutions, even the most reputed and expensive ones, are primarily concerned with catering to the job market and not with imparting knowledge with a critical perspective, what we have in effect is a destruction of critical thought, which means fundamentally a destruction of education.

Why does a government that professes opposition to a small English-speaking elite and wins sympathy on the basis of such opposition, end up destroying education altogether rather than democratizing it? The answer lies in a basic characteristic of neo-fascism, namely, that while it often woos people in the name of opposition to privilege, it carries out the agenda of the most privileged group in society, namely, the monopoly capitalists; fascism and neo-fascism in other words are built upon a fundamental dishonesty.

German fascism of the 1930s for instance called itself “national socialism”; it fulminated against big capital even while being surreptitiously linked to it, and when it came to power and forged open links with big capital, those of its adherents who had been taken in by its earlier fulminations and had remained loyal to them, were simply eliminated in a bloody purge that has gone down in history as “the night of the long knives”.

It is this same dishonesty that is at work here in the sphere of education. The appeal of the neo-fascist elements comes from their implicit promise that they would pursue an agenda of democratization, but destruction of education is what monopoly capital wants; their true agenda therefore becomes the destruction of education. But then the question arises: why does monopoly capital want the destruction of education? And in what sense is education being destroyed?

What such destruction means is the following: technical knowledge and skills continue to be imparted with gusto, but any knowledge of society or any reflection upon its dynamics, except in the form of an uncritical adulation of the status quo, is totally eschewed. In particular, any critical examination of the present is severely frowned upon.

Monopoly capital wants skilled workers, which these newly emerging private institutions are required to produce, and do produce; but a study of society, which necessarily must be carried out within a critical perspective, is deemed dangerous by monopoly capital and gets completely sidelined. Paul Baran the well-known Marxist economist, had once drawn a distinction between “intellectuals” and “intellect workers”. We can restate our argument in terms of this distinction: institutions of higher education in the era of the hegemony of monopoly capital, instead of seeking to produce “intellectuals” that serve the interests of the people and show them the way forward for achieving their freedom, produce instead only “intellect workers” that serve monopoly capital (and multinational corporations with which domestic monopoly capital is aligned).

Central to this distinction is the practice of critical thought. The objective of educational institutions in the era of monopoly capital is the destruction of critical thought and since critical thought is the essence of education, its destruction amounts to a destruction of education.

In India the process of destruction of education began in right earnest with the adoption of neo-liberal policies. Destruction of education is in fact central to the neo-liberal agenda, which enjoins upon the country the task of privatizing essential services like healthcare and education. Privatization of education does not just mean that a certain “thing” which used to be provided by the government earlier is now provided by the private sector; it means a change in the very nature of what is provided. Privatization of education (except when the private institutions are charitable ones as they historically had been in India) essentially means the production of education as a “commodity” for earning a profit; this profit of course may be reinvested in the institution itself, but that does not alter the character of these institutions as profit-making ones that sell a commodity. Commoditization of education entails the commoditization of the product of the education system. The products that come out of the education system therefore, instead of seeking to serve the people with the knowledge they acquire, become, and are meant to become, self-centred, self-interest-focussed individuals who sell their skills to the highest bidder; the very nature of education thus undergoes a fundamental change, with a conscious attempt being made to force the disappearance of any critical thought from the sphere of education.

Neo-fascism carries this forward. It is the denouement to which neo-liberalism ultimately leads. Since the neo-liberal regime is characterized by an enormous widening of income and wealth inequality, and since the rich consume a smaller proportion of their income than the working people, neo-liberal capitalism inevitably ends up generating a tendency towards over-production, which manifests itself in economic stagnation, and higher levels of unemployment. This is precisely the conjuncture where monopoly capital requires an alliance with neo-fascism to buttress its hegemony and hence neo-fascism gains ascendancy.

The destruction of education begun in right earnest by neo-liberalism is carried much further forward by neo-fascism. The decimation of public educational institutions which neo-liberalism sought to effect through starving them of funds, is carried forward by putting Hindutva pebbles into students’ heads, by even making critical thinking a criminal offence; in fact critical thinking is sought to be made an offence not just in public institutions but even in private institutions if perchance it unexpectedly rears its head there.

The duplicitousness of neo-fascism consists in the fact that while fulminating against the old English-speaking elite, it does not seek to abolish the dominance of such an elite; rather it seeks to replace such dominance by that of an alternative uncritical and thoughtless English-speaking elite.