It is not simply sufficient to offer a critique or dismiss the current move to make attendance compulsory; even as we do that, the progressives on and outside the campus need to think about how to reach out and include those at the margins of the educational system, who have remained mediocre, inferior, and therefore anxious to control the system and make it an assemblage of disciplinarian methods.
New Challenges of Pedagogy
Further, it is an open secret that there is a lurking anxiety among the faculty of JNU that class attendance has been steadily declining. At the Centre where I teach a compulsory course, while the student strength is around 80, not more than 50 students have been attending classes. It’s been a long-standing issue that students, as they progress in the course, do not attend classes but what is new is that even fresh students in their first semester itself have been lackadaisical in attending classes. However, this is not merely an issue of discipline but new challenges that pedagogy is facing in the light of the many changes the educational system is undergoing globally.
To begin with, liberal arts courses are not the first preference of many who join these courses but they are mostly the last resort to stay afloat. New exposure to technology and internet has given easy access to information that the teacher was the sole source of earlier. Attention spans of the students have taken a beating.
Further, JNU has other sites of learning including student politics and informal interactions. Even the post-dinner talks that were at one point in time the high point of student life on campus have witnessed a steady disinterest. Easy access to faculty, growing democratization of student-faculty relations, and rising aspirations among students have set in a culture of pretentiousness and a false sense of confidence that is not backed by hard work and professional ethics.
Earlier, students inquired about the chapters they needed to read in a book; now they inquire about the paragraphs they need to focus on in a chapter. It is also a fact that in institutions such as JNU, because of the overwhelming reputation it enjoys and the little competition it has from other central or state universities, students have got an easy claim to superior academic status over their compatriots in other places (this problem continues to plague JNU students when they join mofussil universities as academics; they struggle to strike a rapport with others and often end up forming ‘JNU Clubs’ that exclude others. In most cases, students refuse to move outside Delhi and some even outside JNU.).
There has been a clear decline in the quality of dissertations, where most Master of Philosophy (MPhil) and Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD) work is written in the last leg before submission. Since evaluation methods are lenient, for various reasons, quality of research has not been something that JNU can really boast about. Not many of the theses that are submitted are eventually published. In fact, most students find it difficult to even publish the mandatory paper that is now required for PhD submission. A culture of self-arrogation not backed by matching competence has inaugurated a non-dialogic posturing and aversion to criticism. In fact, more often than not, students in JNU begin their research proposals with their conclusions.
In this intriguingly deductive logic of research, open-ended spaces and sites of interaction have been supplanted by political activism and experiential fundamentalism. Research proposals take their inspiration more from the daily dose of prime-time news than from interactions in class. JNU continues to suffer the confusion of drawing a clear line between activism and scholarly interventions. While they are undoubtedly related, it is also a fact that they cannot be collapsed into each other.
The interpersonal relations among the faculty are marred by extra-curricular concerns and a scarcity syndrome. Students that are taken under the fold for guidance are seen more as social and cultural capital rather than co-equals in the sojourn to discover newer aspects of research agenda. As a consequence, evaluation standards of MPhil and PhD work have suffered, and students are keenly aware of this fact and prefer to appear as the surrogate progeny of their respective supervisors and demand that their supervisors treat them like their adopted children.
While students do opt for courses from other disciplines, inter-disciplinary research has been a non-starter in JNU. The interactions between the various schools and centres belong to an ‘imagined community’ of the hierarchy of the Vedic period. Amid all the talk of egalitarianism, a class system prevails between the various centres, with particular centres and schools representing the ‘high culture’ and the rest relegated to ‘low culture’ and subalternized. For instance, economics assumes to be the king, and history the queen, and disciplines such as political studies and sociology occupy the position of intermediaries or provincial fiefdoms.
Schools outside of the School of Social Sciences are imagined as backwaters meant for recreational purposes. Academic life on the campus is not in the pink of health but the diagnosis and medication that the current administration has administered make wayside quacks look more authentic and reliable. Part of the problem is the current political dispensation, and in this, I must add not just the Right-wing parties but all and sundry have developed a contempt for higher education in India. There have been budget cuts and attempts to further privatize higher education in India.
In order to circumvent this grave problem, the current dispensation did what it is best at—changing the goal post. Earlier in the year, it was a seat cut in the name of teacher-student ratio; now it is mandatory attendance to usher in more accountability.
It is important to resist these rather devious methods, but equal care should be taken not to sidestep the declining academic standards. While the university administration is ostensibly resisting a ‘classless’ society, it should not be an occasion to undermine the need for revolutionary changes in pedagogy that a premier institution like JNU urgently requires. This internal debate on pedagogy has to be in tandem with the need to resist and protect the basic ethos of universities such as JNU that not only provide globally acknowledge education but also perform the social role of admitting students from weaker backgrounds and enabling them to emerge as individuals with self-confidence and a worldview.
