The education sector across India is wracked by crisis, scandal and repression.
At Hyderabad Central University (HCU), the Congress-dominated Telangana government has set in motion plans to construct a ‘state-of-the-art’ IT park over 400 acres of university land. In protest, left-wing students organised a peaceful sit-in, leading to a vicious police response and 52 arrests.
The land in question has long been the subject of a legal battle between the university and the state. Using the rhetoric of “industrial and economic development” (by which they mean maximising corporate profits), the government initiated bulldozing and land-levelling. As a result, trees were felled, forests razed, and the ecosystem ravaged.
State officials have attempted to placate the students by promising to preserve key features of the landscape, such as the Mushroom Rock formation, under the Environmental Management Plan. But this scandalous land grab exposes the true face of Congress – often portrayed as the ‘progressive’ alternative to Modi’s BJP – as merely the friendlier face of brutal Indian capitalism.
Parallel to this, the West Bengal court has confirmed the cancellation of 26,000 teaching jobs. The capitalist politicians are opening essential public institutions – health, education, and transportation – to profiteering and throwing public sector workers on the scrapheap. In West Bengal alone, over 8,000 public primary schools have been shut down.
The situation is not limited to Bengal. From job cuts, to NEET admission tests and JEE exam scams, wherein working-class and poor students are excluded from higher education as the children of the rich buy their way in, we see the collapse of even the illusion of fairness in the education sector.
These assaults on education are the convulsions of a crisis-stricken capitalism. The only way forward is to organise for the overthrow capitalism, and lay the basis for a new society based on the betterment of humanity rather than the enrichment of a privileged few.
Workers, peasants, students, youth – unite in struggle!
