Republic of JNU

<< This post-print was originally published in Tehelka (2016). The version of record is available on the publisher’s website and is archived on Academia.edu (incl. keywords). Citation can be downloaded on Hal. The text is co-written by Shafi Rahman.

It was an eventful day in New Delhi as its sidewalks were filled with soldiers returning to the national capital after a victory in war with Pakistan. An early autumn cheered returning war heroes. On 20 September 1965, Lok Sabha was also witnessing a bitter war of words as it was discussing a Bill for setting up a new university in the national capital, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).

Dr Madhav Shrihari Aney, oldest member of House, 85, spearheaded the attack against the Bill portraying it as vague and undemocratic. Other socialists and several Jana Sangh members strongly opposed the idea of adulating Nehru, making him the palladium of nationalism and conferring to his name qualities that personified the patriotic spirit. “The university is converted into a church and the character and appeal of national ideals are considerably overcast with personality cult,” said MB Lal, spurring aheated exchange with education minister Mohammed Ali Currim Chagla. There are so many institutions in Nehru’s name and most of them are in hibernation, Prabhat Kar, a member from Hooghly accused.

History tells us Prabhatkar was far off the mark. JNU  is not just a pixel on the spreadsheet of Nehruvian legacy. The university is one of India’s premier institutions. Early this month, it catapulted into national imagination and grabbed column-inches in broad sheets, after JNU Student Union (JNUSU ) president Kanhaiya Kumar, was arrested by two plainclothes policemen on charges of sedition.

The leafy campus of JNU  is housed in south Delhi flanked by gleaming shopping malls and neon glow of DDA  houses. There is also a small gloomy stretch of slum across traffic lines crisscrossed with clotheslines and heaps of refrigerator cartons. The university is spread across 1019 acres with low-slung school buildings, teaching Arabic to Russian, foreign policy to nanosciences. Messy tangle of streets and beaten paths take you to myriad hostels and schools. A few months here in the campus, eventually a map appears in your head and you can find new routes and new political alleys.

The political tracks of the student movements had veered off to Left from early days. The coveted post of JNUSU president was won nine times by All India Students’ Association (AISA ), 22 times by Student Federation of India (SFI ), nine times by independents, mostly socialists. Rarely it blurred its way into the Centre or Right — the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP ) student wing of RSS , won once in 2000, while Congress’ National Students’ Union of India (NSUI ) once in 1991.

The Left unions waged their battles from the campus, projecting themselves as young saviours of the shirtless. Right under the nose of India’s Congress and BJP governments, it won elections after the other. In the league tables of Left campuses of India, it topped with full Marx.

The Left here maintained semblance of orthodoxy, sometimes with crude and joyless interpretation of ideology. jnu’s staying power as a Left bastion gives rise to many questions. What turned jnu into a communist Xanadu and what are its dissenting voices? Who walks through its revolving doors? Who are its new converts? What is its revolutionary discourse?

jnu is perceived as an elitist research-based (and English-medium) university, and courses are often competitive and demanding for students. There is a competition among young scholars for upgrading from Masters to MPhil or PhD and making their way to academia.

How students become politicised and devote themselves to time-consuming political activities can be understood only if we look at how new students get socialised by developing new political bonds. The role of student organisations in that process can explain how activism is interweaved with friendship, loyalties, and mechanism of integration into new in-groups.

In the campus, one form of micro-politics that seeks to abolish the distinction between the regular student and the activist is the practice of “room sheltering”. Because of the rapid expansion of the number of students in the past decade, the amount of free rooms available in the 17 hostels in the campus is increasingly insufficient to host all the newcomers. Many freshers therefore end up in the rooms of activists who generously offer them some space until they are allotted accommodation.

Kumar lived in Brahmaputra Hostel, housing mostly PhD students. His room had a reassuring familiarity with empty tea pots, a narrow bed and posters of latest campaigns. Card board sheets were fevicolled to his window panes to stop harsh Delhi sun from cartwheeling through.

