Thread by @roshankar

I stand by students who fight for protection of our rights.

You can find a splice of history, sociology or anthropology to oppose it.

Don't ignore the silent screams of farmers in Bombay, or the restless frustrations of Delhi's youth.

Stand by them. Here's my reasons why. /1

External Tweet loading...
If nothing shows, it may have been deleted
by @Anupam_Guha view original on Twitter

The outcome sought from a democracy should be to fulfill human potential and minimize suffering at the very core, through unique and complex interactions of state, market and society, and possibly set a path to exploration, enlightenment and avoidance of the extinction event. /2

India's first past the post parliamentary democracy can only ever achieve a subset of those outcomes envisioned and executed by the best of humanity. Still, given those constraints, we can expect linear problems and constants to be solved well by the state, given certain info. /3

I mean to say that the state, which was not democratic like Agora or OWS, could possibly keep solving its misplaced problems of structure at bay by continually finding solutions from the fundamental constructs of democracy. That is eminently clear. /4

China did it with sending money to cities and the US kept using military debt and Wall Street. Countries aggregated power and made mistakes which failed miserably. Others were prudent and restrategized. There are no clear governance answers. Only strategies to move ahead. /5

Education forms the basis of fulfilling human potential and helping the species to a path of enlightenment, exploration and delay or deny the extinction event till it is possible. Uniquely gifted minds and groups of people in history are the only ones who have taken us ahead. /6

The Indian state has abdicated responsibility of a core competency over the years. That has shifted to the market and society. It has cut funding and even thinking about it afresh. There are wins here and there of course but the direction is certainly downward. /7

This competency is human resource development. The absence of decentralization, devolution or community participation which should be fundamental realignments, Congress went top heavy and abandoned ideology for electoral losses, a picture reflected in our education system. /8

Capitalism entered with its financial architecture and did screw up several things but gave shining victories but only from certain perspectives. It threw quite a few ideological spanners in the works like the efficiency of markets and private education as a myth. /9

Myth not as an idea but as a rejected construct of scale in the then and even the present interaction of state, market and society. Delhi's private schools for example are efficient only in very small number with very few being effective on learning. /10

Constant governance priority shifts through the 1990s and political interactions of overhaul in 2000s ensured two things:

1. A strong BJP RSS influence on the country's fundamental architecture and ideas.

2. The Congress organization, devoid of ideas was prone to attack. /11

The India Against Corruption movement was a flash in the pan during Occupy Wall Street because the first world wide effects of the global bureaucracy was seen and noticed by everyone for the first time through the culmination of years of good ideas and pressure from society. /12

The AAP and @ArvindKejriwal stopped this symbiotic organization of RSS and BJP in the Delhi elections through a democratic and community driven campaign backed it up with good work. It was ably supported by a Congress minus cadre and BJP without leaders. /13

Nitish and Lalu broke BJP's electoral approach to Bihar by knowing it better than Amit Shah's quant team since they were from Bihar and combined it with the governance perception index of Nitish with Lalu's understanding of caste. /14

Many progressive state governments in India have shown that public education can provide gains for society but have been wedded to ideology and been fiscally imprudent because they used it as a power delaying tactic. /15

AAP has also shown small victories in the long march of history recently. The Interdisciplinary brilliance of @IIITDelhi as an example of what is possible if free academics, honest politics, good strategy and markets combine efficiently. /16

From a 2 room university in 2010 when I was an undergraduate student to its premier reputation and Interdisciplinary brilliance in 2017 that it currently enjoys. /17

Civil society in India has also proposed an interesting bouquet of alternate options and pedagogic frameworks. The state can plan a framework to regulate and assist it but doesn't need to shut it unless there is a good rule or reason. /18

The market and private capital recently is finding or thinking of finding more Ashoka, Nalanda and KREAs and that is heartening. But they cannot be the solution and can only be a bouquet. /19

This isolation of actors, mistaken identity of function with outcomes and the lack of a conducive atmosphere end up muddling up priorities as well as lesser than optimal outcomes. State lacks capacity and comptence and is abdicating both. This can't be allowed, as of now IMO. /20

State is the predominant owner of education infrastructure and controls a majority of the human resources that exist around that planning. A generation finishes schooling and college at different rates and drop off points in about 12-15 years with old principals and teachers. /21

In vocational, technical and skill education, the state has been gradually grown incompetent at solving problems of the world at large or the market or well, even the individual's desire to learn. The teachers and professors are not equipped for the swathing changes proposed. /22

Most Indian success stories claimed in the name of India are products primarily of a combination of any of the following: privilege, individual agency and endeavour, family and social background or success in a vertical specialisation world. They succeeded despite the system. /23

Such moves will open function shops, defund important research in several academic disciplines and subject millions of students across India to a precarious and broken education system and gather debt for something the state could have solved creatively and efficiently. /24

India is Lijjat Papad, White Revolution, Green Revolution and Kudumbashree Bazaar, with some of its finest professors of science, technology and society hidden away in its premier institutions powerless to administrations. They can find our answers and have many already. /25

In the absence of scientifically accurate left vs. right economic recent histories; component based analysis, and well, more actors than one to solve the pedagogy and learning outcome problem, it is important for government to look inward first and fix itself. /26

The layers of the specific targeting of Delhi students on campus and gender has made the problem further fractured and yet rage-inducing. It is important for them to follow the rulebook and process to the T and yet further their civil disobedience and protest. /27

Hope this protest scales across India and becomes a vehicle to direct us into a new direction that is course-corrected whilst simultaneously working towards achieving the dream of a democracy with educated citizens. Education has to be the first political non-negotiable. /28

The protest needs to scale across the country with processes of engagement in place that promote issue-based alliances and horizontal hierarchies with intermittent aggregation or verticality, with cogent and uniform communication, supported by communication/IT. /29

It needs to take new formats and ideas from popular culture, film, music, drama and cultural history of the people around us.

Protest venues need to be each symbol of educational oppression, financial tyranny or autocratic though. /30

Be innovative. Outrage uniformly on fundamental issues of freedom + rights. Use intrinsic parts of cultural or memetic history in plans. Use brand, strategy and iterations to scale. Use IT, Tech and Automation well to reduce complexity and increase scale. Happy to help! /31 /FIN