Barely a month ago, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was being vilified as the den of anti-nationals simply because some students shouted slogans denouncing prevailing sectarian, casteist and authoritarian policies. Even as protesters were thrown into prison, right-wingers argued that then JNU didn’t deserve state funding and demanded stationing an army tank in JNU premises to instill nationalism among left and liberal groups at India’s Berkeley.
But this week, JNU and Hyderabad Central University — another campus on the boil — were officially ranked among the country’s topmost liberal arts universities by the newly introduced National Institutions Ranking Framework (NIRF) of the Human Resources and Development Ministry.
The recognition, to say the least, is ironical, because both educational institutions were branded as the playground of the nation’s enemies funded by taxpayers!
It’s now as clear as daylight that right-wing ideology and communal forces targeted both the universities (JNU and HCU) because they provide quality education at state expense to students belonging to marginalized sections of society who the upper classes and castes ruling India abhor and want to subjugate forever rather than facilitate their upward social mobility. The slogans shouted by leftist students in JNU or the cry for justice for Rohit Vermula, a Dalit student at HCU driven to commit suicide by the machinations of upper caste university officials, came in handy as excuses for a brutal clampdown.
According to Kancha Ilaiah, Director Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at Hyderabad’s Maulana Azad National Urdu University, the Hindu Right is bent upon destroying JNU and HCU simply because they attract and nurture students from lower castes.
Beauty and brains normally don’t go together but they merge conspicuously in Swara Bhaskar, the Bollywood actress-cum-political activist who went to JNU. She has described how her friends who often told her that if they hadn’t come to JNU to study, their highest parameter of success was to open a grocery shop back home in their village or small town, ended up doing postdoctoral research in the United Kingdom. Explains Bhaskar: “This is why education is such a contested sector; it’s where silent transformation is taking place.”
Ilaiah says that JNU and HCU have since mid-1970s and early 1980s become the Oxford and Cambridge for first generation Scheduled Castes (ST), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Other Backward Castes (OBC) aspirants for higher education like him. “The dream to go to JNU was not because it was a left-activist university, but because of its faculty’s reputation and its academic environment. In the social sciences, several serious teachers were drawn from all over and were known for their credible research. Rasheeduddin Khan and K. Seshadri taught Political Science. In History, S. Gopal, Bipin Chandra and Romila Thapar were famous. Economics, too, had well known names. Why did we not dream of going to Banaras Hindu University? We never heard about great teachers there. Even from a rightwing point of view, not much credible work was done in BHU nor was there an environment for rigorous research. No doubt the present dispensation treats BHU as its favored baby. But how many Dalit scholars has it produced? The only known Dalit politician who studied at BHU was Babu Jagjivan Ram (who rose to become the defense minister of India). He faced horrible caste discrimination and later shifted to the University of Calcutta, where he finished his B.Sc.”
The crux of the matter is that over a period of 40 years, JNU and HCU have produced Dalit community leaders who have been engaged in transforming the life and status of India’s “untouchables.” The core social forces of the Sangh Parivar seem to dislike the intellectual emergence of the lower castes, especially the “untouchables.”
This core is also uncomfortable with reservations. Most Dalit scholars made it to prestigious institutions thanks to reservations. Many of them made it to the civil services, like Udit Raj, a Dalit BJP MP, who was in the Indian Revenue Service before plunging into politics.
Many thinkers with a conscience believe that if the powers that be want to destroy universities like JNU and HCU to serve their ideological objectives, or systematically reduce them to the level of BHU or hand over liberal arts and social science education on a platter to private universities, which are in the cut-throat business of selling education, the biggest losers will be the “untouchables,” tribals and assorted marginalized communities for whom state-funded elite universities are the only path to a better tomorrow.
