One of the themes of Mishima’s The Sailor who fell from Grace with the Sea is that there is a natural order in the world, and when that is disturbed, actions must be taken to restore that order. This is a simplistic summary of course, but one that is in keeping with a view (that is prevalent in some sections of society) of our universities today – students should study, teachers should teach, administrative instructions should be followed, and all will then be well with this world.

The consequences of such a simple world view – which then asserts that students should not participate in protests, even if they are peaceful – is that it poses a ridiculous binary: good students would attend classes, and bad students are out there protesting. One of the things this view does not factor in, is that for all to be truly well with the world, many others have to do their bit too. One of the great advantages of an education – any education – is that it forces one to think. and free thought can have unintended consequences. Especially at a university, it is dangerous to infantilize students.

We carry within us so  many different identities – our language, religion, class, caste, politics, and is simplistic to assume that one can overshadow others.  In The Idea of Justice [1] Amartya Sen eloquently alerted us to the dangers of a solitarist view of humankind saying “The increasing tendency towards seeing people in terms of one dominant identity is not only an imposition of an external and arbitrary priority, but also the denial of an important liberty of a person who can decide on their respective loyalties to different groups (to all of which he or she belongs).”

For those that are fortunate enough to have access to higher education, it is a commonplace that the period of young adulthood largely overlaps with the period of university education. It is almost inevitable, therefore, that students would participate in all activities that impact their future, be it the more mundane aspect of classroom learning or the more public role of speaking out against policies and actions that have more long-term implications.

This set of essays in Confluence addresses contemporary events, of course, but also in historical context. Student uprisings have been a constant feature of public life over the last several decades, going back several centuries even. Anybody who has taught at a University knows that the best students are the ones who are capable of independent thought and articulation. Students can obviously concentrate on their studies as well as take part in political issues– and can do them both well as recent events can testify. It is not always given that the political events of one’s times will be of great magnitude, but if – as in 1968 or now – they are, then it is inevitable that strong voices will be heard from academia. Universities have played such important parts in various political events in our country – the language agitation of the mid 1960’s, the protests against the Emergency, the agitation against the Mandal Commission Report, to name a few. And outside India, there is Paris 1968 though one does not have to go far either in distance or in time, given the agitations that have been rocking Hong Kong and Santiago over the past few months, to see the important role of students in public protests worldwide.

The agitations and protests in our country today are centered around two different issues. One is a discussion of the Constitution of India, its scope, ambit and its meaning, and the repeated attempts to trivialize the issue. The second is the siege on all bastions of higher education, crystallized as it were on the Kristallnacht of  5 January, 2020 when imported violence erupted on the campus of the Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Who else would speak against such violence on our campuses? This may be an issue for society at large, but beset as we are with our own niche worries, it stands to reason that the most affected parties should be the loudest in speaking up. Not surprisingly, therefore, students all across the country and indeed across the world have spontaneously and publicly condemned the violence, underscoring the feeling of vulnerability that all students feel at this time but at the same time reflecting the fearlessness of youth and their willingness to risk much for their future by the simple act of speaking out.

Confrontation with the state is always expensive, and students in our central universities are today paying the price for this. Given that our universities are funded by the government (central or state) the university administration can appear as an extension of the state itself, the autonomy of our temples of learning being more an idea than the reality. There is a surreal atmosphere though, as each of the different groups of players seems to be acting in isolation even when their actions are linked. As remarked by Jayati Ghosh in an article in Times Higher Education, Indian higher education is now withering on the vine.

Campus agitations (and now campus violence) are a consequence of the breakdown of communications between the administration and the student body, not the cause. Especially after  months of a lack of communication, patience can wear thin. When one hears the different sides of the story, it can seem like a contemporary re-enactment of Rashomon, and a slightly fantastic one at that.

There is a upside to all this too. Protests that arise on the campus have a way of sharpening an observer’s logic. Seeing and hearing students argue and debate issues, the freshness of the minds, the passion that they bring to the argument, the earnestness with which debates are carried out. A simple “How dare you”, voiced by a teenager, bringing anguish and outrage together on the issue of climate change, can hone the discussion in a way that more refined protests do not. Personal experience apart, every academic administrator of any standing can recall that one moment when a protesting student made a clinching argument that helped to change their point of view. It does not take much more than the willingness of the administration to learn, to concede that they are not infallible or omniscient. But minds have to be open, and ears have to be willing to hear.

