Jadavpur University and Right-Wing's Ideological Anxiety With a Critical Campus
Is the university a place to study or for politics? Why is Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Jadavpur University (JU) always in news for all the negative reasons? These are the questions which are thrown everyday at critical public universities by the flagbearers of right-wing ideological forces. The cultural discomfort of the political right-wing with the critical campuses is rooted in archaic imaginations of Vedic Brahminical knowledge system and hierarchical Guru Shishya Parampara.
For politically vibrant and pedagogically critical campuses like JNU, University of Hyderabad and JU, the politics is often shaped by the public concerns, anti-authoritarian thoughts and democratic commitment for the society. That is why, the far right’s ideological anxieties against critical campuses stem out of amoral and ahistorical senses that wrest its faith in cultural conformity and obedient memory.
There is also a nonstop far right demand for neutral university campus to silence the culture of critical thinking and shatter the intellectual diversity among students and teachers of the critical public higher educational institutions. The unethical call for neutrality is nothing but seeking complicity with the ideological and political right-wing. Jadavpur university has come to the fresh political radar as early as the 2026 assembly election kickstarted from April. The victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Bengal has given a renewed lease to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to transform the campuses into citadels of subjugation and Vedic knowledge centres.
The idea of university is not limited to its physical structures but to produce critical citizens. It has social obligations towards the nation in creating critical historical consciousness, upholding civility and resisting the elite, casteist, communal and gendered notions of education. The corporate and capitalist takeover of Indian education system in the last few decades along with the implementation of National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has recast the purpose of public education. It has been transmuted into private good from being democratic public good.
Resisting the far right hegemony and idea of critical public education
The authoritarian assault on critical universities is a dangerous trend to systematically uproot the emancipatory purpose of education. Worldwide, the neo liberal and neo conservative narratives against critical public education has been nurtured to defund public higher education and dismiss its universal possibility. The right-wing attempts are successfully made to create an ‘ideological hegemony’ through ‘Consent and coercion’ as told by Gramsci. Studying Dalit history, Tribal’s politics of autonomy and anti-caste pedagogy are under systematic attack and relentless censorship by the caste supremacist Hindu right-wing.
The project of Indian Knowledge system (IKS) is pushed through NEP 2020 that have been trying to cast a sanitised and monolithic understanding of Indian culture, centered on high-caste Vedic Hinduism. In the name of curricular and pedagogical innovations, BJP is promoting myths as realities, pseudo-sciences as sciences, and erasing selective histories’’.
Critical pedagogy and right-wing spectacle of nationalism
Jadavpur recently like JNU has been facing a far right onslaught to enforce political compliance in order to erase critical pedagogy and sanitise historical memory. In fact, A former Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister of the first Modi cabinet told Lok Sabha that a committee headed by N Goapalaswamy, ex CEC and affiliated to RSS’s Education wing suggested: ‘’IITs may facilitate study of science and technology as reflected in Sanskrit literature along with inter-disciplinary study of Sanskrit and modern subject. Accordingly, the IITs have been requested to teach Sanskrit language, especially with reference to study of works which contain scientific knowledge’’.
It goes on to show that the far right wants to dismantle the idea of modern democratic idea of education. Instead, they want to weaken the very foundation of democratic campus and replace it with selective history.
The right-wing creates spectacle out of nationalism and patriotism that wants to turn universities into abandoned places of thought where critical scholarship would be substituted with submissive knowledge production. The transformative potential of universities to operate as autonomous institutional spaces are colliding with capitalist imaginations of education. Critics say, The Birla-Ambani report on education submitted in 2000 to the Vajpayee government is revived again under the Modi Govt.
‘’The education reformeds being seen under the current NDA government like fee hike in universities, raising funds from internal accruals, depoliticisation of campuses and setting up of private and foreign universities are all recommendations of the Birla-Ambani or Ambani-Birla report that was presented in the year 2000 when Vajpayee was Prime Minister leading the then NDA government," noted New Indian Express.
Public education has become the casualty due to the weaponisation of social media manufactured false narratives. The very purpose of fascist political campaign against the critical public universities of India is to take over the academic agency from the progressive liberal forces in the campus.
The violent attack on Jadavpur university or JNU is not merely a physical attack, it’s an epistemic violence to suppress dissent and restore the domination of Brahminical patriarchal modes of hierarchy in knowledge creation. The constant propaganda of security threat against critical campuses is unleashed to cultivate fear and divisions and dismantle the democratic and intellectual aspirations of higher education institutions. The rise of social justice politics in campuses with growing intersectional ethical solidarities are scripting new grammar of hopes against the languages of indignities and injustice. The struggle for recognition, equality, liberty and individual freedom in the campuses are critical to resist the far right bogey of ‘neutrality’ and ‘deploticisation’.
Subhajit Naskar is a Political Scientist and teaches at the Department of International Relations, Jadavpur University.
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