There’s Nothing Political About AMU’s Student Union Elections
An attempt to understand why student union polls at Aligarh Muslim University are so cut off from the real world.
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When Tehelka journalist Asad Ashraf was labelled an ISIS sympathizer by Arnab Goswami during his nightly shoutdown, a motley crew of students at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) sought permission to invite him to campus.
1. The Dictator
“The proctor denied saying RAW wale peeche pad jayenge, IB wale peeche pad jayenge”, Sharjeel Usmani, a first year Political Science student and journalist at the historic university, tells The Quint.
Mics and chairs were taken away by force when students tried to organize a protest against the unrest in Kashmir without permission.
“As for Rohith Vemula”, Sharjeel says, “half the students are not even aware who he was. Secondly, no one was willing to come forward. Some said you start, I’ll back you. Others said you start, I’ll back you. When I tried to organize the protest, nobody backed me. They inject fear in us students.”
The fear is of expulsion without a hearing. As was the case with Mudassar Yusuf, an MSc student who was expelled for a Facebook post abusing the Indian Army jawans killed in the Uri attack. His apology fell on deaf ears.
On Sunday, students at AMU will vote for a new student union and end a long-drawn, raucous, messy election campaign. The streets of this historic campus were strewn with posters announcing names and ballot numbers, bike rallies were stalling traffic and street play troupes travelled from one department to the other.
Up for grabs are three posts – president, vice-president and secretary — along with ten cabinet seats. Of the 38 candidates, only three are women.
The campaign is funded primarily by donations from regional lobbies. So, the endless line of supporters who are making a good racket behind Nabeel, a candidate for secretaryship, are bound to be from his hometown Mau and thereabout.
The campaigns are high on energy and rhetoric, but incredibly low on substance for a central university founded by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who had patterned the college after Oxford and Cambridge “to inculcate scientific temperament among the Muslim community”.
One would think Mudassar Yusuf’s expulsion would qualify as a rallying point for a debate over free speech and nationalism. That Rohith Vemula, Mohammad Akhlaq, the Dalit movement or even the state assembly elections next year would feature as prominent election issues.
“But they never talk politics,” says Amjad Sadeem from Kerala who’s currently finishing his masters in Economics. Amjad has bigger problems – “like how students from Bihar and UP are able to get hostel rooms using jugaad and we are left out in the cold”. Or the sorry state of affairs at some of the canteens, campus violence by regional groups that left two students dead or the minority status of the university.
The student union elections at Aligarh Muslim University, unlike other central universities like Delhi, Hyderabad and Allahabad, continue to remain unaffected by the current national discourse. This despite its autonomy and sense of the community coming under threat.
This of course, is partly because the university constitution does not permit organizations affiliated to political parties to participate in the activities of the student union.
But how do the student union elections at a Muslim-majority university situated merely 165 km from the national capital remain so insulated, almost unaware of what’s happening outside its 467-hectare campus?
2. Apathetic Faculty
After one of its student was arrested on sedition charges, teachers at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) organized a series of lectures on nationalism. What did the teachers at AMU do when a student was expelled for a supposedly anti-national Facebook post?
Nothing, admits Professor Mohammad Sajjad from the History department.
So, what’s holding them back?
3. The Muslim Tag
In the last one year alone, Vice-Chancellor Lt. Gen. (retired) Zameer Uddin Shah has had to fight a losing battle to retain Aligarh Muslim University’s minority tag, prevent communal conflagrations following false rumors of cow meat being served in the medical college canteen and do damage control after two regional groups clashed, resulting in the death of two students.
Currently, the Vice-Chancellor faces the prospect of an HRD ministry-led investigation into alleged embezzlement of funds. Funds, which Lt. Gen. (retired) Zameer Uddin Shah says were never allocated to the university.
In an interview to The Indian Express, he said, “All governments at the Centre were biased against AMU... When the Congress government was there, we got Rs 100 crore less than BHU. Jamia, which is one third our size, got Rs 50 crore more.”
Further, the V-C claims, the university sees only 9% of these allocated funds. To run a university with 28,000, students, 1,342 teachers and 5,610 non-teaching staff at a cost that allows a student to survive on less than Rs 1000 a month and stave off political attacks, means the administration has more balls in the air than one can count.
“Presumably, the pressure on the Aligarh Muslim University to prove its secular, patriotic credentials prevailed when the decision to expel Mudassar Yusuf was not revisited,” says Professor Sajjad.
4. Bound by Constitution
The given argument is that a minority institution, especially one like AMU that welcomes students from all faiths, should not exhibit any political leanings or enunciate strong political positions as it can lead to potentially volatile situations.
“But that’s no reason for them to be dumb,” says Professor Syed Salman Abbas who after coming from Delhi University and JNU admits to being frustrated by the complete lack of substance and content in AMU’s political discourse.
5. Get in, Get a Degree, Get Out
On the outside, AMU looks like the centre of modern learning that it was meant to be. Ranked ninth in the list of top ten institutes of higher learning in India by UK’s Times Higher Education magazine, AMU offer highly subsidised education from Class 1 to the PhD level in both modern and traditional fields. The university boasts of comfortable hostel facilities, free WiFi, uninterrupted power supply, a world-class hockey field, even the cloth for the traditional uniform, the sherwani, is provided free of cost.
On the inside, the infrastructure, much like campus democracy, is crumbling. But there isn’t another university as acclaimed as AMU that would give the the son of a vegetable seller in Gaya, Bihar, the opportunity to study engineering. Abheek Aryan is a diploma student who keeps his head down, hopes to graduate and grab the first job he gets.
You think he has the time to engage in lofty intellectual debates over ideology?
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