The other issue is a larger one, and those that have been protesting in the recent past and – uniquely on a Constitutional matter –  are speaking not just for themselves as students but as members of society, as citizens. They speak for their families, their communities and those related to them by the extended kinship of schools of thought. And this is a consequence of the multiple identities that they carry. Regardless of where one stands on the issues per se, it goes without saying that all of us should have the freedom to express ourselves without fear.

But to speak of now,  there is something unique happening at this time, something unexpected and something that should fill one with hope. Across the country, in addition to the  student uprisings, there have been quiet and brave expressions of dissent by people of different social groups, of different age groups, and of different histories. The events of the recent past impact each one of us in different ways and in different ways we all are finding the courage to express ourselves and not always in agreement. A democracy is ultimately about its people, and what should triumph in the end is their will. As Faiz says in Hum Dekhenge

Aur raaj karegi Khalq-e-Khuda

Jo Main Bhi Hoon, Aur Tum Bhi Ho.

Loosely translated (“And then God’s creation – we the people – will rule, both you and I.”)

If the young voices raised publicly make us think and see these issues in fresh light, they will have served a part of their purpose.

References

[1] Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Penguin, 2010).

Ram Ramaswamy is the ex-President of Indian Academy of Sciences, Bengaluru and is currently associated with IIT Delhi. The views expressed here are his own.

This article is part of a Confluence series on Students and Political Protests. The remaining articles in this series can be found here.

In the context of whether students should be out on the roads protesting against what they see as injustice or violation, or not, let me start with a story from JNU. How can we talk of students protests in India and not mention JNU? Prof. Anjan Mukherji, former professor of Economics, and now Professor Emeritus, in JNU, told me this story in support of his statement that G. Parthasarathy, known as GP, the first vice chancellor of JNU, was the best VC the university ever had. It was 1974 – JNU was already five years old but the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning (CESP) was only one year old – and students were agitating, echoing the students movements’ voices in Gujarat and Bihar. Young professors like Anjan were worried that courses, the way they had been designed, needed continuous engagement and rigour, and the agitation would have a negative impact. They shared their concerns to GP, who decided to attend striking students’ congregation and listen to what they were saying. Having done that, he gathered these concerned teachers and congratulated them saying their students were not only well-read and had the confidence and competence to argue for what they wanted; they also had the discerning capacity to stand for justice, freedom and equality! What else do you expect from the university students? This was not a joke, it was a serious conversation, and many conversations like these shaped the university that JNU evolved as in the following years.

It is important to remind that Anjan was narrating this by calling GP one of the best VCs, rather than complaining that he did not reign in students back to classes. Mind you, Anjan is also not a ‘Marxian’ economist, as for some vague reason we think only Marxists protest. Also important is to point out that GP was not an academic; he came to JNU after a long career in journalism and diplomacy, yet not only understood the ethos of what a university should be but also introduced radical measures to develop and maintain that ethos. During the years to follow, the relationships between VCs, students, teachers and non-teaching staff have not necessarily remained as mutually respectful but the culture and ethos of engaging with issues of justice and rights, ranging from local to sub-national, and from national to international, have remained strong in JNU. In addition, it is also important to remind that by all measures of success, JNU has also remained one of our most ‘successful’ universities in the post-colonial India. I will return to the aspect of measures of success and what I mean by that a little later.

So, the best way to answer the question of whether students should be protesting against issues that do and do not concern them directly or be sitting in their classroom or libraries or laboratories, is to ask a counter question: are these two necessarily oppositional to each other? My answer is: ‘No’ – to me, these are complementary and one advances the other. And now let me explain my response by answering three more basic questions: (i) what is education and what the aims of education are, (ii) why education is important for any evolving society, and (iii) why students have been an essential and very important part of any major social and political change that countries including ours have witnessed in the modern era.

What is education? A universal definition that perhaps most agree to is that education is a process of co-creating values, skills (including thinking and critical skills) and knowledge. And this definition remains valid for all ages of students at all stages of schooling, and for all subjects, disciplines, and streams of subject-areas. Education, therefore, is not only an active process but it also involves continuous and simultaneous selection of values, skills, knowledge and pedagogy at every stage. Where do we draw these values from, how do we pick and choose relevant pedagogies for selected knowledge streams, which skills get priority and what gets left out – all these choices that are made in the process of education are essentially part of a political process. The education systems make certain choices, individual institutions, even while following those, makes its own choices that may bring in newer elements and finally individual teachers also make certain choices that could bring new or even opposing elements. This means education is also a continuous process of subversion. This definitely happens when one consciously adopts a radical or transformative approach such as one propagated by Paulo Freire but it also happens even when a system, an institution, or a teacher is not consciously trying to adopt or promote the radical pedagogy. Let me illustrate this with a few real-life examples.

