Politicians emptor!

DESPITE HAVING HAD to routinely suffer the contumely of myopic captains of India Inc,   pangs of disprized love from the country™s academic community and neglect of mainstream media, over the past almost 15 years since EducationWorld was launched in 1999 with the objective œto build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda, this publication has not only prospered, but also acquired a national reputation in inverse proportion to its public profile. A succession of ministers in Shastri Bhavan, Delhi (which houses the Union HRD ministry), who under-estimated and slighted this publication, have come to ignominious ends. In 2003, when EW repeatedly exposed the subversive agenda of Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi, Union HRD minister in the BJP-led NDA government, to infiltrate social sciences texts with communal propaganda and mythology, and to severely whittle down the autonomy of the IIMs, an enraged band of students of Allahabad University went door to door in the city to engineer his defeat in General Election 2004. Subsequently, when the late and unlamented Congress party stalwart Arjun Singh ˜mandalised™ higher education and attempted a backdoor entry into the IITs, expos©s in this publication forced his ouster from the UPA-II cabinet of 2009. And when his successor Kapil Sibal refused all requests for interviews to explain the ill-drafted Right to Education Act, your editors™ public complaints contributed to his own party colleagues in the parliamentary standing committee on education turning against him, and his exit from the ministry in 2012. The succession of Dr. Pallam Raju as HRD minister and his ˜dream team™ was warmly welcomed by EW. But like his arrogant and unaccountable predecessors in office, Raju earned the wrath of your editors by granting and then canceling an interview with them at the last minute. In the General Election of mid-May, Raju not only lost the right to represent the Kakinada constituency (Andhra Pradesh) in the Lok Sabha, a seat he had held since 1984, but his election deposit as well. Draw your own conclusions! Occam explanation POLLSTERS, PUNDITS, academics and intellectuals have offered a mountain of reasons to explain the complete rout of the 128-year-old Congress Party in General Election 2014. For the first time in the history of post-independence India, this grand old party has less than 10 percent of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha. This dismal electoral performance disqualifies its leader (Sonia Gandhi) from claiming the limited rights and privileges of leader of the opposition. Undoubtedly there™s considerable truth and accuracy in most policy-failure related explanations ” unbridled corruption, unremitting inflation, sharp fall in GDP growth, administrative paralysis etc. But applying the principle of Occam™s Razor which stipulates that the simplest explanation is often the best, it™s arguable that overwhelming arrogance and hubris did the party in. In retrospect, it™s quite clear that if the Congress-led UPA-I government had been voted out at the end of its first term, it wouldn™t have suffered the ignominy of this summer which may well prove…