By D V Kumar
When I sat in the train to go to Delhi and join the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 1981, I met a person in the same compartment who was already a student there. I was very happy to see him there as I needed somebody with whom I could communicate in my own language. Being extremely weak both in English and Hindi, finding somebody who spoke the same language as I did was indeed enormously gratifying. When he came to know that I too was going to join JNU, he told me that I was not going to just another university. Rather I was going to explore an idea, the import of which I simply did not understand then. I simply nodded pretending to understand it lest he came to the conclusion that a wrong person was going to join JNU.
It was only when I landed and spent a few days at JNU that I understood what he actually meant. Everything seemed to be so unique on the campus. Its hostels where both boys and girls could stay together with a common mess (but, of course, in two separate wings) gave a ‘cultural shock’ to me, coming as I did from an extremely conservative background where any kind of interaction between boys and girls was socially unacceptable. Girls found JNU to be a liberating space and they could walk around the campus even in the middle of night without any fear of being subjected to any harassment. The enormously heterogeneous nature of the student community made one sensitive to diverse experiences and perspectives.
My own class had students some of whom studied at elite colleges such as Delhi’s St Stephen’s and Kolkata’s Presidency and others who came from municipal schools. Then there was this highly informal dialogic interaction between teachers and students which made one believe in oneself. Its posters on the walls which are described as ‘publishers of the poor’ taught one everything about the world from Marx to Freud, communism to fascism, literature to society. One of the most critical and popular ideas which I came across on the posters was about politics. The slogan, ‘if politics decides our future, decide what our politics should be’ immediately captured my imagination. Communication through posters on the walls, I felt, was an extremely creative and dialogic mode.
The post-dinner talks which were a regular feature at JNU were something which we used to look forward to as they provided an opportunity to listen to some of the most well-known and powerful people in the country in an absolutely informal setting. Elections to the students’ union were something which was out of the ordinary. Students themselves were involved in conducting elections and the highlight of elections was the Presidential debate where candidates for the post of President from different political parties would articulate their position on different issues affecting not only the university but the larger society, culture, economy and polity. There was a firm conviction that as ‘organic intellectuals’ (to borrow an expression from Gramsci), we need to engage ourselves with larger issues instead of being confined only to the campus issues. JNU has always been famous not only for its culture of debate and discussion but also for the way it is conducted. Its non-violent and dialogic character had to be seen to be believed.
What was also very distinctive about JNU was its creative encouragement of inter-disciplinary orientation, perhaps the first university in India which did that. One could be a student of Sociology but opt for a paper in Economics. What JNU did long ago, other universities are doing now. Rigid disciplinary boundaries prevent creative and critical exploration of ideas and this is something JNU realised long ago.
Then February 2016 happened. It was actually waiting to happen to JNU. The University which questioned the dominant, exclusionary and hegemonic idea of cultural (read religious) nationalism and refused to surrender its critical and creative thinking needed to be taught a ‘lesson’. Every systematic attempt was to be made to malign the university and delegitimize it in the popular collective imagination. This was not enough. Every instance of criticality needed to be stigmatized and any possibility of dissent and questioning deserved to be demolished in the name of ‘anti-nationalism’. Spaces for resistance needed to be shrunk. This is what has been happening to JNU since 2016. JNU remains one of those few spaces in the contemporary India where questions are still asked and answers demanded… Any university should be proud of producing students like Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid, Shehla Rashid and others but unfortunately, thanks to some media houses, they have become an anathema to the general public.
The present turmoil which JNU (fee hike issue) is passing through also needs to be seen in this context. A large number of students come from extremely vulnerable and weaker sections of the society who bring in their own experiential and critical questions which the State cannot handle. Therefore they need to be stopped from coming to JNU and hence the fee hike knowing full well that many of them would return to their homes as they cannot afford expensive education. The inclusive and heterogonous character of JNU would be destroyed if the new fee structure is implemented. JNU always thrived on its diverse character. Equally important is to recognise the fact education is a public good and not a commodity to be sold to people who can afford to buy it. The commoditisation of education has become an inexorable process and the JNU students have been resisting it with all the force at their command. They indeed deserve our support.
What JNU gives one is great amount of confidence and the ability to speak truth to power with dignity and decency. Students of JNU have been provoked repeatedly for a couple of years now yet not a single window pane has been destroyed at JNU. The most recent defacement of the statue of Swami Vivekananda is more of an exception and nobody knows who has done it. The power of resistance shown by the students and teachers of the university is something that every university should imbibe. There are only a few empowering spaces left now and JNU is certainly one of them.
Loss of JNU would be the loss of an idea which is democratic, secular, inclusive and gender-sensitive and we all need to preserve such an idea
(D. V. Kumar is Professor of Sociology, North-Eastern Hill University, and Shillong)