A Masters level Physics class in Bangalore University in progress. While in the midst of teaching Brownian Motion in English, the professor realises that a number of students have blank faces. He switches to Kannada and the expression on those faces change: they are not only comprehending better but also feel ‘included’ as their language is being acknowledged. This decision of the teacher is indeed ‘political’ in nature.

Another M. Phil class for the course on ‘Equity in Education’ in progress in JNU where the teacher was discussing the issue of affirmative action in the form of Reservation in higher educational institutions and public sector jobs. The teacher first asked everyone for their opinion and then facilitated a debate by supplying arguments on both sides. This was followed up by a number of readings that she made it compulsory for everyone to read before the next class. Not easy, as this meant spending long hours in the library in a short period of time. The arguments by students in the next class were more refined and better informed, and by the end of that topic, all students not only understood the rationale of affirmative actions but also started engaging deeper with the issues of caste, cultural capital, discrimination, exclusion and justice. This story is from early 1990s and some of the students who had started by questioning the rationale of having  reservations in jobs with the argument that once equally educated, they should have the same chances, took diametrically opposite positions in support of Mandal Commission’s recommendations and argued for the same on public platforms. Obviously, education is about rigour, about grades, about learning, but it is also about sharpening your values, thoughts, positions and actions, and the two are intermingled.

It is not only about higher education; the basic characteristic of education remains the same at every stage of education. So, let us move to school education – early years. When the Environmental Science (EVS) textbook developed by NCERT for a primary level class refers to children coming from different parts of the country and relates it to their language and the kinds of houses they live in, there is an obvious effort by the school system to impart an awareness of the diverse nature of India. Similarly, if the language textbook has a Play for young children with names from different religions, it is a deliberate attempt on the part of the school system to make the classroom inclusive. But if a teacher decides to change it and uses all similar sounding names– as if they are from the same or similar religious groups, it is a kind of subversion. Similarly, if the primary level EVS textbook tells teachers to teach them about different plants by showing them pictures in the classroom and a particular teacher instead decides to take children to the garden to show the plants that children can see and touch, this is also a kind of subversion. Every single act in the process of education and knowledge creation is political in nature, and conveys one or the other kind of value. And students are an important actor of this process.

If this is what education is, then it is also a space for continuous contestations – deliberate and not so deliberate. And in that case, what gives us the anchor or what is our reference point to decide what is most desirable? In the context of India, the constitution definitely provides one important reference point. But the values that the constitution upholds the most -democracy, equality, secularism, social justice, freedom, dignity – are also rooted in the evolution of human society and go beyond national borders, and hence at least broadly ensure a continuity of thoughts and values at a global level. One of the major aims of education is to uphold and promote these values and it does not matter which stream or discipline one comes from. This is true for everyone who is engaged in the process of education, most of all, teachers and students. Students need to and have to actively engage in this dynamic process of contestations, tensions, enquiry, discovery and re-discovery if they have to co-create knowledge and uphold the ‘desired’ values. Participation and protests are indeed an essential part of this process, and such education is critical for an evolving society that cherishes and aspires for democracy, equality, secularism, justice and freedom. That is why students have been an essential and very important part of any major social and political change that countries including ours have witnessed in the modern era. For instance, what is known as May 68, referring to the civil unrest of 1968 in France that is also known as social revolution and led to substantial changes in labour laws including wage gains, started with massive students’ protest against class discrimination and was later joined by workers and others to take a national character.

It is important to know and understand this history to be able to appreciate the importance of students’ engagement in protests. In the Indian context, even if we consider just the post-colonial period, there exist several examples of students’ participation in protests and turning those into movements. 1970s witnessed several of those. Students’ movement in Gujarat and Bihar in 1974 on a number of issues including corruption and public education had far reaching impact on regional and national politics; the then state government in Gujarat had to resign and the Bihar movement led to a national students’ movement against corruption. Many student leaders of these two movements joined active politics leading to the formation of the first independent-India non-Congress government at the union level in the post-emergency era. Several examples exist in various parts of the country. And in most of these, students were raising an issue that is of significance, be it for State supported higher education or for greater autonomy to universities or against big dams or for gender justice. Even when there are two contrasting positions, such as the Mandal Commission agitation, where students were divided in their positions, their participation in the debate was desirable and critical in a democracy.

