Ambedkar in the time of student agitations

WEEKS OF STUDENT LED PROTESTS across the country seeking accountability from the Modi government regarding malpractices in conducting the NEET examination, and a host of issues on India’s crumbling education sector, alas culminated some days ago in the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Intrinsic to the flood of images pouring in from the protests in Jantar Mantar and across India’s urban clusters – from Mumbai to Patna –  leading up to the Education Minister’s resignation were the invocations of Dr Ambedkar, the Constitution, which he played a key role in the drafting of, and the slogan ‘Jai Bhim’, an adulatory anti-caste call that invokes Ambedkar’s revolutionary ideals.

In Jantar Mantar, young people could be seen waving blue flags, hoisting paper posters and cloth banners with Ambedkar’s photographs plastered. In Mumbai, a young man raised a copy of the Indian Constitution, stretching out his arm. In the days following Sonam Wangchuk's forceful admission at the Safdarjung Hospital and incessant police brutality against peacefully protesting students on July 20, Chandrashekar Azad, the Bhim Army leader, took shelter beneath a statue of Dr Ambedkar inside the Parliament complex, initiating an indefinite hunger strike, condemning the police action and calling for systemic changes in education reform.

The present educational regime betrays Ambedkar’s aspirations on higher education reform 

These imageries, within an agitation critiquing the National Testing Agency (‘NTA’), were not without Ambedkar’s deep entanglement with issues of education reform and its role in backward classes emancipation. For one, higher education, in his articulation, was a crucial catalyst for this emancipation. 

On October 5, 1927, while supporting an amendment to the Bombay University Bill increasing the number of nominated senators from 40 to 50, which would make way for representatives from backward classes in the governing body, Ambedkar argued that a fundamental function of universities was “to provide facilities for bringing the highest education to the doors of the needy and the poor.” Earlier on July 27 that year, he had observed that education was the “greatest material benefit” for which the backward classes could fight for. “We may forego material benefits, we may forego material benefits of civilization, but we cannot forego our right and opportunity to reap the benefit of the highest education to the fullest extent,” he noted, “That is the importance of this question from the point of view of the backward classes who have just realized that without education their existence is not safe.”
This purposive conception of higher education was also closely tied to an informed belief that a severely-examination linked system of higher education structurally excluded students from historically marginalised communities. In the July 27 speech, he noted that the education system in India was the “severest possible”. “This is no doubt justified by certain educationists in India who believe that the raising of the standard of examination is equivalent to the raising of the standard of Education. I beg respectfully to differ from them,” he submitted, “Examination is something quite different from education, but in the name of raising the standard of education, they are making the examinations so impossible and so severe that the backward communities which have hitherto not had the chance of entering the portals of the University are absolutely kept out.”