Battleground JNU: Onslaught on the Students’ Movement

Former students of JNU, now studying in the USA, express their views on the controversy around the university.

The views expressed in this article are the blogger’s and do not necessarily represent those of The Quint.

The last two weeks have witnessed an unprecedented attack on Jawaharlal Nehru University. Under the aegis of the RSS-BJP-ABVP brigade, sedition charges have been slapped on unnamed students of the university. Students’ union president Kanhaiya Kumar has been in jail for several days and has faced mob violence each time he was produced before the court.

Despite this travesty of the legal system, student activists Umar Khaled and Anirban Bhattacharya have surrendered before the police. Several other students have been suspended from the university. A section of the mainstream media has been working overtime to establish JNU’s “anti-national” credentials and a vicious campaign against Umar Khalid has been unleashed to fabricate lies about his “terrorist connections.” JNU has effectively entered a state of siege. But it would be a mistake to see this simply as a JNU battle blown out of proportion.

Hindu Nationalism Afraid of Left-Dalit-Bahujan Solidarity?

Politics in JNU is known for debating issues that far exceed the geographical limits of the campus. Recent events are no different. As it happens, the battle raging inside JNU has its antecedents in student mobilisations across university campuses in the wake of Rohith Vemula’s institutional murder at the hands of Hyderabad Central University last month.

Building on the growing ferment in universities across the country, the anger against Vemula’s death assumed national proportions. A striking achievement of this movement has been its success in building solidarity between Left and Dalit-Bahujan forces in university spaces. Nothing threatens the Hindu right more than this growing camaraderie between slogans of “Lal salaam” and “Jai Bhim”. As politics in India has repeatedly testified, nothing cracks the myth of the Hindu nation more than the reality of caste. Given this, it is no surprise that the BJP reacted to Vemula’s death by first brushing it aside as a fallout of ‘depression’ and then turning it into a petty debate over his ‘real’ caste identity. Rather than treating his suicide as a sobering reminder of the horrific normalisation of caste discrimination in Indian universities, the government went out of its way to humiliate Vemula’s legacy. Of course, this strategy fell flat in the face of the growing strength of the nation-wide students’ movement.

Trembling at the power of this agitation, the foot soldiers of the government (i.e. the ABVP) turned our attention to a campus event to condemn the execution of Afzal Guru and discuss Kashmir’s right to self-determination. Given that Guru was punished despite insubstantial evidence of his guilt, his execution has been widely criticised. The ethical debate on capital punishment is also an established one, as is the question of Kashmir’s right to self-determination. These issues have been raised by human rights groups, lawyers, intellectuals and politicians. Therefore, there was nothing extraordinary about this event, certainly not on a university campus where controversial political issues are debated routinely.

Yet, at the behest of the government, some news channels hysterically reported it as ‘proof’ of the spread of anti-national activity among students. Evidently, the event presented the floundering government with a perfect opportunity to perform, yet again, its painfully well-rehearsed strategy of inciting the bogey of nationalism to counter threats to its own power.

By orchestrating a paranoid campaign against JNU as a den of “anti-national” students, the government wants to change the terms of the debate to the empty and base rhetoric of national vs. anti-national, in quite the same way that public attention was exhausted on the vacuous debate on “tolerance” some weeks ago. By doing so, the Hindu right wants angry young Indians to forget about caste, to forget Vemula. It also wants to vilify a raging nation-wide students’ movement which is emerging as the foremost bulwark against right-wing fascism in India today.

A Dangerous ‘Nationalism’

However, the damaging effects of this breed of nationalism exceed the forced amnesia of caste and the demonization of the students’ movement. In a rush to brand “anti-nationals,” the media has shamelessly exploited student activist Umar Khalid’s identity as a young ‘Muslim’ communist who expressly supports Kashmir’s right to self-determination. In so doing, reckless media trials have framed him as a “terrorist sympathiser”.

Although the fiction of such claims has since been established officially, Khaled’s face is on posters, pamphlets and social media inciting violence against him. His sisters have received death and rape threats and young Muslim students are being harassed by the police because of their religious identity. Today, in the guise of nationalism, the lynch mob of Hindu nationalism is running a free reign.

As Khaled said in a powerful invocation of Vemula’s letter, this publicly whipped up paranoia has reduced him to his most “immediate identity” – that of being a Muslim.

Moreover, by pressing sedition charges on students for organising an event on Kashmir’s right to self-determination and Afzal Guru’s execution, the government is clamping down on a long-standing debate on state atrocities and capital punishment. This has been uncritically aided by some news channels which have relayed cries of “Azadi” and “Free Kashmir” from university campuses as ‘proof’ of the “anti-national” disposition of students. By clamping down on debate in this way, the government is imposing a militaristic nationalism which cannot even tolerate an open discussion on Kashmir. Of course, the irony of the BJP’s electoral alliance with the PDP – a party which has also questioned Afzal Guru’s execution – has largely escaped the attention of news channels which are busy orchestrating a witch-hunt against students.

Attack on the Public University

This witch-hunt is not merely an attack on a handful of students but an onslaught on the very idea of a public university. Even though political discourse on JNU and other campuses is fraught with challenges and is bound by its own exclusions, it is steeped in the tradition of an engaged debate between persons holding differing political stands. JNU and its political culture enables students to democratically engage with their political opponents in classrooms, dhabas, and public meetings in a way that makes political debate a part of their educational experience. Its argumentative lexicon is etched across its walls – where students respond to each other through graffiti and poems.

By pressing sedition charges on students for expressing their opinions, the government is destroying this political culture which lies at the heart of public universities. Unsurprisingly, this repression of dissent coincides with a moment when the strongest dissent against the government is emerging from such spaces.

In this attack on the university, the richness of university politics has been diminished in its portrayal as irresponsible and immature. This has nurtured a discourse which treats student activism as a “waste” of tax-payers’ money. Notwithstanding its self-righteousness, this discourse fails to account for the crores that are wasted on corporate subsidies every year. More importantly, it diminishes the value of public education and fuels a long-standing agenda of disinvesting from it and making way for private universities. Again, this coincides with the growing strength of the Occupy UGC movement which has been protesting the withdrawal of fellowships for research students. Such reductive portrayals are also connected to a global trend of treating “unproductive” humanities and social science disciplines as an unnecessary burden on the public exchequer. Given this, it is no surprise that the recent events in JNU have been exploited to question its very existence and make demands for shutting down the university.

#StandWithJNU

Recognizing the gravity of such demands and their implications for the rest of the country, students and teachers have joined hands in an extraordinary show of love for their university. Since the last few days, many thousands are spending endless hours on social media, calling the bluff on this devious attack. Teachers and public intellectuals are conducting public teach-ins to remind us of what the nation really needs to know.

Many voices from across the world are joining the movement and declaring that they #StandWithJNU. Last Thursday, over 15,000 people marched on the streets of Delhi demanding an end to this assault. Yesterday, again, thousands marched to demand justice for Rohith Vemula and express solidarity with JNU. This might be the darkest hour in the life of the university, but Bertolt Brecht’s famous words could not be more relevant. In these dark times, there is signing. About the dark times.

Agni and Varsha are former students of Jawaharlal Nehru University. Their real names have been withheld upon their own request.