Campuses erupt in US: Can India, world learn lessons?

The goings-on in America should trigger thought and a sensible dialogue back home on how we can facilitate, not curb, speech.

Columbia University in New York is in the news in India after the university’s president ordered police raids on the campus in mid-April, and it cannot augur well for campuses in other countries, including India. The incident triggered student protests across 50 American campuses over the Israeli aggression against Palestinians, in particular residents of the Gaza Strip, and to spotlight an ineffective proPalestine movement called Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS). More than 1,000 people, including professors, have been detained or arrested; St. Louis-based Washington University, a private university like Columbia, has banned six of its professors; on May 1, the police entered a Columbia campus building that the Gaza protesters had occupied.

The protesters at Columbia and elsewhere are reported to have told the news media that these demonstrations should remind us of the disastrous stand-off in 1970 between students and the US National Guard, which shot and killed four students on the Kent State University campus in Ohio. Students, protesting the US occupation of Cambodia at the tail end of the long-drawn Vietnam war, had occupied common and open spaces on campuses, considered safe spaces for voice and speech. Anxious to quell the dissent, President Richard Nixon sent the Guard to campuses.

The shooting shocked the world after it snowballed into a media event. Newspapers and magazines amplified it, using shocking photographs of students lying on the ground dead. An iconic image in the Daily Mirror, a British tabloid, accompanied by a scathingly caustic headline, “Death of a Bum”, followed by the sub-heading “Four Killed in New Demo on Cambodia”, is a case study across media schools. The headline referred to Nixon’s speech a few days before, where he had called protesters “bums blowing up the campuses” and US college students “the luckiest people in the world”.

The parallel between 1970 and 2024 should not entirely be surprising: First, both protests are fights for spaces in physical and figurative senses. Second, student voices were discredited in similar ways. Third, and the broadest in its significance, the current protests are the biggest since 1970, and the government is going after protesters in an election year. A recent survey showed that the proportion of Americans who support the Israeli aggression is far more than those who oppose it. Populism surfaces the most when definable and tangible objectives are immediate and existential. Regardless of which ideology governs a nation, such events expose the populism that lurks behind moralistic rhetoric. Once populism can be effectively cloaked in imperativeness — such as that of war or other moral conflict — it lends an emotive, nationalistic purpose to the voter. For all Nixon’s impending downfall, people were supportive of his hard stance against the student protests.

Predictably, the indignation game has begun: The pro-establishment media in India has seized the opportunity to call out the Biden administration, questioning how the US “lectured” India on free speech. The commentaries are right to point out the diplomatic hypocrisy. They are misleading because the First Amendment, the US equivalent of our Article 19, applies to public spaces alone. The US statements on the farmers’ protest is a particularly false equivalence for our media to draw. Many of the campuses are indeed public universities; however, Columbia, Harvard and many others are not. There, the campus governance lies in the hands of the university. Moreover, US campuses pride themselves on being safe spaces for speech and expression, and they have remained that way without fear of violence or prevention. However, violence is treated as a law-and-order problem. Unlike in the US, where intervention of the law enforcement agencies is disruptive, dramatic, rare and highly evocative, in India, the insinuation has been silent and efficient with a chilling effect. In theory, this principle of free debate and fostering of critical thinking is also valid among Indian universities. Indeed, critical thinking appears prominently in the guiding principles of the new documents of higher education such as the new National Education Policy — although it has liberal education principles that emphasise skills-based education and critical thinking together, somewhat self-contradictorily.

In practice, many of these “safe spaces” are not truly free. In July 2021, a Central university in Madhya Pradesh organised a conference in association with a US university. The theme, “Cultural and Linguistic Hurdles in the Achievement of Scientific Temper”, touched a raw nerve among many, and two of the speakers were known liberal intellectuals. After the right-wing ABVP objected, the police asked the authorities to halt the event as it might “disturb communal harmony”. As most of us recognise, this is hardly a lone case. The police in India do not intervene only when protests get violent; they often prevent or interrupt even peaceful protests, triggering a chilling effect. It is in fact private universities in India that have the best chance to stay the course of rationality and permit eclectic voices, thoughts and ideas to flourish.

In targeting the US government, the Indian media is protecting and promoting this systematic clampdown on dissent. One news show targeted the US for its stance favouring farmers during the year-long 20202021 protests, when the Delhi police barricaded the capital and treated farmers with brutal force. These selfcongratulatory retorts, apparently made as representatives of the government, are now common. However, what has become a routine exercise in majoritarian nationalism here appears to find parallels in the world media in toeing a government line that is ideological rather than rational.

All this is not exactly a banner headline in India. Even the academic commentariat has largely skirted it. Silencing academic voices is reminiscent of the pre-modern hierarchical societies of oppression. The US action vindicates the camp that laments that there is “too much freedom”. There is nothing excessive in free expression on university campuses: Disagreement with a government’s stand cannot be equated with something illegal. Even if it is in forms that are rough at the edges, it is essential to the growth and sustenance of dialectical societies, the hallmark of modernity.

Majoritarian populism is the method of pragmatism that is defining the two countries’ approaches. Report after global report evidences a decline in the democratic operations of one; the cracks are more visible than ever in the other. Whether the US is learning from nations like Turkey, Hungary, Israel and India is unclear, but the slide away from President Joe Biden’s avowal to save democracy in 2021 is surfacing in quite an ironic fashion. The goings-on in America should trigger thought and a sensible dialogue back home on how we can facilitate, not curb, speech.

The writer is professor and dean of Hyderabadbased Mahindra University’s School of Media, and the author of News Aesthetics and Myth: The Making of Media Illiteracy in India, which will be published soon. The views expressed are personal.