First, election manifestos in India are largely documents full of whatever the authors <i>think</i> (rarely accurately) will get them a few more votes in an election, or signal various postures to various electoral allies, not something they have the remotest intent of implementing to the letter. If one hundredth of the promises made in the last election's manifestos were implemented, India would be a very different place.<p>Publishing manifestos is an almost empty electoral ritual, beyond the above mentioned mild "signaling" effects. No one holds any party accountable for what their manifestos promise and by the time the next election comes around, everyone has forgotten what the manifesto said (and there will be a new manifesto!). As an example, any party that plans to curry favor with the Muslim populace would include a "resist American imperialism" theme in its manifesto (though my friends who are part of the ground campaign report that many muslims think that Barack <i>Hussein</i> Obama is muslim, so they are feeling friendly to the USA and so the "anti American stance to please muslims" plank is backfiring occasionally!)<p>Second, the Samajwadi Party is largely confined to the "cow belt" of India, which has the least educated populace in India. There is a national election coming up in the next few days and this is just posturing on Mr.Yadav's part to score points with his uneducated/ English unfriendly constituents (or so he thinks. Most people, even the desperately poor, would,given the chance, send their children to English Medium. computer friendly schools).<p>A large chunk of the bureaucracy functions in English (though ever larger chunks have moved to the local language over the years) and this causes English illiterate people some difficulty when they have to interact with the bureaucracy. This is the sentiment Mr Yadav is (faintly) trying to add to his vote bank, without pissing off the english using bureaucrats. And of course, there is always a bunch of hard core language chauvinists who hate every language but their own (This in a country with 20+ official languages and 2000+ dialects) The elections are likely to be very close this year and every bit helps. The smarter folks just ignore this kind of posturing and look at what the candidate/party <i>did</i> in the past(vs what they said).<p>Think of an American politician in a heavily republican evangelical constituency talk about how he'd enforce Christian Prayer in schools and work diligently overturn Roe vs Wade. The American pol would have powerful interest groups watching and publicizing every deviation from their agendsa. In India nothing like that exists.To a much greater degree than in the USA, in India no one really cares about party manifestos anyway except in a very abstract sense. Elections are decided on local/current issues and alliances.<p>Believe you me, any action to make this a ground reality would cause a massive backlash, if not outright rebellion. Indian governments are largely coalitions of disparate parties and there is no way Mr. Yadav will get the votes in parliament to implement this. (he is a very canny politician, he wouldn't even try!)<p>To repeat, It's just posturing. Mr Yadav was recently hauled over the coals by the Election Commission for making vaguely threatening noises about a very honest and incorruptible District Magistrate in charge of overseeing the elections in his constituency and probably just wants a last minute burst of publicity to shift the focus elsewhere.<p>To conclude, Computers aren't going anywhere. Neither is English education. This is all posturing!
Hi All,
Please don't get me wrong, but I don't get what hackers interest HN user can get from this article. I am from Russia and there's enough crazy politicians in my country as well, but I don't feel like it's the right place to post their ideas here.
Flagged this article.
IIT Foundation did respond to Arjun Singh's decision on quota - <a href="http://www.iitfoundation.org/?p=83" rel="nofollow">http://www.iitfoundation.org/?p=83</a>
could we also have such activities for these kind of situations.
it is sad that the same land which gave us one of the ancient world's greatest universities -- Nalanda <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda_University" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda_University</a> produces these dingbats.<p>That said, plinkplonk's analysis of the situation is very accurate.