A pot-kettle tussle
Editorial-February 6, 2014, 8:39 pm
A student union affiliated to the JVP splinter group, Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) has renewed its call for scrapping the government’s leadership training programme for university entrants in the wake of a participant’s death, as we reported on Wednesday. He was the second student to die while undergoing training. A Sabaragamuwa University undergrad died in 2011.
If FSP students want the leadership programme to stop because two participants have died in three years the question is why their party doesn’t publicly abjure its commitment to revolution—or, rather, its version thereof—as its past revolts have killed thousands of youth. They are also without any moral right to protest against military training for students. For, the JVP has a history of using child combatants. It roped in children and brainwashed them into carrying out subversive activities. Small children who could hardly mount bicycles were used to deliver chits, with which the JVP crippled the southern parts of the country in the late 1980s. It also gave military training to undergraduates and used them in guerrilla warfare.
Time was when brutal ragging left several undergrads dead and turned universities into hellholes for new entrants. But, the JVP never launched public protests against ragging. Political activities in universities have also led to bloody clashes where several undergrads perished. Will the JVP call for an end to party politics in universities?
However, it needs to be added that the JVP has, since its entry into mainstream politics, conducted itself much better than the two main political parties responsible for election related violence which has plagued the country since 1977. The SLFP and the UNP should emulate the JVP’s polls campaigns devoid of manape (preferential vote) battles and bloodletting. For the first time the JVP has had a parliamentarian as its leader—Anura Kumara Dissanayake—and the challenge before him is to ensure that past mistakes won’t be repeated besides shoring up his party’s troubled image.
One cannot but agree with the FSP student union that no undergrad should die due to leadership training at military camps or elsewhere. No training is worth dying for. The Higher Education Ministry has apparently sought to play down the two student deaths claiming that the deceased had been suffering from some ailments. But, the fact remains that they would have been among the living if they had not been made to undergo physical training.
FSP students are opposed to military training for school principals as well. Pointing out that it has already led to one death they demand an end to that programme. Some principals, in our opinion, need a different kind of training. Instead of being trained at military camps and given ranks, they need to be educated on anti-bribery/corruption laws. School admissions have become an unholy mess over the years mainly because of corrupt principals and meddlesome politicians. Officials of the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC) may be used as resource persons. Epaulet and accoutrement may give principals a sense of self-importance but what they need most is to be taught how to do their job properly without depending on private tuition centres to prepare their students for public examinations.
It defies comprehension why undergrads should be made to take strenuous exercises in the name of leadership training which has come in for criticism from university teachers as well. If such activity is a prerequisite for leadership then the Executive President and the Prime Minister—not to mention the Opposition Leader—should be made to undergo physical training daily at the Army Headquarters!
The government seems to think it could render university students malleable and ideologically sterile through a brief training aimed at enforcing a regimented lifestyle on them. It is sadly mistaken.
