The state of JNU mirrors the state of India
The uniqueness of the country’s only ‘national’ university is being destroyed systematically so that it falls in line
With nine schools and four independent centres, the Jawaharlal Nehru University houses the country’s finest centres of history, political science, economics, regional development and sociology. Notwithstanding its inability to fetch a high global ranking, the university has emerged as the only national university in a country where institutions have been reduced to caste and community congregations.
The crux of JNU is not what it teaches merely as part of the syllabi but in the critical faculties it develops among its students. This critical faculty almost unique to JNU students and teachers make them rich in intellectual capital. In the increasingly closing minds of the Indians, it is this unique capital what is being envied and attacked.
For the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, JNU had been an aberration as its historians, social scientists and its students have not been reduced to zombies of the Hindu ideological brigades. Since 2016, this has been attempted with the time tested methods of intimidation, disruptions, and dividing scholars and students. Since February 9, 2016, one saw the entry of the police, charges of sedition on students, defaming and deligtimisation of JNU in public eye, which itself is a part of delegitimisation of the knowledge produced by JNU and continued disruptions created by filing charges, suspension of teachers and students, and malicious media profiling.
While attempts are being made to delegitmise the teacher’s solidarity by trying to split the teachers union, ABVP tried to delegitmise the student union when the union president was incarcerated. The administration around the same time began to be filled with non-tested academic figures, delegitimising their value and made them a part of an administrative bureaucracy more than members of a collegium. Thus, statutory bodies like the academic council and executive council, and democratically elected bodies such as JNUSU and JNUTA were battered to endorse the ideas of an ideologically charged administrative dominance. On the other hand, extreme casteist and communal forces have also been helping each other to delegitimise the institutions and collegiality that has built up JNU.
While communal attack comes from outside parading mediocrity and homogeneity as the only viable intellectual and political agenda, the casteist and sectarian attacks come from inside with external links and presents itself as the only liberatory discourse. So what we have today is a university whose uniqueness is to be attacked and destroyed so that it falls in line.
A university is after all the reflection of a nation and also its intellectual face to the world. The state of JNU today should concern all those who think for the nation and they must step forward to stop the march of mediocrity in the name of Hindu communalism or casteism.