Being a teacher in India has become a risky proposition; being a student even more so. What with incessant paper leaks for a range of exams affecting millions of students and lack of infrastructure in state-run colleges and central universities, the aspirants who wish to receive quality education are thwarted at many levels. In Delhi University, more than 4,000 teaching posts have been lying vacant for the last eight years not because there is a dearth of good teachers but because the UPA-II and now the BJP at the Centre have other plans.
If one wishes to go back a little, the sturm und drang (storm and drive) moment arrived with the suicide of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula in Hyderabad Central University. The storm that gathered force with that untimely death has not abated and has been driven by other nefarious and sinister events that have taken place: the disappearance of another young scholar Najeeb Ahmed from Jawaharlal Nehru University, the rebellion by Punjab University students when their fees was hiked, the resistance by women students that erupted at Banaras Hindu University, the lack of opportunities for meritorious but marginalised student communities and the systematic dismantling of universities and what they stand for.
The long and insidious assault on JNU is a glaring example of what is happening under our very noses. The storm clouds are very real and they are fierce enough.
If the storm is real, so is the drive that results from it: a resistance to privatisation of institutions of higher learning, the rejection of an autonomy that smacks of benign despotism by granting ‘freedom’ to institutions to generate funds and hence raise fees, the refutation of dismantling the social sciences and humanities, the refusal to encourage market-driven courses; in short, a resistance that is carried out by teachers, students and karamcharis, those who have their largest stakes in higher education. These foot-soldiers of the rebellion, across universities and across regions of the country, have gathered their meagre resources to stand firm against this onslaught on the institutions they nurture and it will not be a tall claim to state that their resistance, the storm that they have kicked up, is not going to disappear in a hurry.
On March 28, it did not need any visionary power to see the palpable anger of young students marching on Delhi streets with banners and posters that spoke of their fury and resentment against the move to render central-funded institutions autonomous. With irony and tongue-in-cheek humour, they proclaimed their messages and it would be plain stupid to ignore them or underestimate their anger.
As history has taught us, the rage of students can shake up things and although they can be suppressed with brute force, the anger shimmers just under the surface and erupts in most unexpected ways. The individuality and imagination of the young are disruptive yet creative forces that must be understood by politicians and policymakers. As a young nation, students have voting powers and their large numbers can make or break elections. The assault on higher education that has been unleashed by the present government is part of the capitalist forces that run the global economy but the questions of social and educational justice are very real in India. It seems our young students are determined to address those questions as they gather themselves into a vocal and angry group. The storm clouds they have gathered are here to stay.
The foot-soldiers of the rebellion across universities have gathered their meagre resources to stand firm against the onslaught on the institutions they nurture. Credit: DUTA website
In Indian universities, the student-teacher ratio is roughly 22:1, abysmal by any standards. The University Grants Commission has recently offered contractual teaching posts in some higher education institutions across many states and Union territories and there are significant ways in which they wish to change the future hiring of teachers by tweaking the reservation roster. The move towards contractual employment is lauded as a quick way to create jobs; however, it is a questionable practice where teachers have no commitmenthe t to long-term growth of the institution. The constant threats of job loss and a reverence to authority are at best unattractive fall-outs of this system as it is also detrimental to their own growth as scholars and thinkers.
It should be disquieting to see which way the market will push institutions and policymakers in India to undertake reforms even further that in the long-term will be both anti-student and anti-teacher. In this country, the price of all this ‘reform’ will be borne by those who can least afford it: the Dalits, the tribals, the marginalised groups like women and children. The sturm their resistance can kick up was seen this week on Delhi’s streets. It was a storm that would have soothed any jaded heart. It did mine.
Debjani Sengupta teaches at the Department of English, Indraprastha College, Delhi University. She is also the author of The Partition of Bengal: Fragile Borders and New Identities (CUP, 2015).