Interestingly, apart from serving the national interest, participation in political debates can benefit students directly by adding to their education. To illustrate this, let me go back to the issue of measures of success for a university that I mentioned above in the context of JNU. How does one assess the success of an educational institute? One standard way would be to look at the completion rates of those who admitted, and also the quality of what is done there. A good proportion of JNU graduates join a number of prestigious universities across the globe, and that definitely speaks about the high quality of teaching-learning there. A good percentage also joins academia within the country and perhaps majority of them have a reputation of being a good teacher. Being a ‘good’ researcher or teacher also involves issues such as what problems are selected for studies, what kind of relationships are built with students and fellow-teachers, and what positions one takes on various issues in one’s own context in addition to brining rigour and depth in the research and teaching per se. A good number also join bureaucracy and if I go by my own experience of anecdotes in the last twenty-five years of working life, they generally have a reputation of being more sensitive to people’s needs. A high number of those who clear NET (National Education Test) and fellowship examinations also belong to this university. That means that high level of student activism does not adversely affect their academic and related achievements; on the contrary, it could be contributing towards their achievements! Also, many a times, a number of teachers in JNU actively continue to take their classes outside the classrooms, and these are well-attended – showing that protests do not necessarily mar the academics.

Let me draw from my own experiences of being a student in JNU. I actively participated in Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) on Medha Patkar’s call for some time: she had come to one of our late-night, post-dinner public meetings (an important tradition in JNU which is a major source of leaning, as students get an opportunity to interact with various kinds of people including, artists, politicians, academics and activists) and challenged our conscience by highlighting how greedy we urbanites could be in terms of our demand for electricity, water and other resources, which then becomes the raison d’être for interventions such as Sardar Sarovar. Engaging with NBA not only made me much more aware of our own lifestyles that needed change, and of issues of power, rights and inequalities but it also helped me understand the concepts of social and economic costs much better that I was learning in my classroom as a student of economics. Despite the fact that NBA did not succeed in stopping the construction of the dam, the movement and the discourse around it tremendously contributed to the knowledge as well as awareness around people’s lives, resources and rights. And the protests did have an effect! The mighty World Bank not only withdrew its support but added a mandatory clause to all its future projects dealing with eviction and rehabilitation of people.

If students do not raise their voices about important policy or constitutional issues, who else will? Recent JNU protests about protecting the public universities and higher educational institutions is extremely relevant in that context; we still have a very small percentage of relevant age group entering the higher education, and this proportion is even lower for women and those belonging to disadvantaged social and economic groups and communities. One major reason is the absence of well-funded free higher education – in a highly unequal society, the only way to enable education among those who cannot afford is through public delivery. The rationale for public higher education also comes from the standpoint of quality; increasingly, one hears horror stories of students of rich parents demanding high grades in private universities and colleges, as they have already ‘paid’ for the same. This means commercialization of education is bad not only for equality but also for quality in education. Even from an instrumental perspective of pushing economic growth, the country needs a larger number of well-educated work-force and publicly supported higher education is one of the best ways to make that happen. Important to add here is that students are also protesting against the fact that their union was not consulted before announcing steep fee hikes – process is as important in democracy; democracy is not only about electoral wins.

Another case in point is the recent anti NRC – CAA agitation. By coming out in large numbers and voicing their views fearlessly, the students of our country are proving that they are indeed serious and committed about their nation.

At this point, it is important to add a word on violence. Violence is definitely condemnable and it is important for students to ensure that their protests remain non-violent under all circumstances. But it is even more important for the State to remain committed to non-violence, especially when dealing with young students. Serious students must rise to the occasion to oppose these in every possible form and that is what they are doing by adopting democratic means of protests – declining to receive medals, boycotting ceremonies and attending protest calls. And this is not limited to JNU or Social Science institutions – a good number of Science, Engineering and Management institutions are also joining hands – showing that these are fundamental issues of an evolving society committed to democracy and freedoms, and our educational students understand that.

Jyotsna Jha is currently based in Bangalore and heads the Centre for Budget and Policy Studies. The views expressed here are her own.

This article is part of a Confluence series on Students and Political Protests. The remaining articles in this series can be found here.

The question that is the title of this post has been debated since the pre-independence era. Every time some political decision rakes up the nation and students are seen engaging in public protest, this question is raised by some quarters. Parents advise students to keep safe distance from politics, fearing that it may ruin their career. Teachers tell the students that they should not engage in anything other than studying. Some students also pride themselves in remaining ‘neutral’.

