JNU, where one can be subversive without being seditious

There were two lines that were crossed last week in the ongoing row at one of my alma maters, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), easily the best university for humanities in the country (although I am open to contrary opinion on that statement).

The first line was crossed last week by a handful of JNU students when they raised slogans vowing to ‘destroy India’. It is one thing to criticise your country – and God knows, there is plenty to criticise in India, and I do it on a regular basis myself – but it is quite another to call for its destruction, even allowing for the heat of the moment.

 

This is not the JNU I know and studied at. When I was there in the early and mid-‘90s, the intellectual atmosphere was as vibrant as I imagine it was before we got there and as much as it is, I hope, today. All the Left parties’ student wings had an active, and majoritarian, presence then with their stated goals of ‘Revolution’. But never did we hear slogans of the kind that were raised last week (Click here). None of the student parties, not even AISA, which is the student wing of the ultra-left CPI(M-L), ever raised such slogans.

My friends on the left, and I had a few, never ever questioned the integrity of the Indian nation-state as it exists, even though we all debated, and were encouraged to, the idea of India. That, to me, is freedom of thought. But as if one wasn’t enough to show us the horrors of its happening, to make a public demand for breaking up the country is, to my mind, beyond the pale.

The second line was crossed when the government decided to throw its heft into the ring. What could have been easily resolved by a simple complaint that could then have been addressed internally by the JNU administration instead became a draconian crackdown on the students. It was a show of brute power designed to intimidate and silence. It is no secret that the orders for police action came from the Home Ministry. 

And it is no secret, either, that on the right, JNU is a symbol of how the intellectual discourse in this country has been dominated by the Left. In that sense, the Right see its attacks on JNU as the intellectual equivalent of storming the Bastille, as it were.  Except in this case, there was no metaphor involved, just an iron-fisted handling of the situation.

Any government must remember that it is the biggest kid on the block. But that does not give it the right to be the bully of the block. “Speak softly, but carry a big stick,” the American president Teddy Roosevelt was fond of saying. Everyone knows the Indian state carries the biggest stick; what it needs to do is not just to speak softly, but to also let others speak, loudly if need be.  A nation is strengthened not only by how it treats it enemies but more by how it treats its citizens.

The government’s response is no doubt just a warning shot across the bow that this sort of anti-India sentiment will not be tolerated, and matters will hopefully blow over soon enough. But the manner in which it has reacted has only given a handle to anti-Modi groupings to come together. Even Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi landed up in JNU to show his solidarity with an ideology he had categorically dissed a few days earlier.

The ideology that the Left believes in, is an obsolete ideology, it is the ideology of the past century

— Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) February 9, 2016

It has also given the Left leaning intelligentsia, on a platter, another chance with which to raise the issue of intolerance for free speech and dissenting opinion. Both of these are no doubt critical to any democracy but I find this the ‘freedom of speech and dissent’ argument downright hypocritical because I have witnessed enough incidents of the Left parties shouting down and disrupting peaceful public meetings of ABVP, with which I was affiliated. And anyone who has lived in West Bengal or Kerala (or the former Soviet Union or, even now, China) will tell you how much dissent is allowed there.

(What I find infinitely more amusing is that the standards of free speech that our Left comrades are demanding are held to those that are present in capitalist democracies, which are otherwise Enemies No. 1. and almost never in communist nations)

The larger disappointment for me, personally, though, is the coagulation of public opinion against JNU as some bastion of anti-India forces, which it is not. It is one thing to be a right winger, pro-Modi, pro-government, but it is quite another to seek to shut down a campus that is genuinely committed to new ideas and ways of thinking. You may have heard JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar’s impassioned speech before his arrest – it is clear that he is committed to the unity of India and the Constitution of India.

I may be immune, even opposed, to the Left’s ideological persuasions but there is no questioning the fact that JNU opened up my, and tens upon thousands of others’, minds to new thoughts, new ideas, and gave us the intellectual space, the courage and the confidence to question positions that we did not, or could not, agree with, including those of, the horror!, our professors. To come to a place where most students, such as I, came from mofussil areas and small towns, were encouraged, often for the first time, to speak up in class was to arrive at an educational paradise in India, away from the narrow, teacher-dictated structures and strictures of education that passes for learning elsewhere. 

Here, at least, you could be curious and there would be someone, not necessarily your professor, to help you figure out the answers for yourself. And it helped that the overarching culture of the university was one that created such a space for questioning, even dissent. It was, in that sense, a place that truly gave you agency.

It is that nuanced thinking that allows me today to say in the same breath that this small group of students crossed a line but also that the government also crossed one in its reaction, and that a larger section of people is crossing one when it calls for shutting down JNU. To my mind, the biggest tragedy in this whole row is to see calls for shutting down one of the few educational institutions in the country where one can be subversive without being seditious.