BJP ministers attend education meet

Human Resources Development Minister Arjun Singh today dealt a masterstroke by getting Ghanshyam Tiwari, education minister of BJP-ruled Rajasthan, to chair a committee for the universalisation of secondary education, even as he indicted the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh for pushing its policies through the "backdoor".

Along with Tiwari, education ministers of four other BJP-ruled states attended the meeting of the Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE) today. These included Anandiben Patel of Gujarat, Ajay Chandrakar of Chhattisgarh, PN Singh of Jharkhand and Alka Jain of Madhya Pradesh.

These ministers had yesterday boycotted the CABE meeting, in protest against the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government's "arbitrary" decision to withdraw National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) text-books.

"Yesterday, we boycotted the meeting as it had a political agenda. Today, it dealt with education, discussing primary, secondary and higher education, so we decided to attend," Tiwari said.

It became clear later that Tiwari had accepted Singh's offer for chairing the committee after consulting party President M Venkaiah Naidu.

Tiwari, on his part, has expressed his reservations on the CABE proposal allowing direct affiliation of minority educational institutions to the National Commission on Minority Education. He has also taken exception to the inclusion of several personalities from non-governmental organisations in CABE. Tiwari demanded that the revenues collected from the education cess should not be included in the Consolidated Fund of India, and wanted the states to have a greater allocation.

Besides Tiwari, Singh named six other CABE members as heads of committees looking into various issues related to education.

The CABE committee on the free and compulsory education Bill will address issues of elementary education and will be chaired by Minister of State for Science and Technology Kapil Sibal. The committee on girls education and the common school system will be chaired by Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi. West Bengal Education Minister Kanti Biswas will head the committee on autonomy of higher education institutions. Integration of cultural education in school education, a point discussed extensively at the meeting, will be looked into by Professor U R Anantamurthy. The regulatory mechanism for text books taught in private schools will be chaired by Zoya Hasan and Professor Gopal Guru, member, Planning Commission. Professor Bhalchandra Mungekar will head the committee on financing higher and technical education.

After the meeting, Singh said the RSS must get itself registered with the Election Commission and fight elections, instead of  influencing political parties to implement its objectionable ideology.

Reacting to allegations about purging the system of RSS men, Singh said a law was in place that disallowed government servants to be part of organisations like the RSS. However, this law was disregarded by BJP President LK Advani during the National Democratic Alliance rule.

Yesterday, a resolution passed by the BJP education ministers had said: "We reject the decision to withdraw the books on history and social sciences published under NDA rule and their replacement with old books published since 1968. We resolve to continue with the existing books, which conform to the National Curriculum Framework For School Education 2000, which was upheld by the Supreme Court."