Yet, can one really remain aloof from political events? No, because humans are social beings, and politics decides how the society will run. How the economy will function, whether there will be jobs in the market, whether inflation will overtake the average income, whether communal tensions will flare up, what kind of education will our children get – all these are decided by politics. Thus, politics directly affect our lives.

That is why whenever some step is taken by the political establishment that can have adverse effect on our lives, people protest. And the only way to protest is to make the public discontent visible – by coming out to the streets, by organizing demonstrations, and if everything else fails, by going on strikes. The question is, should students get involved in such protests?

Let us see what stand great thinkers took on this issue. During the civil disobedience movement, Gandhiji gave a call to students to boycott schools and colleges run by the British. The great litterateur Sarat Chandra said “Age cannot bar anybody from responding to the call of the Nation – not even the teenagers. It is necessary to pass the exams, but call of the Nation is a bigger cause.” Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose said “Many people try to dissuade students from working for the Nation by citing the general belief ‘Chhatranang adhyanang tapah’ – studying is the ‘worship’ for the students. I think studying cannot be the only activity of students. Studying involves reading some books. This may yield good results in exams, one may also get a good job, but this alone does not give one humanity.” When asked if the unrest during political movements will harm students, Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Dash said “Education can wait, but the struggle for Swaraj cannot.”

One may argue that those days were different: It was pre-independence era. India was under the British rule. Now India is a free nation. But in one respect the situation is the same. These great men urged students to act against oppression and injustice, and to participate in nation building. If they were present today, they would have taken the same position: students and youth should act against oppression and injustice, and should participate in nation building. True, the perpetrators of oppression and injustice have changed. But the problems remain, and students do have a role in ameliorating these.

Students played the main role in the French uprising of the 1960s and the great thinker Jean Paul Sartre urged them to take to the streets in protest. Similarly, students and youth played a major role in the Arab spring uprisings that saw the end of autocratic rule in Egypt and other countries. Students played a major role in the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US. The climate strike of this year was spearheaded by a school student, Greta Thunberg.

Students and youth have always been in the forefront of any viable movement, and they will always be.  The sooner we accept it, the better.

Soumitro Banerjee is a Professor of Physics at IISER Kolkata

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author.

This article is part of a Confluence series on Students and Political Protests. The remaining articles in this series can be found here.

‘The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events.’

–Bertolt Brecht

My first memory of someone telling me ‘You should study, do not indulge in activities that may jeopardize your future’ goes back to school days. When I was in class 6th, a very respected teacher, referring to an ongoing agitation in AMU Aligarh, said, ‘Politics is a bad thing, you should not indulge in it, focus on your studies. You can do politics when you grow up’. The conversation took place in Urdu language and he repeatedly used the word ‘siyasat’, which I did not understand. I asked my father ‘What is siyasat (politics)’? My father replied, ‘Politics is a form of education that makes you a citizen. Good and responsible politics makes you a good citizen, bad and irresponsible politics makes you a bad citizen’. Since then, I have heard this assertion probably millions of times, obviously not always directed towards me. During a personal conversation, the words chosen by the adviser are a function of the age the listener. For example, when you are a student, the teacher will say ‘You are a student complete your education, then you can participate in politics’. If you are unemployed, then the argument is ‘Seek a job first, once you get it you can do politics’. If you are employed, then you are told ‘Don’t indulge in politics, you may lose your  job, or the conduct rules don’t permit it’. When you are married and have a family, they tell you ‘Don’t indulge in politics, you have responsibility towards your family’. And finally, when you are old, they tell you ‘You are old and sick, look after your health, why are you indulging in politics’? The moral of the story is that they do not ever want you to get educated in politics which shapes the society, the nation and the whole of humanity.

Those who say that ‘Students should not indulge in politics’, can be divided into two categories. In the first category, we can put all those who use this position for ‘political’ purposes. And secondly, there are those who have a very narrow vision and skewed definitions of citizenship, politics and education. For the latter category, education is only a tool to secure a job, politics, as opposed to education, is a route that leads to political leadership, and citizenship is limited to an act of casting one’s vote, preferably only after five years. Let me deal with the second category first.