It’s A Class Struggle
The protests at JNU, against mandatory attendance imposed by the administration, were not about the right not to attend classes. However, attendance, as I suggested above, is gradually becoming a concern due to various other pedagogic reasons. It is a much more serious issue that was struggling to find a language to articulate itself. It is, in essence, about the life of the mind in an increasingly technocratic world. Critical thinking, to think against the grain, and to live a life that is infused and inspired by ideas, rather than the lure of money, comfort, and power is a very uphill task in a world marked by the pressures of a secure life. Students of JNU continue to carry the burden of this cross that society at large has by and large given up in succumbing to the imperatives of pragmatism.
One needs to understand the life on campus and what it does to scores of students coming from extremely deprived backgrounds. JNU does not merely transform their social status; it also equips them to undergo a metamorphosis of sorts in enabling them to develop a reflexive self. This reflexive self is a guarantee of sorts for a dignified life outside the campus in a society plagued by prejudice.
JNU does not merely teach philosophy but an ability to live a philosophy. This is a process that is delicate and ephemeral. It is an everyday life that leaves nothing unquestioned and thereby creates a sense of meaning in questioning the immediate identity that one is born into and one is often reduced to living.
That’s the point Rohith Vemula made in his dying letter—the burden and suffocation of being reduced to one’s immediate identity and ‘to a thing’.57
It is the anxiety to protect this internal critical culture on campus that has taken the route of protesting against the mandatory class attendance. The current administration is beyond even an elementary debate on this issue. It does not understand what the students wish to strive for
when they protest against mandatory attendance, they would compulsively merely look at it as an act of indiscipline.
I am afraid much of the larger society would also fail to make sense of this protest as being anything other than a protest to preserve a privileged unaccountable lifestyle. Even most parents of the students might view it as a self-goal, given the pressures of career and settling down. Classrooms are unique spaces in JNU. They are not merely for a monologue by the teacher or for information to be consumed by the students.
Dignity and Self-Confidence
In fact, classrooms are part of the larger learning process that goes on in many other sites on campus, including at the dhabhas (one of which used to be open till late night hours has been ordered to be closed well before midnight by the current administration), post-dinner talks (that have been made virtually impossible, again by the current administration, by invoking many procedures and checks to get permission to organize a talk), study forums, and informal discussions with the faculty. What students gather from these sites form a loop to critically interrogate what is being taught in the classroom. It is this unique loop that compensates for the insurmountable gap in social location and linguistic skills within the student community to make the classroom a more even playing field.
It is a constant tussle between experiential knowledge and textual and professional skills that remains aesthetically unsettled in JNU. Students coming from marginalized backgrounds, who are hesitant to speak up in the classrooms in the first semester of their joining JNU, gain the self-confidence to raise issues even as they struggle with English and the categories of social sciences.
A change that would otherwise take perhaps decades is a kind of a marvel to witness in JNU in a few months’ time. Self-confidence is gained from the space that swims against the tide and refuses to be judgemental about issues of lived diversity.
It is not about the right not to attend class, but it is about how clamping down through rules will dislocate this rather ephemeral idea of self-confidence. It is the complexity of demanding the right to self-confidence that takes the language of a protest against mandatory attendance. Even if class attendance were to be a problem, it calls for a debate on pedagogy and it cannot be viewed as an issue of indiscipline. In fact, my own experience has been that classes overshoot the allotted time. Even as protests progressed, students were asking for classes to be taught outside classrooms, sitting in corridors on cold winter days. The protest is to preserve this unsaid and sometimes difficult-to-verbalize process that students are anxious to protect.
It is an ongoing conflict between an idea of education of the Right that is marked by discipline, standardization, information without questioning, and technical education versus an idea of education that allows you to bridge the gap between thinking and being. Students were, in the true spirit, taking a cue from Marx, once again reminding those currently heading the university that ‘educators need to be educated’.58 ‘Class’ remains the missing link in all of this.
Demonetization and the ‘War on Terror’
On 8 November 2016, the Modi government in a dramatic move announced a policy of demonetization of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes, in order to arrest corruption through illegal hoarding of currency.59 Apart from arresting corruption, we were also told that demonetization had also ‘broken the back’ of the terrorists and the Maoists. In emphasizing that demonetization is a new method of fighting against terrorism and continuing the on-going global ‘war on terror’, it had introduced a new and a subtle shift in terms of the discourse of governance. Demonetization attempted at drawing a new equivalence between the fight against corruption and the global ‘war on terror’. The discourse of war on terror changed the legal discourse, the way the law was sought to be implemented and used to arrest criminals, and acts of terror. As part of the war on terror, various exceptional laws were passed globally and in India, beginning with the Patriotic Act in the United States (US) to Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (TADA), The Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), and Armed Forces Special Power Act (AFSPA) in India. What is common to all of these is the institutionalization of ‘criminalizing intention’.