In his room, like that of other activists, amidst flicker of mobile phones, comrades squatted like inflated parachutes. Away from crumbling hostel rooms, across ocean of protests and blood, was a promise of better lives. At the beginning of the academic year an activist can shelter up to four new students. This situation can last for months and provide a formidable space for “political socialisation”.

A former senior leader of SFI agrees that a normal procedure for recruiting new cadres in political organisations involves sheltering new students waiting to be alloted a hostel room. “Sometimes assistance to students involves personal sacrifice. The classic strategy is to offer a room to freshers and this is what I did, four people for so many months, it was horrible,” he adds.

As a residential institution, JNU is for many a forcing house for changing persons and it can be argued that an important agent of individual change is the multidimensional and processual student interaction with campus organisations. It means that at first, the stranger in jnu cannot apply the standardised social patterns at work in her former educational place. Sinful temptations of Greater Kailash have no place here.

Within few months however, the individual “is about to transform himself from an unconcerned onlooker into a would-be member of the approached group” (Schutz). Four actors are involved in the process of initiation into jnu cultural pattern: friends, senior activists, ideologues, and professors. The processes of socialisation and politicisation are so intertwined that they form a single nexus on the days of registration for freshers. On these days of the year students land in the campus, fresh-faced, thumbing through degree certificates and other documents to get enrolled for the courses and the hostel. These are days of “registration assistance” in which activists first come in contact with new students, in order to help them complete the necessary administrative tasks and get familiar with the facilities.

Sometimes, one needs to be innovative too. “It is true that in order to have a good database [list of sympathiser that will cast votes for the organisation and will form a pool of potential recruits], you need to be the first to approach freshers. Usually, newcomers arrive in 615 bus and at the T-point aisa and sfi are waiting for them. But I was more astute, I would go to main gate and wait for the bus to come, then I will jump onto it and while it will go up to the registration area I would gather everyone and get them there,” says sfi activist Nikhil Narkar.

AISA , being an outfit of the CPI (ML), which has its roots in Bihar, relies mostly on cadres originating from the Hindi belt (74 per cent compared to the average of 54 per cent in campus). After an organisational split in 2012, the student wing of CPM , relied on a few leaders from Kerala to restructure their unit. As a result, one in two activists from sfi was born in south India. Campus politicisation is orchestrated by small cohorts of actors with preexistent linguistic and regional identities, but student organisations broadly represent the different categories of the population.

In Democratic Students Union (DSU) for example, eight members in 2014 were from north India and four belonged to the Northeast and Darjeeling region. Out of these four activists, three happened to have studied in the same high school, St. Anthony’s School — in Darjeeling’s Kurseong district.

In the campus, the community of faithfuls often fought with their worst enemy, each other. “New cadres then become polarised and follow a confrontational line. Between sfi and aisa, there is a river of blood,” says Khaliq Parkar, a former MPhil student. Old wounds were often rubbed vigorously, sometimes innocent comments were seized upon. During every polls, a fratricidal carnage spreads through the Left ranks.

The AISA will accuse SFI of not fighting against the attempt of Nestlé to open a vend in JNU campus in 2005 or rejecting any accountability in the 2007 killing of farmers in Singur and Nandigram by CPM led West Bengal government. SFI in return will blame AISA and CPI (ML ) General Secretary Vinod Mishra for not taking a clear stand on OBC reservations in the 1990s.

Climbing up the ladder is a tough act and young leaders have to show their skills in a two dimensional political world: one is the public interaction between the activist and common students, and the other is the quasi-private interaction between the activist and the sun-dried organisation.

The leaders lure specific network of sympathisers, decide whether to address a speech in English or Hindi, find a rhetorical pirouette to avoid uncomfortable questions and keep calm and carry on when questioned by the rival organisations. This body public is fundamentally an act of performance. Like an actor before footlights, the leaders must act real, which includes, even, wearing a specific outfit.

