Yet Another Promise
The Gauhati University Vice-Chancellors decision to withdraw his letter of
resignation has been hailed by one and all with the appropriate sighs of
relief. There can be no doubt that the withdrawal of resignation has come about
as the result of a lot of pressure from student organizations as well the
faculty of the university with the Chancellor himself playing a pivotal role in
making the government honour its earlier commitments. In any case, the
Education Minister too must have had time to realize that he had gratuitously
burnt his fingers by calling the Vice-Chancellor an escapist. We now have a
situation where a government that has a rather poor track record of keeping
promises has managed to persuade the Vice-Chancellor to withdraw his
resignation by dangling yet another promise before him. There is a very strong
element of deja vu in such familiar shenanigans. The government makes a
commitment to a college or university or a professional fraternity (like the
teachers) and does not honour it. This leads to a threat of resignation or a
collective hunger strike. The government first denounces the reactions and then
makes yet another promise with a shorter deadline, but when the time comes to
honour this new promise, the leopard cannot get rid of its spots. For the
government, most promises are a means of buying time, unless a promise has been
made to a group of its blue-eyed boys or when honouring a financial commitment
yields some financial benefit also to the political executive or the
bureaucrats. For instance, the contractors who did the shoddiest job of
widening the GNB/MRD Road of Guwahati (with its two-foot high pavements) did
not have to wait for their money even though they left walls of sandbags in the
drains and even though their bills involved hundreds of crores of rupees. And
yet the same government cannot meet its legitimate financial obligations to its
creditors even when there are court orders and even when the
amounts involved are very much smaller. When it comes to honouring its
financial commitments, the government is not terribly worried by who or what is
going to be affected by its failure to keep its promises. It has arbitrary
norms about who needs to be paid at once and who can be kept dangling for
months on end. And in its whimsical scheme of things, vice-chancellors and
teachers belong to the second category.
The Vice-Chancellor of Gauhati University should keep this rather familiar
style of functioning of the government in mind and not be very sanguine about
yet another promise emanating from the same deplorable source of commitments.
He should get his staff to work on a war footing to submit the detailed project
report on how the Rs 25 crore that the government has promised him by December
31, 2007 will be spent. And this time, if the government fails Gauhati
University once again, he must resign as Vice-Chancellor and not withdraw his
resignation again regardless of who pleads with him to capitulate once again.
This will ensure two things: (a) that unlike the government, he does not
believe in empty threats solely for effect; and (b) that the government is made
to take full responsibility for the dismal future of the university after that.
There is no denying that the people of Asom cannot afford to get into such a
situation, but if their elected government pushes Gauhati
University to such a situation, that government must also face the inevitable
consequences.
(EDITORIAL,The Sentinel,04.10.2007)
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