Conviction and state action were sought to be implemented not ‘merely’ on the basis of evidence and investigation but on the basis of the purported intention of those seen to be involved with terror activities. The larger justification was that the state cannot wait till the crimes take place to take action but that it needs ‘preventive strikes’ to close spaces available to such activities. This has had a popular reach, which was partly evident from the justification that was sought over the encounter of Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) activists in Bhopal and the way the officers involved were felicitated by the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh. One could not have waited till those who allegedly escaped the prison to commit the acts of terror for the state to act.60
Criminalizing Intention
One possibly cannot wait even for them to be convicted as their ‘intention’ to produce terror in society in popular perception was sufficient ground for the state to act in order to not compromise the larger security of its citizens. The arguments flow somewhat similar to the recent demonetization. What is being assumed is that unless we prove ourselves innocent by depositing clean cash in the banks, we are all guilty of holding an intention that is corrupt. Since the state cannot find evidence and cannot investigate who amongst us are the corrupt, black marketers, and money hoarders, the state is justified in assuming that the money we hold could have been earned through corrupt means.
In other words, by investigating and finding evidence against those who actually make black money, the state ‘distributes guilt’ among its ‘people’. Each one of us is at least potentially prone to corruption, and therefore, the best way to make sure the economy is cleansed of black money is to push everyone into the process of proving themselves innocent. War on terror similarly declares everyone potentially guilty if some in a specific community or territory are guilty of acts of terror. Thus, it is assumed that every Muslim is potentially prone to be attracted to terrorism, as every tribal is prone to be attracted to Maoism.
‘Distribution of guilt’ in the entire community as a ‘suspect Muslim’ or a subversive tribal, in turn, is necessary for the state to justify ‘collateral damage’ that the security forces now have come to believe will be inevitable in arresting terrorism and Maoism. Citizens the common man, the poor, and the farmers standing in long queues without cash, and the daily wage earner surviving without food constitute the necessary collateral damage that is necessary for containing corruption.
As displacement and dispossession are the unavoidable consequences of development, certain collateral damage to the tribals in fighting the Maoists and innocent Muslims in fighting Islamic terrorism is also inevitable, so is the suffering of the common people in re-hauling the system against corruption. Amit Shah, in an interview on the television, said that when the system is changed, there will be ‘jerks’. The collateral damage, however, needs to be understood as one made in the greater national interests.
Those questioning demonetization are told that they are tacitly supporting the parallel economy. Very similar to how those wanting to interrogate security forces and their alleged excesses in security-related operations, be it in Kashmir or Chattisgarh, are often told they are silently supporting the acts of terror by scaling down the morale of the security forces. Further, the war on terror coincided with the rise of the neo-liberal economic order. The growing model of jobless growth, global migration, growing socio-economic inequalities, and the stigma of poverty was sought to be countered by what one could refer to as ‘retributive mobility’.
Populism and Retributive Mobility
Retributive action on some sections of the society drawing battle lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ has been the story of populist mobilizations across the globe. Whether it is between the White Americans and illegal immigrants and Muslims in the mobilization as a run-up to th
e election of Donald Trump in the US or the permanent ‘othering’ of the Muslims in the rise of BJP and Modi in India, it is the retributive action against these groups that is sought as a solution to the problems plaguing the citizenry. It is a relief that provides momentary, if not a lasting mobility, to the majority. On similar lines, demonetization too is sought to provide a retributive relief to those suffering from economic and social marginalization. It is an action against the unknown villain who has cornered public money.
We do not know the names or addresses of these individuals but we are told that those who have accumulated this wealth for the last 70 years are powerful and that demonetization is supposed to siphon off all that they stored in their treasury, under their beds, and in their farmhouses. It could be the industrialists, the politicians, and anyone we collectively hate. It is their unseen suffering that is sought to provide us with the relief and a sense of security and mobility. This is markedly different from the discourse of ‘ache din’ that promised jobs, control inflation, and social welfare.
War on terror was more of a security and a legal battle (such as countering the imperatives of rule of law) that the state was fighting on behalf of its citizens; demonetization is the social and economic corollary of that battle. It is at the crux; therefore, demonetization is the populist version of translating the war on terror into the everyday ‘direct democracy’ that India was collectively dreaming about.
Corporate Capitalism, Hurt Pride, and Hindutva
At the heart of the Sangh Parivar’s strategy is an irreducible contradiction between a modernity that augments high-end capitalism best symbolized by the rhetoric of growth and the bullet train and a politics that systematically destroy the social form necessary for capitalist growth. This is a tension that will effectively decide the future of Right-wing political mobilization in India.
India After Modi Page 7
