Avijit Pathak - JNU’s enemy without, within
NB - Thank you Avijit, for this perceptive and timely warning. Those who want to protect democracy and the right to dissent need themselves to uphold dialogue and save higher education campuses from the destructive polemic that has overtaken radical politics over the years. Here is something I wrote on the crisis in JNU this February: What is to be Undone . Sadly, I have thus far been unable to discuss its argument with the people I (primarily) wrote it for, the students of JNU. Thank you once again. DS
Students suspect teachers, who fear students. Every relationship becomes politically calculated & instrumental. This must change. Saving JNU does not mean merely saving it from an unfriendly government. It also means saving it from the rot within.
Students suspect teachers, who fear students. Every relationship becomes politically calculated & instrumental. This must change. Saving JNU does not mean merely saving it from an unfriendly government. It also means saving it from the rot within.
Even though Jawaharlal Nehru University
(JNU) exists as one of India’s finest centres for learning, a deep crisis is
haunting the university today. This is manifesting itself in many ways; growing
unrest among students, an environment increasingly filled with fear and
suspicion, the legitimacy crisis the university administration is facing, with
its inability to communicate with students and teachers. The crisis and its depiction,
particularly by some television channels, seem to have generated a series of
stereotypes about the university. Its “unruly” students propagate
“anti-national” feelings, its intellectuals are not in tune with the country’s
“religious” ethos, its “permissiveness” has caused huge ethical
irresponsibility.
But what is the
reality around us? First, the emergent politico-economic elite is not in tune
with the essential spirit of the university, its liberal education, its urge to
see beyond mere techno-managerial perceptions of economic development, and its
largely non-hierarchical, inclusive ethos. At a time when there is an unholy
alliance of neo-liberal rationality and social conservatism, and education
becomes a market commodity, JNU, unlike IITs, IIMs and private universities,
tends to acquire “deviant” status. Its critical social sciences, gender
studies, art and aesthetics, even its theoretical physics, may be perceived as
“wastage”. It is obvious that the ruling elite needs excuses to target the university.
Second, something has
gone terribly wrong with the university’s political culture. JNU is still a
role model for other universities. Students still fight elections without money
or muscle power and there is a culture of debate. However, the decay is
noticeable. Politics has lost its substance; rhetoric has replaced thinking.
“Competitive radicalism” has reduced protests to predictable rituals. For
“radicals”, Gandhi is a taboo, Marx is a residual memory, Ambedkar is God.
Whatever you don’t like is a symptom of “patriarchal Brahminism” and hunger
strikes are as normal as sunrise every morning.
The result is, it is no longer
possible to distinguish the serious from the trivial. This politics is centred
on a new practice of “untouchability”. “Ultra-leftists” don’t talk to
“Brahminical” leftists; “Ambedkarites” don’t allow others to appropriate The
Annihilation of Caste; ABVP cadres remain perpetually sceptical about
“pseudo-secular”, “pro-Kashmiri”, “anti-national” liberals.
This scenario
stimulates caste and religion. But we cannot overcome caste through a politics
that uses the idiom of caste, even if it looks like a subaltern politics. And a
politics based on religious identity intensifies the arrogance of
majoritarianism and ghettoises minorities. Such turmoil is destroying the
university where, without dialogue, a suspicious, potentially violent
environment emerges.
Third, a poverty of
imagination tends to characterise the administration. A university is a zone of
learning that induces experiments with ideas, modes of resistance and cultural
practices. How crude to see it with a purely bureaucratic gaze, with a “law and
order” discourse. Often, new administrators, because of a technical mindset,
fail to evolve sensitivity to negotiate with this domain of liberal education,
its political vibrancy and protest ideologies, which emerge because of an
uneven society like ours, with diverse forms of discrimination, violence and
inequality.
No wonder the administration suffers a severe legitimacy crisis.
It is difficult to say
whether JNU can overcome all this. But this university must be saved because
this is possibly the only university that still retains a culture of critical
learning. At a time when either market-oriented technical education or guide
books and mass copying with demotivated teachers and students prevails, JNU
looks like an oasis in a desert. Here, it is possible for a professor of
bio-technology to converse with a political philosopher, for underprivileged
students from Jharkhand and Telangana to work with foreign students, for girls
to go to their hostels from the library at midnight without fear. This
university produces creative teachers and researchers, civil servants,
activists, people in diverse creative work.
Here is a university
with a spirit. It should not be allowed to die. But what is missing today is
trust. Students suspect administrators, who observe, classify and discipline
students through multiple surveillance (a campus once beautiful is now becoming
a war zone marked by security guards, CCTV cameras, police outside the main
gates and television reporters inventing “breaking news”). Students suspect
teachers, who fear students. Every relationship becomes politically calculated & instrumental. This must change.
Saving JNU does not mean merely saving it from an unfriendly government. It
also means saving it from the rot within. We have uttered many slogans: “Down
with imperialism”, “Brahminical fascism murdabad”, “Jai Bhim”. It’s time we
take a break. We need to look at ourselves and to use Gandhi’s words, fight the
enemy within.
The Broken Middle - my essay on the 30th anniversary of 1984
The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi: Inquiry Commission Report (1969)
The Abolition of truth
The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi: Inquiry Commission Report (1969)
The Abolition of truth
