The Nehru in JNU

In light of recent developments in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) wherein students are protesting against fee and other changes, with their demonstrations spilling over and debilitating life in New Delhi, here's a relevant throwback to an earlier instance when JNU was at the centre of controversy.

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Can a Valentine’s Day get sadder? A beautiful girl walks up to you, looks in your eyes, searchingly, and shoots, “Shame on you.” Taken aback, I ask if I know her. She again hisses, “Does not matter, you low life,” before stomping off with an equally well turned up possible date. This took place while covering student protests at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus Sunday. The girl’s centre of ire was the boom mike in my hand in fact.

A traditional left bastion, JNU is in the eye of a media storm following a chain of events that started with slogans in support of convicted and hanged terrorist Afzal Guru, and slapping of sedition charges against eight students, including the students union president.

One would say protests, and the reason behind them, are par for the course for JNU. The protestors, which included faculty, shouted Lal-Salaam, and behaved as if they owned the campus to the exclusion of every other ideology. It has been long known that JNU is a left bastion. Do we wonder why?

Story goes back to the freedom struggle and its leadership. The Indian National Congress then was an amalgam of varied ideologies of all hues from left to right. The troika of Nehru, Gandhi, and Patel itself so beautifully represented left, centre, and right, respectively. It was the kind of movement where a Lenin acolyte MN Roy could co-exist with a Hindu chauvinist KM Munshi, as could socialist Jayaprakash Narayan, and a capitalist GD Birla in between.

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But post the Meerut conspiracy case of 1935 and acceptance of the Dutt-Bradley thesis, the communist element increasingly gained prominence within the Congress. This got further strengthened with the success of Soviet experiment in Russia giving hope to many freedom fighters that it could be a post-independence model to follow in India as well. The fear of a left takeover of the Congress and the possibility of a revolution must have been so real that even Gandhi calibrated his views towards more radical positions on economic and class issues. Land would be taken over by farmers, and compensation of landlords would not be fiscally possible, he would tell journalist Louis Fischer.

Given the scenario, Nehru in one of his most understudied masterstrokes, made an arrangement in which, while the political power stayed with the Congress, the intellectual space through India’s universities was tactically ceded to the left. By giving the campus to the left, Nehru shot many birds with a single stone.

For one, with all the intellectual steam-letting that a campus allows, the probability of a revolution, or a left takeover of the Congress party receded into oblivion.

Two, the left-leaning campuses flooded all echelons of government under Nehru, himself an admirer of the Soviet experiment. If the Planning Commission gave commanding heights to the State, the left-leaning foreign policy establishment made sure India found itself in the Soviet bloc, and the larger bureaucracy that formed the steel frame, whether from St. Stephens, or JNU, or Delhi School of Economics, only represented various hues of Marxism.

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A purge followed that left all institutions across the country bereft of any counter ideology. Ask economist Jagdish Bhagwati why he could not flourish at D-school, and it would be clear what I mean by purge.

Third, and so far as politics go, the most crucial bargain for the secular-romantic Nehru was that this made sure the Hindu right would not get any toe hold among the universities of the country, thus depriving it of young talent. It would not be before half-century and the Ram temple movement that the right would attract masses towards it. On hindsight, it seems even the RSS saw into this. For, it might not just be a coincidence that the student wing of the Sangh, ABVP was set up in 1948, years before the VHP in 1964, or the BJP in 1980!

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The first NDA government under BJP was headed by Vajpayee, who for all his Sangh upbringing remained a politician of Nehruvian fold. But NDA under Narendra Modi is a different animal. Remember what Guardian wrote in May 2014? That with the victory of Modi, the British have finally left India. Possibly this is the first time that the tap of benign indulgence from the establishment has run dry for the JNU.

So it seems what we are seeing on its campus is the beginning of a keenly contested turf war between the left and the right that would be replicated over many more campuses across the country. For now, what I can say is that Nehru did succeed in saving India the pains of a revolution. He's screwing up my Valentine’s Day is perhaps a small price to pay!

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