Daily Newsings: 14th May

Daily Newsings are musings on the daily news.

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) announced the results for grades 10 and 12 on Monday. The percentage of students who have passed the examinations has increased marginally compared to last year.

Over the last 8 decades since the country got its independence, India has made huge progress in raising the literacy and education levels of the population. We are much closer to universal literacy at this point. This was the dream of many of our early leaders. The dream was that with education would come national development.

However, when one looks at the everyday news in the country, one begins to wonder whether the education has lived up to the expectations.

Consider the following examples:

• Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United) was with the BJP, then switched alliances and joined the Congress. Then he again joined the BJP. Then again he switched to the Congress. And now again he is back with the BJP.
• Arvinder Singh Lovely was a Congress leader for many years. He quit the Congress and joined the BJP. Then he quit the BJP and came back to the Congress. And now again he has quit the Congress and joined the BJP. Why? The most likely reason was that he wasn’t given the ticket to contest the elections from where he wanted.
• Individual legislators quitting their own political parties and joining the opposition party in return for being given money has become so common that parties are often hiding their legislators in resorts after elections.

We could go on and on.

How can someone easily jump between political parties such as the Congress and the BJP, which are so opposed ideologically? Do they have any beliefs of their own? What do they really stand for? Can one so easily sell their beliefs in exchange for power or money? Are these people in politics in order to serve the people they claim to represent? Or are they in politics mainly in order to gain positions of power for their own selves?

This is not considering the alleged sexual abuses cases of both politicians in West Bengal and Karnataka.

How can an educated population elect men who lack any real ideological conviction, any semblance of moral conscience over and over again?

I remember a quote popularly attributed to Theodore Roosevelt: “A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.”

This is just a good reminder to us that education on its own can never build the moral fibre of a society. If corruption is heart-deep, secular education alone will never suffice. If corruption is in woven into the heart, who but the Creator alone can remove it?