Kanika Datta: JNU's corruption interruptus

SWOT

Here is my sincere advice to members of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students' union. If they really want to be true to themselves""as of January 2005, that is""they must forever eschew the following:

(i) jeans (a potent symbol of oppressive American Imperialism, if there ever was one);

(ii) Charminar cigarettes (manufactured by the Indian subsidiary of a dastardly multinational);

(iii) Lipton or Brooke Bond tea (remnant of British colonialism, still produced by the subsidiary of another dastardly multinational).

Even if they are successfully able to launch a class struggle against these three standard symbols of university life for as long as I can remember, they must be ever more vigilant when it comes to more up-to-date accoutrements.

For instance, I do hope they will stop using mobile phones since almost every major service provider has been wicked enough to accept substantial amounts of foreign investment from those corrupting multinationals to set up networks that revolutionised Indian telecommunications.

As for their choice of cars and two-wheelers, it is vital that they do not deviate from the mandatory abstinence from foreign marques, the better to "cleanse the campus" of the "ideological brainwashing" and "neo-colonialism" of multinational corporations

Am I quoting phrases from Mao's Little Red Book? Lenin's State and Revolution? No, this was the terminology employed by a contemporary Left-dominated students' union at JNU to evict a dangerous source of neo-colonial corruption from the campus "" a Nestle coffee outlet.

This vital issue was debated at a 12-hour general body meeting last month that ran past midnight and finally voted the Nestle outlet off the campus with a majority of 544 to eight.

Such swadeshi nationalism might have been considered constructive before 1947, when foreign goods could plausibly be equated with colonial exploitation ""and you didn't have to read Naoroji to figure that out.

It is breathtaking that students in today's world should even be thinking in such precious, anachronistic terms.

The JNU union's (ostensible) reason for this momentous decision was that a Nestle coffee outlet excluded poorer students who apparently could not afford Rs 5 for a cup of coffee.

Even the lowliest MBA student could have told you that it is always possible to negotiate lower rates on the kind of large volumes that a university coffee outlet can effortlessly generate. Also, surely the whole notion is impractical.

To give you an example of this, consider "Tulsi's cafe", the name that consecrates the down-at-heel dhaba outside Business Standard's Delhi office. Like the recently departed JNU coffee outlet, Tulsi charges Rs 5 for a cup of coffee.

Had Nescafe been banned from his "cafe", Tulsi would have had to source coffee powder from the nearest Coffee Board outlet and percolate it, a process that would be both time-consuming and costly (since you'll use more coffee per cup under this process).

Heaven forbid, journalists might have to start paying as much as Rs 7 for a cup of coffee if this happened.

The impact of this daily commerce on Nescafe? Well, in the three years that Business Standard's journalists have patronised his establishment, no one has yet detected signs of neo-colonial corruption in Tulsi.

Indeed, we'd be hard put to make him confess to "rightist, counter-revolutionary" thinking in the best Stalinist and Maoist traditions since it is unlikely he has ever given a thought to the brand of coffee he buys.

As for Business Standard's journalists ... I guess JNU's union might consider them beyond redemption, Nescafe or no Nescafe, since the paper has a minority foreign investor in the Financial Times and, worse, has consistently been a supporter of foreign investment-attracting economic reform.

The thing is, an editorial line can rarely be as harmful as a large student body that thinks in this impractically prissy way. JNU is famously the breeding ground for India's leftist politicians.

The results of this are evident both in legacy systems and in current policy-making. Labour, for instance, has been the Left's natural constituency.

Yet, the Left hardly played a constructive role in improving the lot of unorganised labour, or lobbying for a viable safety net as it well could have, despite decades of experience in unionism.

As a result, the government is now struggling to make labour laws more corporate-friendly without harming the interests of labour.

The Left has always reserved a superior snigger or two for the crass swadeshi politics of the Hindutva kind; the JNU student union's actions make it hard to distinguish between the two.

Or maybe, just maybe, some sanity is returning to the campus. Last week, a larger resolution to ban all multinational brands from the campus suffered a shock defeat. So perhaps JNU's students can get on with their lives in a globalised world once again.