This essay was originally published in Confluence. It has been republished with edits for style and clarity.
In the context of whether students should be out on the roads protesting against what they see as injustice or violations – let me start with a story from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Prof Anjan Mukherji, a former professor of economics and now professor emeritus told me this story in support of his statement that G. Parthasarathy, or GP, the university’s first vice chancellor, was the best the university ever had.
It was 1974. JNU was already five years old but the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning (CESP) was only a year old, and its students were agitating, echoing their peers’ voices in Gujarat and Bihar. Young professors like Anjan were worried that these activities would negatively impact the students because their courses had been designed with continuous engagement in mind.
They shared their concerns with GP, who decided to attend the students’ strike and listen to what they were saying. After that, he gathered the 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, but that they also had the capacity to stand for justice, freedom and equality.
This was not a joke but a serious conversation, and conversations like these have moulded JNU over the years.
Anjan is not a Marxist economist, despite our tendency to think only Marxists protest. GP was not an academic either: he had come to JNU after a long career in journalism and diplomacy, but he understood the university’s ethos and introduced radical measures to develop and maintain it. In the following years, the relationship between the VCs, the students, the teachers and the non-teaching staff have not remained as mutually respectful as they were in GP’s days, but the culture of engaging with issues of justice and rights, ranging from local to the sub-national, and from the national to the international, have persisted at JNU.
In addition, JNU has also been one of the most successful universities in postcolonial India.
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The best way to answer the question whether students should be protesting instead of attending classes, studying in the library or working in laboratories is to ask another question: Are these two domains of activity opposed to each other? My answer is no; these are in fact complementary domains. To understand how, let’s explore let’s ask ourselves what education is and what its aims are, why education is important for any evolving society, and why students have been an important part of most major social and political changes that countries have undergone in the modern period.
A universally agreeable definition of education might be that it is a process of co-creating values, skills (including those of thinking and critical reasoning) and knowledge. This definition is valid for students at all stages of schooling, as well as across disciplines. Education is thus an active process that also involves the continuous selection of values, skills, knowledge and teaching methods, and the way we make these decisions can be rationalised as a political process.
There are choices to be made at the education-system level, at the level of individual institutions followed by the level of individual teaches. As a result, education is also a continuous process of subversion, especially when one consciously adopts a radical or transformative approach as propagated by Paulo Freire, but also when the system, an institution or a teacher is not deliberately trying to adopt or promote a radical pedagogy.
Imagine a master’s level physics class in Bangalore University. In the middle of a lecture about Brownian motion in English, the professor realises that a number of students don’t seem to follow. He switches to Kannada and their faces brighten up; now they follow as well as feel included, as their language is being acknowledged. This decision is thus political in nature.
Next, imagine an M. Phil class for a course on equity in education at JNU; the teacher is discussing affirmative action in the form of reservations in higher educational institutions and public sector jobs. The teacher first asks everyone for their opinion and then facilitates a debate by supplying arguments from both sides. This is followed by a number of readings ahead of the next class. This is not easy because it means many hours in the library in a short span of time.
But the students’ arguments in the next class are better informed for it. By the end of the course, all students understand the rationale of affirmative action as well as begin engaging more deeply with issues of caste, cultural capital, discrimination, exclusion and justice.
Obviously education is about rigour, grades and learning – but it is also about sharpening your values, thoughts, positions and actions, and the two will intermingle.
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The basic characteristic of education remains the same at every stage of education. For example, when the National Council of Educational Research and Training developed an environmental science (EVS) textbook for the primary level, it referred to children from different parts of the country, described their languages and the kinds of houses they lived in. This was an obvious effort by the school system to inculcate an awareness of the diverse nature of India.
However, if a teacher decides to change the book and homogenise the names, as if all the children belonged to the same or similar religious groups, the act becomes subversive. Or if the primary-level EVS textbook asks teachers to teach their students about different plants by showing them pictures, and one teacher instead decides to take children to a garden instead – this is also a kind of subversion.
Every single act in the process of education and knowledge creation creation is potent with political meaning, and conveys one or another kind of value. And students are an important actor in this process. This way, education also becomes a space for continuous contestation – deliberate and otherwise.
In this context, what should our reference points – the entities that define our desirable moral and ethical positions – be? The Indian Constitution is definitely one of them, although the values it upholds the most, such as democracy, equality, secularism, social justice, freedom, dignity, are also rooted in the evolution of human society and transcend national borders, ensuring a continuity of purpose at the global level.
