I STAND WITH JNU

JNU has rightly or wrongly been implicated as a leftist den. It is true that the Left ideology had an upper hand there with the many shades of Marxists, Trotskyites, Maoists and numerous other strands of Leftism being professed and practiced there. But then we had the free thinkers, the extreme Right wing, the Congress and many other groups too. There were also the eternal rebels and perpetual dissenters against the system who too co-habited with others. The institution always provided enormous space for critical thinking and dissent. That was the basic value we proudly inherited from JNU.

At present, the students and the teachers in JNU are leading a historical struggle and hence I believe that it is the duty of every jnuite, every liberal to speak up for the JNU community who are fighting for the fundamental democratic rights of the citizens in this country. I write this, keeping my head high and with a deep sense of pride that the institution instilled in me some years ago.  If one borrows the expression of Sartre, one who does not speak at the time of turbulence consents.  So I speak.

I entered JNU as a student in the School of International Studies in 1987. I had belonged to one of those lower middle class families in Kerala and it was my greatest dream to get into JNU; and more than me, it made my teachers in Sri Kerala Varma College, Thrissur, happy and proud. I arrived in the campus on a hot, hostile day of July that year; looking at the dry branches of the trees in the scorching sun, I thought of going back to Kerala, my comfort zone. What added to my misery then was my poor communication skills in English and the spoken Hindi was indeed an alien language to me.  However, I could overcome these challenges soon, thanks to my understanding  teachers (they always treated the students from rural areas with special attention- Narayan Das, G P Deshpande and many others) and others around. A senior from my Centre, whom I did not know at all, helped me; I came to know his name only later – Vikram Rao (now a bureaucrat) and he was the one who prepared me for the interview. He literally acted a mentor for me. And indeed it helped in the interview immensely.

I learned the most important lesson about the political culture of JNU on the day of the Bharat Bandh, in 1988; against the Rajiv Gandhi government that was then embroiled in the Bofors scandal. The Left organisations in JNU had decided to join the Bandh and I was too enthusiastic about my first exposure to Delhi politics. We approached the canteens in the campus and requested those who ran them to close down as a mark of their solidarity. However, in the School of Social Sciences canteen, a NSU (I) leader sat alone and kept on ordering tea, one cup after another, so that they will not be able to close the place.  He did not heed to our request. I took his cup of tea and poured it down the washbasin and asked him to get out. He was stunned and speechless and left the place. However, I was called to the students union office that evening and the union leaders told me politely; “comrade this is not the way we conduct protests in JNU, we ENGAGE the opposition in a debate. You are very new here, but you will learn the ways of JNU soon”.

Yes. I had learnt the JNU ways soon.  The lecture classes in the mornings in the various centres across the schools (sometimes we attended classes of teachers like Prabhat Patnaik who never asked as to whether we belonged to the Economics Centre), library hours in the afternoons and the long evening sessions in the Ganga Dhaba with Nimbu pani and chai did teach me a lot and made me what I am today. We engaged in debates and discussions on a whole range of issues -- national and international. Sessions were there on theories and praxis.  There were arguments and counter- arguments but none turned violent. End of the sessions, somebody who was drawing a fellowship/scholarship ordered some tea and sometimes bun-andas (the best cuisine available in the Ganga Dabha those days and Tejbir, who ran that dhaba was a magician who could produce at least six large glasses of lemon juice from a single lemon).

JNU had always provided space for diverse thoughts. From left to centre to right, people visited JNU and presented their views before us. These were mostly conducted in the dining halls of the various hostels after dinner time. Of course so many uncomfortable questions were asked to whoever spoke there. When the EPRLF leaders Padmanabha and Varadaraja Perumal visited the campus, just before Padmanabha was the assassinated by the LTTE in Madras in 1988, the students raised many questions about the internal fights among the Tamil groups in Sri Lanka; and some of them were LTTE sympathizers.  The BJP’s Uma Bharathi too came for a public meeting on sati. Questions were raised to her too but the campus did not witness any kind of violence even if the views of the visitors were ultra-right,   fascist or divisive.

When Sitaram Yechury, the most convincing spokesperson of the CPI(M), visited JNU after the Tiananmen square  killings in China to justify it, there were a volley of questions raised against the stand of the Party and I was pro- (Chinese) students who were fighting for democracy. That’s what JNU made me -- from being a hardcore rigid Marxist to a Liberal Marxist -- over a period of time.

Now, we are living in bad times. An undeclared emergency prevails over and it is worse than the 1975 emergency. It brutally enters into our private space and lives and decides for us what we should eat, what we should wear, what should we speak. The line between a ‘national’ and anti-national is thinning down. A day has come when we have to tell our young children to watch out what you are speaking; and to watch out to whom you are speaking.

This is too bad. The silver lining is that there are some sane voices. When solidarity for the fighting JNU students are pouring in, I believe it is my humble duty to express my solidarity with them and tell the young fellows, some of whom are even risking their lives for protecting democratic rights of the people, that I am with you; we are with you.

An open appeal to the JNU VC. From the legendary G. Parthasarathy to Prof Sapory from whom you took over JNU, they had all defended and upheld the democratic tradition of JNU and provided space for the students to express their views fearlessly and openly; PLEASE you should not follow the steps that P.N.Srivastava took (in 1983) when he called police into the campus and allowed over 300 students to be taken to the Tihar jail. Let JNU treat that an aberration. History will not absolve you.