THE BID TO UNMAKE JNU
In a moving post on the JNU students’ agitation against the proposed fee hike, one of my Ph.D scholars wrote: ‘Do you remember the story [of] a security guard in JNU who cracked the entrance exam? [It] will never be repeated if the fee hike comes true…. Please India, hear our voices.’
For most of us on campus, students and teachers alike, witnessing the undoing of a great public university, the current feehike agitation by JNU students is but another inflection point in the disreputable, bitbybit dismantling of a storied institution. The process has a mascot, the incumbent vicechancellor M. Jagadesh Kumar, and it began in earnest with his appointment in January 2016. The key difference with the proposed fee hike, only the latest blow the JNU administration has dealt its students, is that it will lead to immediate dropouts of higher education aspirants, with the attendent indignity of exclusion and the tragedy of unlived dreams.
Whose dreams and futures are we talking about? In 201819, women comprised 53 per cent of total admissions in JNU; around 60 per cent of those admitted were from SC, ST and OBC families; more than 40 per cent of students came from families with monthly incomes of Rs 12,000 or less. Such a social composition has been achieved over years, and grows out of JNU’s progressive admission policy. The policy, which has been in place since the university’s incep
tion, accords regional deprivation points, favouring students from remote and underdeveloped parts of the country. Much before India implemented the OBC quota, giving deprivation points to student-aspirants from OBC families was an established practice in JNU. In 2010, JNU instituted gender-based deprivation points, to encourage women and transgender candidates. Under the current JNU administration, the system of according deprivation points has been abolished for M.Phil/ Ph.D programmes.
The social and economic diversity of JNU serves many purposes besides fulfilling a welfare state’s social obligation to its citizens. The academic excellence of JNU, for example, is because of the social diversity of students, not in spite of it. The unique
contributions to knowledge that come out of this university are an organic product of the diverse ways in which its people have been raised and have lived their lives. The invaluable contributions to existing discourses that JNU can legitimately claim credit for follow from the teaching-learning environment JNU offers. Its diversity also enables the building of solidarities and empathy across social barriers. In sum, it truly contributes to the making of Indian citizens.
It is this character of JNU that the fee hike threatens to fundamentally alter—more than 40 per cent of current students, all from underprivileged backgrounds, would be forced to leave the university. Even for people who calculate the benefits of higher education in strictly financial terms, this should represent a huge waste of ‘taxpayers’ money’ already spent on these students. The fee hike, fashioned as a selffinancing model, now includes salaries of sanitation and mess workers, charges for utilities like water and electricity and a hugely increased room rent, taking the annual hostel fees to approximately Rs 66,000 (from about Rs 30,000 now). The ‘rollback’ of fees announced on November 13, 2019, is applicable only to students from BPL (below poverty line) families, and even after the rollback, the hostel fees alone will be nearly double the annual income of a BPL family (estimated at Rs 27,000, Digital India, 2016). So, in effect, the announced ‘rollback’ is applicable to none of the students on campus, a fact abundantly clear to the JNU student protesters. Also, the students’ union was not consulted in the fee-hike decision, which is a subversion of due institutional process.
The JNU students are not just fighting for their own future, or to preserve an institutional ethos they have benefited from. They are fighting for future generations of learners of meagre means, who might live their dreams through this public institution of higher learning. The protesters are asking a moot question: is higher education a preserve only of people who can pay for it? ■
60% of those admitted in 2018-19 were SC/ ST/ OBC; 40% were from families earning under `12,000 p.m.