One of education’s major aims is to uphold and promote these values, irrespective of the subject or discipline, and whether to student or teacher. Students must actively engage in this dynamic process of contestation, with the tensions, enquiries, discoveries and rediscoveries if they have to create knowledge together. Participation and protests are indeed an essential part of this process, and such education is critical for a society that aspires to democracy, equality, secularism, justice and freedom.
This is precisely why students have been essential participants in major social and political changes. The May 1968 protests in France make for an illustrative example in this regard, as do many protests in postcolonial India itself.
The students’ movement in Gujarat and Bihar in 1974, on a number of issues including corruption and public education, had far-reaching impacts on regional and national politics. The chief minister of Gujarat was forced to resign while the agitations in Bihar avalanched into a national students’ movement against corruption. Many student leaders from these movements later engaged in national politics, leading to the formation of the first non-Congress government since independence.
There are other examples from other parts of the country as well, and in most of them, students were responsible for amplifying an issue for greater attention. Even when students harboured two contrasting positions, such as with the Mandal Commission agitation, their participation was desirable and later acknowledged to be critical.
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Apart from serving the national interest, political debates can also educate students. For example, what does make JNU one of the country’s most successful universities in India after 1947?
One standard way is to inspect the completion rates of admitted students as well as the quality of their work. A good proportion of JNU graduates join a number of prestigious universities around the world, which speaks for the university’s quality of teaching. A sizeable percentage of students also enters academia within the country, and many of these people have over the years been appreciated as good teachers themselves – a recognition that combines rigorous and engaging pedagogy with knowing which questions to ask, building good relationships with students and fellow-teachers, and the positions taken on various issues.
Many JNU graduates also join the government, and anecdotal accounts I have heard over the last 25 years suggest have a reputation of being more sensitive to people’s needs.
Many students that clear the National Eligibility Test and other fellowship examinations also join JNU.
All together, the university’s high level of student activism does not adversely affect the academic or extracurricular activities of its students; on the contrary, it could be contributing to their achievements! JNU’s teachers have also been known to conduct some of their classes outside the classroom, and these are well-attended.
The post-dinner public meetings in JNU are an important and unique classroom where students meet, and are challenged by, artists, politicians, academics and others in conversation and debate. At one such meeting, the activist Medha Patkar challenged our conscience by highlighting how greedy urbanites could be in their demand for electricity, water and other resources, which then becomes the raison d’être for interventions like the Sardar Sarovar Dam. Shortly after, I joined her organisation, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), and participated in its activities for some time.
My time with the NBA made me more aware of our own lifestyles, and what about them needed change, as well as issues of power, rights and inequality, and taught me more about social and economic costs than I had ever learnt in the classroom, as a student of economics. Despite the fact that the NBA didn’t succeed in stopping dam’s construction, the movement and the surrounding discourse significantly improved the knowledge and awareness of the lives, resources and rights in the region. The NBA’s protests also prompted the World Bank to withdraw its support and add a clause requiring all future projects (seeking its funds) to mandatorily deal with the eviction and rehabilitation of displaced people.
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If students don’t raise their voices about important policy and constitutional issues, who will? The recent JNU protests, about protecting public universities and institutions of higher education, are pertinent here: only a small fraction of those who need to be in schools ever enter the schooling system, and this bottleneck is even tighter for women and members of disadvantaged social and economic groups. A major reason is the absence of well-funded free higher education.
In a highly unequal society such as ours, the only way to educate those who cannot afford an education is through public delivery. Public higher education can be rationalised from the point of view quality. One hears horror stories of students of rich parents demanding high grades in private universities and colleges simply because they’ve paid for it. This is proof that the commercialisation of education is bad not only for equality but also for the quality of education. Even from an instrumental perspective — of driving economic growth – India needs a larger and better educated workforce, and publicly supported higher education is one of the best ways to make that happen.
(The students have also been protesting that their union wasn’t consulted before the university announced steep fee hikes. The democratic process is an important part of a democracy.)
Another case in point is the recent anti-CAA/NRC protests. By coming out in large numbers and voicing their views fearlessly, the students of our country are showing that they are serious about their commitment to the nation and its interests.
A word on violence at this juncture: Violence is condemnable and it is important that students to ensure their protests remain non-violent under all circumstances. But it is even more important for the state to be non-violent as well, especially when dealing with young students, and students must oppose state actions that cross this line in every possible form – including declining to receive medals, boycotting ceremonies and attending protest calls.
These actions haven’t been limited to JNU or other social science institutions either. Many students from science, engineering and management institutions have been participating as well, revealing both their dedication as well as the importance of the issues they’re fighting for.
Jyotsna Jha is based in Bengaluru and heads the Centre for Budget and Policy Studies. The views expressed here are her own.
