The demands of the style of competitive politics that India’s democracy seems to encourage usually have politicians vying with one another to offer electorates more - more loan waivers, free rice, power, job reservations, and so on. In that sense, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and its leader Mulayam Singh Yadav have broken new ground by offering Uttar Pradesh voters less in the bid to compete against the power of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) party leader, Ms Mayawati. So, where BSP promised to introduce more English-medium schools and step up the pace of computerisation in India's most populous (and among its most backward) states, the SP’s manifesto promises to do just the opposite. The SP has vowed to abolish schools offering “expensive” English education. And, on the quaint assumption that computers displace manual jobs, the party said it would scrap the use of computers where the same work can be done manually. Later, the party clarified that the computer diktat would apply to only new projects.
It is difficult to understand just how the SP can consider these promises populist and vote-winning at a time when even the poorest of India’s aam aadmi are eagerly trying to acquire an English-language education and computer skills. One only has to look at the booming private businesses of computer education and “English-medium schools” in small-town and rural India to gauge the extent of popular demand for these basic qualifications. Since Mr Yadav has served as a central minister (holding the defence portfolio), he has no doubt also travelled outside of India and gained a good idea of the fact that the country's global reputation is built on the twin advantages of a large English-knowing population and IT proficiency. That makes the logic of the SP manifesto incomprehensible, and its perceived attractions for voters beyond the capacity of normal vision.
If Mr Yadav and his party colleagues are serious about these promises, one can only assume they are operating in a political time warp. Most state governments that abolished English in state-run schools in the seventies and eighties have long since reversed those policies once their deleterious impact on employment became clear. In West Bengal, Jyoti Basu as chief minister opposed the computerisation of government departments but changed his mind towards the end of his tenure. Now, a new dispensation under Buddhadeb Bhattacharya is desperately trying to make up for lost time.
Mr Yadav also needs to be corrected on several notions that he holds about the use of English in India and the impact of computerisation. Like all northern politicians, he assumes that Hindi, the language most widely spoken in UP, is India’s only national language. Actually the Constitution mandates over 20 national languages, including English. Given India’s enormous diversity, English plays a practical role of providing the only politically acceptable medium of communication, given that the southern states will not accept Hindi. And he should surely know that an English education is "expensive" only because of the premium attached to knowledge of the language. As for his views on computerisation and its job-destroying potential, the notions are so absurdly Luddite that even Mr Yadav will probably backtrack on that promise if his party is voted into a position of power.
