The Right does not want education to be a catalyst for change. That explains the assault on public universities, writes Rajiv Gupta
The political party in power has failed miserably to address the issues concerning people. It has weakened democratic institutions which has led to restlessness. It is also a fact that neo-liberal economic forces and rightist forces led by the BJP-RSS combine are interested in turning India into a surveillance society. These forces are also trying to replace class politics with identity politics. These objectives can be achieved by an organised assault on the ideologies of socialism, liberalism and feminism, on the principles of social justice, equality, freedom of expression, cultural freedom and secularism. Moral and cultural policing, misuse of force with the involvement of police, and attacks on universities and colleges are tools with which assaults on students are organised.
Managing the discourse
There are two important ways to achieve this. One is the use and misuse of the media. I keep a close watch on the language media and I can see its rampant misuse. Add social media to this churn, and you find the classic creation of a surveillance society. Communism, feminism, and other ideologies can be attacked by counterpoising them against nationalism and patriotism through emotional blackmail and aggression. Whenever these issues are raised, there is an easy endorsement from the capitalists and the ruling class. Such aggression can be perpetrated effectively among a category of students by raising communal consciousness based on religion and culture which the ruling class and its ideologues deploy. The Education Minister of Rajasthan directs the college board to introduce Maharana Pratap as The Great, in place of Akbar — projecting it as Hinduism versus Islam.
In Central and State-funded universities, a large number of students who take admission belong to the marginal sections of society and the middle-lower class. If they undergo the process of cultural understanding about the relationship between state and society, they can be effectively used for institutionalising an alternative polity of the working class in which the working class, peasantry and women along with SCs, STs and minorities play instrumental roles in the decision-making process. The ruling class, which comprises capitalists and landlords, would never wish for this alternative polity to emerge. Their ideologues know that education played a role in the October Revolution and that’s why they assault public-funded universities, so that education does not become a catalyst for change.
Promoting private players
The rightist forces are, in fact, afraid of universities and colleges which are public-funded because they provide an understanding of diversity, tolerance and scientific temper. When students from Ramjas College or Jawaharlal Nehru University raise questions relating to Maoists or the rights of Jammu and Kashmir or the Northeast, they try to make it a part of the public discourse and there is a unity between the faculty and students indicating solidarity, so needed to create a secular ethos. We all know that education is an important tool to achieve this. Left politics works on dialectics, which provides ample scope for dialogue.
Any struggle can only come through a peaceful dialogue. Universities are important for de-classing societies — that’s why they become the centres for revolutionary consciousness. If these universities are run down, private players can take advantage. The universities are also under siege from policies like skill development being propagated by the NDA government. Universities are not meant for skill development. They are for nurturing a critical understanding of the social world.
Rajiv Gupta is former professor and head, Department of Sociology, University of Rajasthan, where he taught for 37 years before retiring in 2013.
Campuses are under siege from those who cannot appreciate peoples’ connect to the motherland, writes Aswini Mohapatra
Nationalism, as understood by the anarchists — I would refrain from calling them leftists — is confined to raising anti-India slogans publicly and defending their right to do so under freedom of expression. This group also has a pre-determined mindset and prejudice against the BJP-led government at the Centre. I would say campuses are under siege from this group. And it is this group that is raking up the issue of nationalism, which came to the fore after they were caught red-handed shouting anti-India slogans on February 9, 2016 on the JNU campus. In the last 15 years or so, with the onset of the liberal economy, the Left has been losing ground to radical and anarchic elements for which the idea of a nation is an artificial construct and national identity is a discursive construction subject to revision, negotiation and reinterpretation.
Nation and nationalism
Based on the available literature related to the concept of nation and nationalism (largely drawn on the Western historical experiences and philosophical traditions), one can broadly identify three major schools of thought. The primordialist school, for instance, claims that nations are ‘real’, and ethnicity forms the basis for a nation to emerge. Germany comes to mind, where people came to together to create the nation first and then a unified state. The second are the proponents of civic nationalism — as in France — where the state is first, then the nation. The third, popularly known as the constructivist school, contests the existence of nation as ‘real’ or ‘natural. For the constructivists, the discourse on nation makes it ‘real’. National identity, according to them, is made-up narratives based on selective manipulation of facts and used as an instrument by the political elite for mobilisation and capture of state power.