Certain rules of dress gives mask of position – an unwashed and worn-out kurta, chappals even in winter, gamcha in summer and a jhola. “This jute bag makes students think that activists are going to work with the masses, boarding a bus just after their speech. Just as if they were always in movement, busy, so that they have to keep their things always with them,” says Suchismita Chattopadhyay, a PhD scholar.

The baptism of a Left activist in jnu cannot be complete without her capturing the revolutionary discourse and class struggle cosmology. Textual analysis of student pamphlets, throws up a lexical field based on confrontational phrases – dare to resist, damning facts, communal-goons, worker’s exploitation, not up for sale. All God’s in Marxist pantheon are invoked at the dinner table – Mao (DSU ), Mazumdar (DSU , AISA), Safdar Hashmi (SFI , DSF , Lenin (AISA, SFI, DSU, AISF), Bolivar and Chavez (DSF, AISA, SFI, AISF), Che Guevara (all except NSUI and ABVP), Bhagat Singh (all), Ambedkar (all).

While television anchors and Sangh Parivar rush to paint JNU as an anti-national campus, in their own way, JNU activists develop a close sense of what India is, as an imagined community. Students committed to public affairs do not only discuss Marx, Gandhi, Ambedkar or Lohia, they take position on contemporary Indian issues raised in media.

“When you open the newspaper in the morning, it tells you what you are going to protest against in the afternoon,” says Ishan Anand, a senior Democratic Students’ Federation leader. Daily protest and programmes in jnu are often made in reaction to news items.

Benedict Anderson saw this medium as a silent form of mass ceremony in which the nation is imagined by the readership. Most jnuites are of that kind, they envision India when taking a position on political matters. Irrespective of specific ideologies flourishing in campus, commentaries portraying jnu activists as anti-nationals are grave misinterpretations.

Historian Romila Thapar notes that the current issue exemplifies the opposition between two forms of nationalism, one secular and one religion-based. The political arena in jnu welcomes overlapping interpretations of secularism, including a communist version, a feminist-inspired, and a Dalit-centred one.

The Hindu-Right definition of an Indian, articulated by the RSS and both their student (ABVP ) and political outfits (BJP ) refuse to accept incompatible but competing claims over the definition of the nation. Following Golwalkar’s understanding of the Nation, Indian identity according to RSS and ABVP is equated with Hindu culture, in which religious minorities are enjoined to keep expressions of community particularism to the private sphere. “We repeat: in Hindusthan, the land of the Hindus, lives and should live the Hindu Nation” (in We or Our Nationhood Defined, 1939).

Contrary to this essentialist definition of the nation, communists’ idea of India is attached to the ascriptive aspiration for land free from landlordism, class oppression and adherence to religious pluralism.

A textual analysis of JNU pamphlets since 1994 by Jean-Thomas Martelli shows how the word ‘nationalism’ provokes different reactions from different groups in the campus. It tells us that each organisation identifies different enemies to the Indian interests. ABVP emphasises on illegal Bangladeshi immigration or Islamic terrorist acts, while Marxist-Leninist organisations (AISA , SFI ) concentrate their attacks on “imperialist” forces, such as the US or Israel as well as hated elites like capitalists and industrialists.

Mirror of commentaries held up to JNU so far showed it as a deluded herd passing resolutions on affairs of far off land, say rigging of municipal polls in Nicaragua. In contrast to these views, the word India was mentioned overwhelmingly 25,138 times.

Kanhaiya Kumar’s PhD study is on social transformation of peasants in post-apartheid South Africa. He met his supervisor, Subodh Malakar, at a seminar at Joshi Adikari Gangadar Institute in New Delhi. Impressed by his paper on Marxism and population problems in India, Malakar advised Kumar to seek admission in JNU . This is the first time, Kumar, who came from mud-walled town of Bihar’s Begusarai, heard about jnu.

But Kumar’s idea of nation was loud and clear: “ We are not only a Left party, we follow a patriotic nationalist character,” he told us in an interview last year. As an after thought, he added: “Don’t worry. I am an Indian by sentiment but Marxist in reason.” That’s the sound of a young man in the grasp of destiny.