Dear Rajendra, This is a clever argument! I read you saying: if you get your demands met, you will face a communal backlash! Heads we win, and tails you lose.
Earlier too, around 1985-87, support was garnered for Konkani by suggesting that Marathi would swallow the minorities... Now we can see the picture more clear, though. I fail to understand how this issue can be interpreted in communal terms. Today, across Goa (forget the coast and hinterland stereotypes), parents regardless of religion prefer to vote with their feet against the government-run Marathi medium schools that proliferated in the 1960s. Which is why these schools are closing down, being merged, or handed over to political supporters. Konkani has had its many glitches in implementation. To understand why, one needs to look at the Devanagari-Romi divide as well as the fact that even supposed champions of Konkani have been finding it tough to run schools in that language or educate their children/grandchildren in that tongue. I fail to see how a dog-in-the-manger approach (we-don't-want-English-and-won't-let-you-have-it) policy can be justified in rational terms. If a tiny, well-organised section is able to push its views down on everyone else, that's another matter. Seen another way, the attempt to polarise people on religious lines is actually essential and badly needed, if our politicians are to continue dividing and ruling. A Churchill can gain from a 1990 PDF decision (personally) and a 2011 Congress decision (politically). The opportunism of others, supported by the vernacular press without much debate, goes unchallenged of course! As far as I see it, the Diocesan Society played a major negative role by taking (what they thought to be) the easy way out in 1991, and believing that they could gain from the policy of giving grants to primaries where none earlier existed. It took them 20 years to realise that their schools were getting decimated in the bargain, with the more affluent simply moving away from them. (In that sense, your suggested time-line is incorrect; parents affected by the MoI policy have long been lobbying for a change. It was only this year after New Delhi's new policy threatened to take Devanagari Konkani upto Std VII or VIII, that the schools probably realised the implications of it.) As for your argument that the Congress is no different from the BJP, I have long held these parties are two sides of the same coin -- even in terms of communalism and/or corruption (if both are long enough in power). The only difference, maybe, is the Congress love their power more, and are willing to bend a bit to cater to sectional interests. Mind you, this is not only when it comes to the "minorities" as is projected, but even within large sections within the "majority". Which is why the Congress somehow cobbles together a majority. However, the Congress does have an uncanny ability of letting the agenda to be set by the BJP and its interest. FN On 28 June 2011 00:18, rajendra kakodkar <[email protected]> wrote: > > It was the Diocesan Society which mooted the idea of government grants to > English MoI. Their motivation came from the fact that the catholic community > was preferring private English schools in preference to church run Konkani > schools, a genuine reason. The PTAs of the church run schools toed in their > line and formed a FORCE to fight the cause. The government on the basis of > 50,000 odd signatures upheld the freedom of choice of the parents to choose > MoI for their wards and approved the proposal. > > But the decision making process was not as clean as that. The haste with > which the decision was made, lack of consultation with education experts, > ignoring the global concensus of preferring mother tongue at primary level > and the lack of gestation period for effective delivery of the policy were > the grey areas for the smooth sailing of the policy implementation. Yet, if > this had happened two or three years earlier, it would have got a lukewarm > resistance, which would have died down in due course....
