Crony asana: Modi's yoga master is going to head panel to select UGC chief
If you are a “yoga guru”, or can claim to be one, your fortunes will be made under the Narendra Modi regime. After Baba Ramdev taking his FMCG empire, Patanjali, to new heights, after 21st century India witnessing a ministry of AYUSH, where homeopathy has the same emphasis as peer-reviewed medical science, we have a new bout of cronyism entering the government echelons.
He’s called HR Nagendra, and he’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s yoga instructor, but now also integral member of several key committees in the government. According to latest reports, Nagendra is heading the HRD ministry appointed panel to pick the new chief of the University Grants Commission, or UGC.
But of course, Nagendra’s presence is as sweeping as is the sway of yoga in modern-day India. He is the chairman of the International Day of Yoga Experts Committee and Task Force of the AYUSH ministry, as well as the head of the committee on Yoga Education in Universities within the HRD ministry. In addition, he’s a Padma Shri awardee, being anointed by the Modi government in 2016, while also being the vice-president of the Indian Yoga Association.
So much for Narendra Modi’s anti-nepotism and anti-dynasty drive!
Instead of the Congress-era Gandhi family tree and its serial climbers, we have the yogic nexus pervading each and every aspect of Indian policy and decision-making bodies, particularly something as sensitive as the UGC that’s in charge of India’s higher education.
However, in his defence HR Nagendra is no Gajendra Chauhan whom the Modi government cherry-picked as the chairman of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), or even Smriti Irani, former HRD minister, whose claim to fame saw her at loggerheads with university students all over India, as well lying in Parliament while she spoke about Hyderabad Central University student, the late Rohith Vemula.
Nagendra has a doctorate in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. But the 74-year-old’s basic area of interest and expertise is yoga, even though he has been a “consultant” at Harvard University, and was part of the visiting staff at Imperial College, London.
Yoga as the ultimate yardstick
It seems some basic expertise in yoga has become the ultimate yardstick and determinant of qualification under the Modi regime. While the International Yoga Day was observed with great pomp all over India and even abroad, we witnessed lynchings and farmers agitation at the same time. It’s unfortunate that the PM spends so much time talking about yoga, while he has only perfunctory platitudes to offer on the spate of violence in the name of the cow, or the debt crisis driving farmers to take their own lives.
Higher education has become a battleground for the Sangh ideology, and installing regime-friendly heads to lead various universities, colleges, affiliated bodies and committees has assumed pathological proportions. Even the current HRD minister, Prakash Javadekar, is an RSS man, who is silently abetting the attempts to saffronise education in India. Little wonder then he has not spoken out against the cases in which pure falsehoods have found their way into school textbooks in Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and other BJP-ruled states.
Moreover, it was reported last year that the HRD ministry is contemplating to introduce yoga in varsities soon, and even the CBSE has decided to have compulsory yoga, on which students will be graded. The UGC reportedly has been working on a plan to introduce yoga in undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and the aim to pick a UGC chief conducive to that end explains why HR Nagendra is heading the selection committee.
In fact, reports on how the UGC had asked all the institutes and universities to celebrate Yoga Day by organising activities around yoga, including essay competitions, have been doing the rounds for a while now. HR Nagendra’s presence and leadership of the UGC chief selection committee is therefore very much in sync with the larger goals.
Cronyism reloaded
Whether it’s Mukesh Ambani-headed Reliance Jio “disrupting” the telecom sector, or Gautam Adani getting SBI loan worth $1 billion for a disputed coal mine in Australia, or Baba Ramdev getting all the airtime and key cultural ambassador to promote Patanjali, those close to PM Modi have benefitted unduly from the proximity to the prime minister.
Despite his rants against the Gandhi family and the Congress-era nepotism, that malaise has dug deep within the Modi government, with the Sangh-driven ideologues getting a free rein.
While AYUSH ministry is busy churning out bogus booklets on fake and frankly hazardous advice to women, we have the national obsession with yoga clouding our judgement and presiding over each and every key government decision in sectors such as education, health, sanitation, etc.
Little wonder then that the Indian-origin British Nobel laureate in chemistry, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, denounced the Indian Science Congress as a “circus” and vowed to never return. Similarly, the IIT Delhi seminar on panchagavya curing cancer has attracted ridicule and extreme derision from the scientific fraternity across the world.
Given PM Narendra Modi’s aspiration to be counted among world’s statesmen, this obsession with yoga and affiliated bogus subjects needs to end. Else, India’s future will comprise a billion-plus people fed on the diet of ideological and scientific fraudulence.