Interestingly, India, or Bharat as the Constitution defines it, does not fit into any of the three categories. India as a nation-state model is sui generis. It emerged in 1947 as a modern, sovereign nation-state entity but that does not mean that the idea of Bharatavarsha is new. Historically, it does refer to an entity with its distinct culture, social practices and set of beliefs within a territorially delineated area. The description of Bharat is found in our epics, our sacred texts, shastras, in Kalidasa’s poem ‘Meghaduta’ (Cloud Messenger), apart from the speeches and writings of Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo. The idea of Bharat Rashtra is thus neither a product of imagination or narration; it is a natural reality. What unites the inhabitants of this land for centuries regardless of the plurality of gods and deities, socio-cultural practices, traditions and customs is a set of fundamental beliefs, notably the concept of transmigration, presence of astral body (a spiritual counterpart to physical human body) as reflected in commonly used names like Radha, Krishna and Ram (from Ramaswamy in the south to simple Ram, for instance) across the country.
The idea that is Bharat
What underlies all this is a kind of emotional connect to this Devabhumi, Bharat, that our so-called secular and left-leaning intellectuals will have difficulty in appreciating. Attempts in the past few years to revive an authentic Bharatiya soch (thinking) have turned many of them hostile. Bharatiya soch is based on the recognition of diversity of beliefs and views — not just tolerating plurality but respecting those beliefs and views. Until recently, the movement was mostly reactive, proving to its critics what it was not. With the movement spreading across the country, it is projecting itself as what it is and hence it is not averse to healthy, meaningful criticism or intellectual engagement. It is a home-grown movement unlike the leftist or Maoist movements; it is inclusive and at the same time fiercely protective of national identity and its territorial sovereignty.
Aswini Mohapatra is professor, Centre for West Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
More than Left versus Right, what we are witnessing is an outright attack on the very freedom to think, writes Apoorvanand
The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) as well as the ruling party at the Centre, both children of the RSS, are trying to take over universities across India irrespective of who is in power in the States. The ABVP enjoys immunity because its government is in power at the Centre and that makes it emboldened.
It also enjoys an advantage over any other ideology as the default setting of the mental make-up of Indian police and administration or even the political class is pro-Hindutva.
Reaction to Left hegemony
It is often argued that this is a reaction from the right-wingers as the ABVP, for long confined to the margins by the Left which enjoyed supremacy in the educational institutional life of India, is acting with a vengeance. Many also see it as a battle for hegemony in the educational sphere between the Left and Right. The Left is a very broad category inhabited by diverse ways of thinking. Can a Trotskyite live peacefully with a Leninist? In India, historians R.S. Sharma and Romila Thapar, both historians of ancient India, are considered Leftists but have very different methodologies to understand the past. Knowledge is very fluid. Existentialism impacted Marxism and got changed in the process; similarly Freud helped Marxists see human nature in a very different light. Do not forget feminism, environmentalism, etc.
It is true that the Left, when in power, has displayed a tendency to hegemonise all social and cultural spaces. It destroyed the intellectual life of West Bengal. When knowledge-seeking is made subservient to what is thought to be politically correct, it flounders. Today the RSS variety of nationalism defines this political correctness. Nationalism in India has a Hindu overhang, and it has become easy for its advocates to present their variety of nationalism as the nationalism. If you question its universality from the standpoint of women, Dalits, Adivasis, minorities or the dispossessed, you are immediately branded an anti-national. It prevents any enquiry into its claim.
To not allow knowledge to grow in directions the powers dislike is dangerous. We saw an interesting and novel effort to frame a curriculum framework for schools in 2004 which sought to provide an anxiety-free and egalitarian atmosphere for learning for children. The effort was attacked viciously by the Left then as it thought that it was not serving explicitly the aim of secularism. But the rightist RSS outfits did not spare it either. Petitions were filed, books attacked in Parliament, court cases were lodged against the National Council of Educational Research and Training for ‘hurting’ nationalist sentiments.
Targeting of the free mind
What we are witnessing now is not a clash between Left and Right. It is an outright attack on the very freedom to know, to think. It is very crucial for political parties having authoritarian tendencies to gag universities. Stalin did it; painters, artists, scholars had to flee Hitler’s Germany; Mao unleashed terror on universities in the name of Cultural Revolution, the student militia of the Islamic government of Iran policed universities, reported on students and teachers. What do all these cases tell us? Marxists were eliminated by communist regimes; people who could not be remotely called leftist were destroyed by Islamic or Nazi regimes. The target is then a mind which thinks freely.
Apoorvanand is a literary and cultural critic who teaches Hindi at Delhi University.
(All views as told to Anuradha Raman)
