Anyone looking at the headlines of the past few months would think that there is a students’ revolt going on in the country. In several educational institutions, students are on the warpath against the administration or objecting to some decision the government has taken. It began with the high-profile strike at the Film and Television Institute of India, where the students objected to the appointment of actor Gajendra Chauhan as the chairperson and some others on the board; none of them were qualified and were all party apparatchiks. The strike eventually came to an end without the government having withdrawn those worthies from their posts.
Since then, there has been turmoil in Jawaharlal Nehru University and in University of Hyderabad and less high-profile but no less significant tussles have been going in at Allahabad University and in Ferguson College, Pune.
But this is no revolution — it is neither organised on a national level and neither have student bodies in other parts of the country joined in.
University of Mumbai, never a particularly political place, is as placid as ever, and the same can be said for campuses in other parts of the country. I was at a graduate school a week ago and the students — all studying to become managers — were not particularly agitated by the events in JNU. A faculty member said she was aghast when even the arrest and jailing of Kanhaiya Kumar left the students unmoved — indeed, there were murmurs that students should not indulge in politics on campuses.
This, as any historian or social scientist will tell you, is so different from a generation or two ago. In the 1960s and ’70s, colleges in the US and Europe were afire with student protests. In India, students in Gujarat — yes, you read that right — were out on the streets demanding the resignation of “Chimandas Chor”, as the chief minister Chimandas Patel was called. Similar protests were seen all over the country.
We live in different times and student politics now is a pale shadow of its past. Hyderabad, Allahabad and JNU are exceptions to the general rule; in the bigger metros, career-minded students stay away from politics. This is not to suggest that they don’t engage with current affairs, but most of this engagement is done in a passive manner; a tweet is preferred than a march on the street.
Yet, limited though it may be, the intensity of student protests in JNU or University of Hyderabad — and also in Allahabad and earlier the FTII — should give the government and the Bharatiya Janata Party pause. If it thinks that it can employ bulldozing tactics of one sort or another and quash any budding student rebellion, it will be mistaken; they may not be out on the streets, but in a few short weeks, the government has managed to anger the student community everywhere. Three distinct narratives have emerged which are common between all instances of campus turmoil in the last nine months or so, when the FTII strike began.
First, the government is clearly involved in triggering off student protests. In the FTII, it was the appointment of people to important posts who were quite clearly worthless; when the students objected, the government, instead of finding a compromise, saw the strike as a gesture of defiance and dug its heels in. In Hyderabad, the ministry of human resources development took inordinate interest in the “anti-national” activities of the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA), pressuring the university administration to take action; the university reacted by placing students on suspension and one of them committed suicide.
The events in JNU are too recent to be repeated, but in this case, no less than the home minister declared that anti-national activities would not be tolerated, even though there was no evidence anything of the sort had happened. Second, in places where the BJP’s student body, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, cannot make a headway in the proper manner — through elections — it will act as a disruptive instrument. The ABVP had made the initial complaint against the ASA and in Allahabad. It has been after the Allahabad University students’ union president Richa Singh. (By a strange turn of events, three ABVP members have quit the union and criticised the government for the police action in JNU).
Most important is the realisation among students that the government — Central or state — far from trying to work out a quiet compromise will deploy the toughest possible measures. Sending the police in JNU, arresting students for sedition, shutting off the mess and wifi, as has just happened in Hyderabad. The government wants to show it is ready to take the hard line. Even the surreptitious re-entry of the Hyderabad University vice-chancellor Appa Rao Polide after his “leave” was a highly provocative act, given that the students were blaming him for the events that led to Rohith Vemula’s suicide. Clearly, the Union government did not bother to take the simmering anger of the students into account.
Treating the students like “children” and not taking steps to deal with any genuine demands that they may have seems to be the policy of this government. It may feel sanguine that this mood of protests will quieten down and in any case has no resonance elsewhere. But angering students is never a good idea; students’ protests have led to further instability. At a time when there are many other important issues to deal with, the government should not be opening this front. Campus fires may not spread, but they generate a lot of heat, which can singe those who try to play with it.
