A 'reformed Left Front' was what Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee meant when he asked for votes for an 'improved Left Front' in last year's assembly election campaign in West Bengal. Small sections of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) leadership are still resistant to the word 'reform', with which they assail the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress. But Bhattacharjee knew he was seeking a mandate for reform, no matter what the party did or said to make it sound different. Before and immediately after the elections, therefore, he identified three areas for major policy reforms - education, health and industry. Education, however, posed a tougher challenge than the other two . With ministers like Nirupam Sen and Suryakanta Mishra, two dynamic members of his new cabinet who are also key leaders of the party, reforms in industry and health had better chances of initiation, if not early success. In education, he had a problem with the two ministers - Kanti Biswas and Satya Sadhan Chakraborty - the former known for his stubborn resistance to change and the latter a non-performer who usually busied himself with teachers' association politics rather than with policy perspectives. Moreover, between them, the state CPI(M) secretary, Anil Biswas, and politburo member, Biman Bose, kept a tighter party control on education than on any other sphere. Bhattacharjee had no hope in hell of reforming education without reforming the two ministers and, more importantly, the party's attitude to education policies. The recent decision of the government to relent on the Ramakrishna Mission's demand - that it be allowed to recruit teachers not from the panel of the school service commission but of its own choice - is a welcome indication of a change of heart and policy. The government's decision has not been formally announced yet, but both Bhattacharjee and Biswas have suggested that it is a matter of time before the Mission is finally allowed freedom to run its own institutions the way it thought best. It is a significant decision that underlies a reformist agenda to correct past mistakes. There were signs of it earlier in the government's decision to re-introduce English in the primary school curriculum, in the decision to set up quality educational institutions like the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences and the Indian Institute of Information Technology and in allowing an increasingly larger role for the private sector in education. The ban on private tuition by school teachers, still rather unstructured in implementation, is prompted by the same impulse to stem the rot in mass education. There is also a growing acceptance of the fact that one has to pay more for certain kinds of education. It would have been unthinkable in the old Left Front regime, but the newly-introduced bachelor of business administration course of the Calcutta University charges a monthly fee of Rs 4,500. The application form itself costs Rs 1,000! But the most important change seems to be the admission that there is no necessary conflict between democracy and excellence. The average party functionary may still deny that the populist race for equality doomed the state's education to a pervasive mediocrity. But Bhattacharjee seems convinced that there is no alternative to a search for excellence if West Bengal has to regain past heights. Without some measure of excellence regained in education, the search for it in health, industry or any other sphere would be futile. But he has to reckon with unreformed party comrades who know that this reform agenda actually mean a wholesale reversal of the left's two decades-old legacy in education. It is fundamentally the legacy of the late Promode Dasgupta, the party strongman who reigned supreme over party and government policies in the early years of the Left Front regime. Its motto, in short, was the demolition of the old order in education and building of a new order on the principles of mass politics. The demolition drives were symbolized in the government's - and the party's - sustained attempts to squeeze the Ramakrishna Mission institutions and Presidency College into the 'democratic' mould. The assaults on Presidency College were easier and more successful because it is a government college. The Mission gave the government harder battles. In Dasgupta's view of things, centres of academic excellence militated against ideas of democratic, 'progressive education' and of social promotion. Even if some people unimaginatively used Presidency College or some other educational icon for credentialism, the government could not take this as an excuse for running it down. But in their zeal to extend the logic of mass politics to education, Dasgupta's demolition boys in the party suspected all that smacked of 'elitism' or 'exclusivism'. They dropped English from the primary school syllabus because they decided that it was a hindrance to the spread of mass education. There was also the lurking suspicion that the language of the colonial rulers was still a cause - and a tool - of inequality. If the poor and the underprivileged cannot learn the language well enough, the party logic went, it is better to shut the door on everyone. The political rhetoric caused not just a lowering of standards but a debilitating confusion of concerns at all levels of education. The same policy of so-called democratization of education led the Marxists to change statutes and pack university senates and college governing bodies with their representatives from other walks of life. The result was more partisan control masquerading as egalitarianism and less education. And while state-controlled education declined in quality, the old socialist distrust of the private initiative prevented new institutions of worth from coming up. This resulted in students fleeing the state in droves to seek admission in private engineering, medical and management institutes in other states, although most of them have little claim to excellence. Although late in coming, the realization seems to be finally here that some people are better equipped, better suited than others for certain competence tests, that it is ridiculous to create standards so low that everybody can qualify and that there is no escape from a renewal based on the best standards. If it is true of the market, it is true of education as well. 'Market' may be another dirty word for the Marxists, but there is no alternative to quality education which alone can impart the knowledge, the skills and the services one buys and sells in the market. In his last term as chief minister, Jyoti Basu realized the enormity of the damage that long years of populist education policies had wrecked on West Bengal. He hurried to open education to the private sector and create new institutions that would signal the change. Bhattacharjee seems more committed than Basu to demolishing the Dasgupta edifice of controlled education. The Ramakrishna Mission story suggests he has been able to take the party leadership along with him in pushing educational reforms. But his litmus test remains the old question of granting autonomy to Presidency College and some other colleges, which the government-appointed Bhabatosh Datta commission on higher education recommended way back in 1984. It will be the final proof that he and his party have accepted excellence and freedom as cornerstones, not only in the education policy, but in all matters of public policy.