The colonial mindset

LET ME BEGIN with a confession. I am one of those products of Macaulay’s education system that the Prime Minister denounced while delivering the Ramnath Goenka Memorial lecture last week. he said that thomas Babington Macaulay had created an education system for India that was designed to turn Indians into little brown English people who would be Indian in name only.

- TAVLEEN SINGH

Absolutely true. I went to a girls’ school that was modeled wholly on English public schools. We spoke only English, read only English literature and poetry and knew very, very little about our own country.

It was people of my kind who ruled India after the British packed up their bags and went home. We continued perpetuating the colonial mindset till Narendra Modi became Prime Minister. Before he came along political leaders, high officials, police officers, judges and the men who became generals in the Indian army all came from that same old ‘colonial’ breed. This did not change in the time of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s first Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, because he was totally seduced by the wiles and ways of us colonial types. It is a good thing that us lot are now in the garbage bin of history. But, has the Prime Minister noticed how deeply colonial everything else remains under him?

Days after he delivered his lecture, the BJP government in Maharashtra issued written instructions ordering officials to stand when they spotted an MP or an MLA. I commented on this on 'X' and was deluged with posts from Hindutva types who said this was a valid order because elected representatives of the people take precedence over unelected officials. Why? Are they not supposed to be servants of the people? Is this attitude not a product of that colonial mindset? Does it not make elected officials think of themselves as rulers?