Universities on the boil

Universities and institutions of higher learning today are in revolt — against attempts to reduce them to a factory for the production of mindless automatons — either in the service of the neo-liberal/corporate machine or of a mind-numbing, virulent Hindu nationalism. If the neo-liberal wants universities to churn out people who would become cogs in the corporate machine, Hindutva forces seek to turn all educational institutions into factories, mass-producing pre-programmed Hindu nationalists who will eat, read and love only as prescribed.

But there is an air of desperation among the hitherto powerful, since, for the first time in India’s long history, universities are throbbing with the new energies produced by the entry of those who have long been excluded from the domain of knowledge.

As masses of students from Dalit and Bahujan backgrounds, or from really poor families enter these hitherto heavily-guarded fortresses, panic buttons are pressed in a bid to protect the privileges of the dominant.

With their arrival, new questions and new perspectives challenge these institutions. The old common sense that has till now dominated many of these institutions is thrown into crisis, received notions of nation and nationalism are interrogated.

Recall the withdrawal of recognition to the Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle (APSC) by IIT-Madras in May 2015. This institution has seen a number of right-wing organisations, ranging from the RSS shakhas to groups like the Vivekananda Study Circle, operating without restrictions. However, within a year of its formation, the APSC was faced with a notice of ‘derecognition’, following a complaint by RSS students to the Ministry of Human Resource Development and the latter’s suspiciously prompt response. The ministry’s letter to the institute raised the matter of “the distribution of controversial posters and pamphlets in the campus” and “creating an atmosphere of hatred among students by one student group” and also disaffection against the Prime Minister and ‘the Hindus’.

This is eerily the pattern that is repeated later in University of Hyderabad, where the attack, once again prodded by the MHRD, is on members of the Ambedkar Students’ Association (ASA), leading eventually to the tragic suicide of Rohith Vemula. There again, the proactive intervention of the MHRD, following provocation by the ABVP, led to the suspension of Vemula and his comrades for indulging in ‘anti-national’ activities.

What is happening in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) now is not very different insofar as the essentials of the script go. It is the same bogey of ‘anti-nationalism’ that is being raised here — and this time it was not just the MHRD but the Home Ministry as well, that intervened — in order to frame students for sedition. The pattern itself suggests that there is more to JNU than meets the eye — and some of this becomes evident in the way a few television channels were pressed into service for creating an atmosphere of paranoid witch-hunting. And lest we forget, two of the five students whom the police want to frame are Dalits and some others from very poor backgrounds.

It is also worth noticing that in all these cases, the Dalit students have been talking not merely about their ‘own’ issues of caste discrimination but also issues that are not of immediate concern from an identity perspective. Thus the APSC in IIT-M had been organising discussions on issues like the coal-bed methane exploration project in the Kaveri delta, GM crops, labour law changes and language politics, just as the ASA in Hyderabad University had been raising the issue of capital punishment in the Yakub Memon case, as well as questions regarding the state of minorities (the screening of a film on the Muzaffarnagar violence being one of the immediate points of conflict with the ABVP). In other words, in all these cases we see the emergence of a new kind of self-confident Dalit politics that is decisively moving in a leftward direction. It is this that has caused panic.

From this it should not be understood, however, that other issues of culture and identity have become any less important. A case in point is the issue of the worship of Mahishasur as a counter-cultural symbol to mainstream Hinduism. It is an index of how much of a microcosm of India JNU is, that even such marginal beliefs and practices find a place there. The coming of age of Dalit politics also manifests in this significant bid to create a counter-cultural canon from symbols that have been consigned to oblivion as far as the mainstream is concerned. It is this feature of JNU that has also opened up possibilities of cultural re-education of Left groups as well, making us all aware of the immense diversity that is India. It is this that Hindutva nationalism cannot digest.

(Views expressed are personal).

Aditya Nigam is a professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi

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