Politics is the mobilisation of collective resistance against power for the cause of justice, which includes disobedience — a constitutionally ordained privilege of citizenry in democracy, noted educationist Rajan Gurukkal has said.
In a statement issued here on Monday, he said student politics was organised resistance against injustice and the campus of higher education institutions was their democratic space, where they not only attain educational outcomes but also ethical postulates, sense of public justice.
The campus is the public sphere of students, which nurtures them as political individuals who go into the making of the responsible citizenry of democratic passions and values. A Court, therefore ought not to ban students’ collective operations like strikes, dharnas and gheraos, he said.
It is unfortunate that the Court tends to go by the semantic corruption of the term politics caused by the unruly behaviour in campuses by some in the student organisations under political parties.
If disobedience slips into violence and aggression, there are well codified criminal laws and procedures to govern such outrageous behaviours. It is critical, ethical and political consciousness that helps students to question social injustice.
Being political is being social and hence growing altruistic by transcending selfishness. It is this capability to question social injustice, which enables them to question epistemic injustice or injustice embedded in knowledge they acquire.
The gate
Questioning knowledge is the gate to the world of new knowledge, he said. This would mean that political criticality is the door to creativity. All democratic campuses of the world over are critical and creative in this sense.
A very significant factor to be remembered is the global context of all this. It is the context of the death of democracy, which is seemingly not long way off because capitalistic globalisation cannot get along well with democracy any longer.
As an extension of the global corporate capitalist imperialism, there is a political economy driven techno-military robotic disciplining spreading out in all campuses. This transnational corporate imperial order disallows critical consciousness among students and it is utterly intolerant of politics that is the praxis part of democracy. It encourages to question injustice and speak truth to power.
