POWER OF EDUCATION DIPLOMACY

CAN you imagine that on a metro ride in Bengaluru, Delhi, or Chennai, you might be sitting next to a foreign student who would one day turn out to be a head of government? If it comes to pass, the student’s experiences in India may well turn out to be significant for his or her country’s foreign relations someday.

- MADHAVAN NARAYANAN

My countless rides on Delhi University’s special buses came flooding into memory as I read of the visit by Sri Lankan Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya to her alma mater, Hindu College, where she recalled her days at the institution. Amarasuriya was a sociology student admitted in 1991 on an Indian government scholarship, as her own country was ravaged by violence and strikes. She remembered teachers who had encouraged her to think critically.

Sushila Karki, who was named Nepal’s first woman prime minister this year as head of an interim government after having served as the chief justice of her country, received a master’s degree in political science from Banaras Hindu University in 1975. The university was also the place where she met her future husband, Durga Prasad Subedi.

Amarasuriya and Karki are no oddball exceptions, though it might seem so to Indians who have grown up reading about their own leaders being educated in the West. Jawaharlal Nehru and Manmohan Singh went to Cambridge, and Mahatma Gandhi to University College London, while Sardar Patel studied law at Middle Temple. Bhimrao Ambedkar received a doctorate in economics from Columbia University and another from the LSE.

Even leaders associated with rugged socialism were adorned with Western degrees. Jayaprakash Narayan hopped through Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, and California’s Berkeley as a university student. Ram Manohar Lohia held a PhD from Berlin’s Humboldt University before turning into a pioneering ideologue for India’s backward castes.