To be selected as a Member of Parliament in India one must atleast be a graduate.

Con raises a few points in his argument which I will summarize below, and show how they are all flawed or at least highly reductive, before offering two arguments of my own to negate the resolution. ==REBUTTALS== Re: Education and Effective Governance In Round 1, Pro writes, “Too many uneducated politicians have made Indian legislature a place completely void of logical reasoning and righteous uprising,” and he expands on this idea in Round 2: “with education comes rational thinking and the ability to choose between beneficial and detrimental decisions.” Firstly, Pro has not provided any evidence to show that better decisions have always been made by Indian politicians of higher educational qualifications. Pro unquestioningly accepts the common assumption that people who are more highly educated ipso facto are people who make better decisions in the political arena. I need to make clear at this point that I am not arguing that education is peripheral to fulfilling the duties of a politician. It is absolutely important to have basic literacy (and for that matter other qualities such as integrity and passion to serve, that cannot be naively measured with formal education), but to posit a graduate degree as the minimum standard is highly arbitrary and unjustified, and as I will demonstrate in my argument later, potentially counterproductive. Lalu Yadav, who holds not only a Bachelor Degree, but also a Masters in Political Science (no less!), shocked the general public when he was convicted for a series of atrocious corruption charges, including the 2G Spectrum scam, Coal Block allocation scam, and the Commonwealth Games scam. [1] Unfortunately, there is compelling evidence suggesting that Indian ministers who are graduates and postgraduates have been more prone to corruption. The deterrence of corruption, then, should not be approached by arbitrarily designating a minimal educational standard (as Pro has done here), but through a rigorous review of the Indian judicial and legislative structures and the institution of more robust checks and balances in the legal system. In short, Pro’s fallacious assumptions that higher education necessarily brings about better decision-making processes in the Parliament and deters corruption are unfounded. If anything, evidence points to the contrary – that politicians with higher education are more likely to abuse loopholes in India’s deficient political and legal system for their own benefit while at the same time covering their tracks. Re: The Arbitrary Standard of a Graduate Degree Pro continues, “Hence comes the need for a basic education, in today’s fast moving modernized world Graduation degree is not really difficult to obtain, I mentioned Graduation degree just as a benchmark for a nominal educational qualification for those who run the country.” I invite the audience to take a moment to consider what Pro has just claimed. He begins by declaring that a Graduate degree “is not really difficult to obtain,” and brushes it off as merely "basic education," when it is pretty much general knowledge that illiteracy and poor access to *genuinely* basic education in rural India are among the most staggering problems plaguing the country today. India has a literacy rate way below the world average of 84%, and has the largest number of illiterate people in the world. [2] Less than 1% of the Indian population hold a graduate degree; in other words, Pro's suggestion is passed as law, more than 99% of the population are instantly disqualified for political office for no good reason. In anticipation of my argument later, also consider how Pro’s suggestion will result in a highly polarized society where power is increasingly concentrated in an ever shrinking pool of “elites” elected into political office by virtue of the fact that they are the only ones who can afford higher education. I fail to see how such a scenario will benefit the masses in *any* way at all. Having rebutted Pro’s arguments as above, I will offer 2 more points of consideration for why the resolution simply should not stand. ==CON== The Deplorable State of Indian Higher Education This is not a red herring. If we were to even consider a “nominal criterion” for political office, we should have enough faith in that criterion for having satisfied what it has set out to do. This is patently *not* the case for higher education in India. An article in the Wall Street Journal has revealed how call companies in India are having trouble even “[finding] new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email,” as even graduate applicants lack effective communication and “many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension.” [3] This is further corroborated by another article which astoundingly admitted that “50 percent of Indian graduates [are] not fit to be hired”. [4] The predicament of Indian higher education today suggests that Pro’s faith in the graduate degree being the secret key to good governance has been wildly misplaced. In addition, I invite Pro to read an article that summarizes how India’s education system is second only to their politics in corruption. [5] This furthers my point above that Pro’s suggestion would amplify the class stratification in the Indian society where the ruling elites comprise exclusively of people who are rich, from the higher classes of the social order, and can afford (through whatever “means”) higher education. Needless to say, both the education system and politics in India are in a state of disrepair, and the last thing that ought to be done is to mindlessly use one to fix the other and hope for the best. The Affective Divide A recurring problem in both developing and developed nations has been the dissonance between politicians and the respective electorates that these politicians are supposed to represent. The elected members of parliament in Singapore (all of whom very intelligent people), for instance, have been roundly accused for their “single-mindedness, sternness of purpose and cool detachment” and their aloofness to what the average Singaporean really needs. [6] This affective fracture between the governing authority and the governed will only get worse in India if *all* politicians are graduate degree holders, most of whom elected to represent large segments of the population whose needs and necessities may be very different from or even antithetical to what the politicians have experienced or been exposed to. Moreover, there are encouraging precedents of Indian politicians who, despite their lack of higher education, have performed a wonderful job of representing the people. K. Kamaraj, known in India for his “simplicity and integrity,” was forced to leave high school early in his life but is remembered today for “bringing school education to millions of the rural poor by introducing free education” in his capacity as Chief Minister. [7] Pro’s suggestion would have precluded him from even being elected, much less the capacity to serve the people in the way he selflessly did. Pro's suggestion is founded on several assumptions that are highly problematic. I have also shown how his suggestion, if indeed promulgated, would not only be profoundly unjust but in fact potentially counter-productive. As such, the resolution is negated. Sources: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org... [3] http://online.wsj.com... [4] http://www.ndtv.com... [5] http://www.indiaeducationreview.com... [6] http://catherinelim.sg... [7] http://en.wikipedia.org...