Education for a majority of people is limited to what Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educationist, calls the ‘Banking Model of Education’. The teachers must deposit ‘information’ into students, for which, either society or parents have paid, and students must receive the information passively, for the simple reason that it is a commodity which has been paid for. Freire aptly describes the impact of such an education when he says ‘It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them’ (Freire, 1996). Most of us are happy with the results. The system, sometimes efficiently, but more often inefficiently, produces docile doctors, engineers, managers, historians, sociologists, economists, workers, mechanics, etc., who ‘adapt to the world as it is’. The degrees given away are a proof of passivity and submissiveness of the citizen shaped through this pedagogic modus operandi. Those who are in favour of this system of education develop extreme ‘cognitive dissonance’ when students indulge in any activity that may convert them into active agents of transformation of the social order that they live in.

The recent protests by students in universities across India has, once again, unsettled this section of the society. They are worried about the educative, disruptive and transformative nature of participation in a protest. When students come out on streets, their banking system of education gets disrupted and they are likely to acquire the ability to become catalysts for social change and, more importantly, question the balance of power. The danger that the students may thus become political and thinking beings permanently is far more unsettling. The consequent perception of ‘permanent damage’ caused by a protest forces this section of the society to vehemently oppose participation of students in politics. The old arguments are resurrected: ‘Students should not indulge in politics, their duty is to study, universities should not be converted into centres of political activities, politics is a dirty game student must keep away from it, etc.’

Ironically, most members of this section of society never tire of lauding all major student movements that have had significant impact across the world, about which they have read in school or college. The Vietnam War Movement in USA, the Occupy Universities Movement in France, the Anti-Pinochet Movement in Chile, and the Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa are but a few examples of great transformative movements in which the role of students was significant. They may also hold student leaders like Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Sukhdev, Dhanvantri and Ehsan Ilahi, in high esteem and argue that the Indian freedom movement (Swadeshi-1905, Non-cooperation-1920, Quit India-1942) would not have succeeded without wider participation of students. For this section of the society, these are events of the past, fossilized into passive pieces of information, which just have exchange value. It scares them immensely when through participation in a protest, the younger generation realises a connect between the past and the present. This connect leads to exploration of their own ability to transform social reality. Bhagat Singh, Steve Biko, Patrice Lumamba, Martin Luther King Jr., come alive out of the text books and the realization dawns that we could also become ‘transformers of the world that we live in’. The banking system is so ingrained in the thought processes, that people in this category, more often than not, do not even realize that the argument ‘students should not participate in politics’ is a highly political assertion.

People in the first category, i.e., those who use the argument that students should not get involved in political issues for political purposes, are far more difficult to reckon with. They know the explosive potential of a students’ movement. They were themselves often groomed as politicians while participating in protests as students. They have followed the trajectory and have risen to positions of power, by replacing the older generation. They are fully aware that a protest may throw up new political leaders who may challenge their authority, unhinge them, or may even render them completely irrelevant. This is the category of highly motivated people, who not only propagate the idea that ‘educational institution must be free of politics’ but also actively sabotage or suppress students’ movements. They leave no stone unturned to block the political path that they themselves have followed.

A good example of this behaviour is the present students’ protest which was suddenly started by a bunch of students in Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. The response of the state machinery was brutal and sharp and, instead of quenching the fire, it further inflamed students, and within a few hours, the protest spread to multiple universities across the country. Thanks to modern communication channels, international support from universities across the world also boosted the students’ confidence. They realized the educative potential of a sustained public debate and gradually prepared themselves for a prolonged struggle. Besides discussing all issues related to Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens, a remarkable feature of this protest is the public reading of preamble of the constitution of India, in English and regional languages, that has almost become a ritual.

The strident opposition to this protest comes from those who participated in anti-emergency protests in the 1970s as part of the JP movement, and are presently in positions of power. This category of politicians are trying to crush the dissent using state power, and have also unleashed propaganda against student participation in protest. The discourse has stooped to such a level that students are being accused of wasting public money, and their subsidized food charges and hostel fees are being shown as a proof of burden on tax payers. The political leaders in the power of position are well aware of educative resistance, it has a potential of spreading beyond the four walls of educational institutions, and therefore they are scared of it.

I was always worried that the present generation has had no opportunity to get educated beyond the four walls of educational institutions. The present movement, which has spread to many universities around the country, will surely educate them to become catalysts of social change instead of passive and submissive citizens.

References

Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (revised). New York: Continuum.

Gauhar Raza is Former Chief Scientist, CSIR.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author.

This article is part of a Confluence series on Students and Political Protests. The remaining articles in this series can be found here.