Sonia Kristy The political parties have come up with their manifestos all colourful and bright promising us the golden Bengal — shonar bangla. The education sector understandably features prominently in the party pledges. Attaining 100 per cent literacy, encouraging free education, giving lucrative stipends, setting up schools, colleges, university madrassahs — almost anything and everything the aspiring politicians could think of were included. One party pledged to put emphasis on vocational training while another went overboard and promised to set up an Asian Culinary College that will produce chefs, waiters and food and hygiene experts. For a manifesto that makes largely generic pledges in the areas of health and even mainstream education, one can only wonder the motives behind such specificity. The parties promised to set up IT villages, e-parks, modernise madrassah education and further the country in the path of science, technology as well as theology. One particular thing all the political parties agreed to do is depoliticise the campus and free it from the clutches of ‘dirty’ student and teachers’ politics (now, we all know who are responsible for giving student politics a bad name). Pledging to promote healthy politics was in no one’s agenda. No one thought the students should be encouraged to study social sciences, even as a subsidiary subject that is so important for the students, the future generations of the nation, to grow up as conscious citizens and become the future faces of politics and policymaking. One party has pledged to provide stipends and financial aid to students who will have been deemed to have done ‘courageous and heroic’ deeds — strange words to qualify any aspect of scholastic pursuit. This party has a students’ organisation infamous for slitting veins of those with dissenting views or don’t subscribe to their school of ‘politics’. One would then logically conclude, or at least seriously ponder, whether this incentive to ‘heroic and courageous’ students from this particular party, was actually meant for those who would ‘heroically’ attack — or shall I say engage in ‘vein slitting programmes’ of — students who dare to ‘pollute’ the campuses with such filthy and vile things as freedom of thought and expression.