Of mutinies & ideological battles

Aditi Tandon

Campus mutinies dominated the news this year snowballing into a massive student backlash against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the proposed pan-India National Register of Citizens.

The anti-CAA agitation that began from the Jamia Millia Islamia campus in New Delhi on December 15 spread across the country forcing PM Narendra Modi to clarify that a pan-India NRC had not even been debated.

The government’s course correction was duly credited to campus uprisings against the CAA and the NRC with Jamia Millia Islamia, a central university, emerging as the focal point of protests. 

The police crackdown on Jamia and Aligarh Muslim University students during the anti-CAA agitations united campuses across India with the IITs, the IIMs and other institutions rallying in solidarity with other counterparts but also underlining that damage to public property couldn’t be condoned and protests must be non violent.

The scale of student involvement in anti-CAA stir had political rivals taking note. While Congress President Sonia Gandhi pledged to rally behind the “just struggle of students”, the BJP blamed the Opposition of misusing students’ agitation to score political points. The CAA apart, the student body remained restive throughout the year as many higher education institutions raised the cost of study and hostel living. Campuses erupted frequently with Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union (JNUSU) boycotting semester exams as a mark of protest for the first time since the varsity was set up in 1974. The stir against fee hike move started on October 28 and was underway when the year ended.

Though the JNU partially rolled back the hikes in hostel rents, the students have been seeking a complete withdrawal. Students at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, IITs, Tata Institute of Social Sciences and National Law Schools also launched struggles against executive moves to raise annual tuition and hostel fees arguing that quality and affordable higher education was the backbone of a demographically young society. As student anxieties raged, HRD Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal remained in the eye of the storm whole year for allowing the IIT Council to raise M Tech tuition fee annually by a whopping 900 per cent, apart from discontinuing the stipend previously available for this student segment. 

A fight for right

Most Indian campuses also became ideological battle grounds in 2019 as sharp political divisions emerged around the ruling right wing moves.

The Banaras Hindu University students this year succeeded in forcing a Muslim assistant professor Feroze Khan to resign from the literature department of Sanskrit Vidya Dharma Vijnan and teach at another department instead. Their contention – a non Muslim cannot teach certain specified Sanskrit texts. Khan put in his papers on December 10 after students agitated for over a month.

The other end of the ideological spectrum saw the ABVP, the ruling BJP’s students’ wing, protesting the appointment of historian Ramachandra Guha as professor at Ahmedabad University. “His writings are against Indian culture and traditions,” contended the agitating students. Guha ultimately resigned from the post .

In a similar instance, the JNU, the hotbed of clashing political ideologies, this year asked acclaimed historian Romila Thapar for her bio-data to check her credentials and decide if she could continue as professor emeritus at the institution. An uproar over the move resulted in a government clarification that the request was part of a formality under JNU rules and had been sent to many other professors in Thapar’s league. There was nothing personal about it, HRD Ministry insisted. 

The highs

More institutions in world’s best list

India jumped in The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2020, with 56 institutions in the list up from 49 previously. 

Up in the Global Innovation Index

India moved up five notches in Global Innovation Index 2019 to the 52nd position among 129 countries ranked by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). 

The lows

No Indian varsity in top 300

For the first time since 2012, not a single Indian university made it to the top 300 list in the world university rankings. Even IIS slipped to the 301-350 bracket from 251-300.

War for vernacular words

Language wars erupted as political parties in Southg objected to a mandatory implementation of the three-language formula as mentioned in the draft National Education Policy.