Reinventing JNU

Jawaharlal Nehru University continues to feature in the news at regular intervals, the most recent being when a students’ bid to screen the BBC documentary India: The Modi Question, had to be aborted due to a sudden and unexplained power outage. In December, it was in news for graffiti aimed at creating a rift within the JNU community along caste lines. This JNU is far removed from the JNU of the 1970s and 1980s when its majesty as an institution of higher learning and research was unparalleled, and its culture of debate and healthy disagreement, the spirit of camaraderie were iconic. JNU “is a terribly wounded space” that needed “healing”, sociologist Avijit Pathak wrote in a newspaper article recently. What has led to this state of affairs, and where do we go from here?

Any social or political institution is a reflection of society; educational institutions are no exception. The malaise that we see in JNU today is symptomatic of an abyss our society has fallen into of late. We seem to have lost our ability to resolve differences through dialogue and find solutions to the problems of our society through deliberative exercise. In a recent book, Listening for Well-Being: Conversations with People Not Like Us, Arun Maira has argued that the idea of democracy is in peril because we are unwilling to give people the dignity they deserve, and are losing our ability to listen to people who are not like us; therefore, what is needed is the cultivation of the art of listening, particularly, listening to people who are not like us.

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While JNU had great merits, it was not free from shortcomings. So being nostalgic for the early days of JNU may not help; nor is that desirable. The question that should concern us is, how do we reinvent JNU. Let us firstly cursorily look at the journey of JNU reaching its nadir in 2020, when the university was rocked by violence; then I’ll make a case for the reinvention of JNU in light of the need to resuscitate the public university.

Its special status, unique admission policy, and welcoming nature made JNU an extraordinary university. It drew students and faculty from all parts of India and different sections and strata of Indian society. And it came to represent the diversity of the Indian nation in all its splendour. Its democratic and libertarian ethos made it an open and inclusive community. JNU made rapid strides and attained excellence in learning and teaching because of its unique pedagogy, structuring of programmes, autonomy enjoyed by the faculty, and promotion of research on long-term issues of social relevance. It treated students and teachers as co-travellers in the pursuit of knowledge.

Somewhere down the line, in the early 1990s, JNU’s unique fraternal bond got seriously damaged, mainly because of a change in the nature of mainstream Indian politics with serious repercussions for social relations and bonding in our larger society. The government’s decision to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission report on OBC (other backward castes) reservations in 1990 reverberated across the country, particularly among the youth. ‘Upper caste’ students responded by violent agitation in several Indian cities and campuses. JNU could not have remained insulated from what was happening in the larger society. The following years saw the shattering of JNU’s intellectual serenity, and its democratic and tolerant culture was soiled by polemics, incivility, clamour, and even threat of physical violence, hitherto unheard of on the JNU campus. The crackdown on students and the violence on campus during the stewardship of the former Vice Chancellor M Jagadesh Kumar, and the JNU administration’s questionable role therein, marked the culmination of the trends that had surfaced in the early nineties.

Fascination with social and political theories originating in the West produced intellectual snobbery and a sense of exceptionalism among JNU-ites. This preoccupation with theories and jargon, coupled with the neglect of indigenous knowledge traditions, created delusion and disconnect with the reality around them, thereby resulting in a lopsided understanding of Indian social and political reality. Rajeev Bhargava has rightly pointed to JNU’s neglect of the discipline of Philosophy, and its failure to seriously engage with the study of Indian religions .

It requires no exceptional intelligence to discern that the campuses of private universities remain out of bounds for the underprivileged. In such a situation, there cannot be an alternative to a robust system of public higher education with a commitment to the needy and deserving students. In this context, the assumption of leadership at JNU by Shantishree Dhulipudi Pandit deserves our attention. Her bold stand on some important issues holds significance for our public higher education and the reinvention of JNU.

Besides highlighting the need for India to raise spending on education, which has become a cliché, Pandit has highlighted the importance of “constructing Indo-centric narratives”. While we may debate its content and substance, there is little dispute that the creation of knowledge on the subcontinent during the last 300 years has by and large taken place within the framework set up by colonial episteme. It is high time we jettisoned the hold of Macaulay-ism on our education. She has also called for the co-existence of all narratives on the campus. Pandit has also articulated the primacy of human agency in the project of knowledge dissemination and creation. This is significant at a time when an educational bureaucracy, largely consisting of techno-managerial elites drawn from STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects, holds sway over our educational institutions. Pandit has expressed serious apprehensions about the robustness of the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) for admission to post-graduate courses in social sciences, humanities, and languages.

As social scientists, we need to go by what one does and not by what one says, and it remains to be seen how Pandit uses her office at the JNU. Nevertheless, she deserves our respect and support for boldly articulating her concerns and her efforts to create trust among different stakeholders. The reclamation of JNU as a compassionate and dignified place of conversation is integrally related to the revival of the public university system in our country.

(The writer is Adjunct Faculty, Department of Social Sciences, Flame University, Pune)