In early November, the JNU administration forwarded to all Centres/Special Centres/Schools, the Government of India proposal to establish twenty “Institutions of Eminence” to achieve world class status, from amongst the existing Government/Private institutions and new institutions from the private sector. It conveyed its intentions to submit an application to the UGC under the scheme and has asked Centres/Special Centres/Schools to provide comments on Part-1 – III [Vision for Institute of Eminence], Part-1 – IV [proposed fifteen year strategic plan], and Part-1 – VI [Proposed five years implementation plan] of the attached proforma.

This note from JNUTA is first to direct colleagues’ attention to the serious debate that this GoI plan has occasioned, in a country where higher education has simply failed to deliver in terms of access, quality, and justice — with a Gross Enrolment Ratio of just 20.4, as per the All India Survey of Higher Education (2013), it is the responsibility of educationists to query whether an outlay of Rs. 10,000 crore on ten institutions is warranted in the first place. (Please see the following pieces in favour of the proposal, and against it, in particular). Given that the goal of this whole initiative is a limited one of achieving a breakthrough into the world top 100 rankings, the teaching community must thoroughly discuss what rankings are good for anyway, and what significance the term ‘world class’ truly signifies, if the goals of education are essentially humanist and necessarily inclusive in character.

With regard to rankings, the JNU-DU faculty group Academics for Creative Reform has formulated a detailed position, which can be found here. With regards to ‘world class’, it is important to note that the parameters for assessment privilege a certain combination of parameters that there is no independent validation as having greater value than a positive estimation by peer institutions. See these articles for opinions highlighting the inherent flaws of a faith in the semanticity of world rankings.

Most immediately,  it is necessary that given that the JNU administration has decided to pursue this application path, for JNU faculty to examine the exact provisions of this scheme and to evaluate whether the visions each academic unit has for its own and the university’s development can indeed be realised within the rubric provided by this scheme.

Beyond the hoopla: The Scheme
At the outset, it is important to note that all that exists is a set of non-mandatory guidelines for an application. (Please note that the Gazette notification associated with this scheme does not pertain to government-owned universities like JNU, but rather only to those “not owned or controlled by government”.) It is therefore entirely inappropriate for the university administration to decide that this scheme will be applied for without consulting Schools and Centres in the Academic Council, and for administrators to imply that this is the only means by which funding for the future can be secured. This is patently not the case, as the guidelines make no such statement.

In JNUTA’s view, there are extremely serious reasons for concern at JNU’s making any application under this scheme.

First, the scheme actually has nothing to do with the UGC. Rather, the decisions will be taken by an “Empowered Experts Committee (EEC), which will comprise  three to five eminent persons appointed for a period of three years. The persons appointed to the EEC will be “as advised by the Central Government”, with “the approval of the Appointments Committee of Cabinet”. The EEC shall be responsible for scrutinising and appraising the proposals submitted all the way up to monitoring, assessing and reviewing the selected institutions. In other words, the scheme is to be operationalised by out-and-out political appointees whose decisions will have political sanction alone and will not be constrained by even the regulatory framework of the UGC. This has been admitted by the MHRD itself in answer to a Lok Sabha question, where it records the Solicitor-General as having categorically stated that the UGC Act, 1956 does not allow for the UGC to form an Empowered Expert Committee in this manner, such that the decisions of this EEC shall be deemed to be decisions of the UGC. Should JNU be associating its future as an institution with a scheme in which there is virtually no scope of autonomy and practically no regulation of the regulators? What impact will this regulation by a body have on the provisions for autonomy in the JNU Act then? 

Second, the scheme will drastically alter the composition of the JNU faculty, restricting the university’s ability to recruit the best from India. By the “indicative list of parameters” provided in the guidelines, JNU shall have to move in a specified time period  to having “a good proportion of foreign or foreign-qualified faculty”, where foreign faculty is defined simply in terms of having non-Indian citizenship, but a foreign-qualified Indian must be one who has a degree from the top 500 institutions in the world and also be “one who has spent considerable time in academics in a foreign country”. Further, hiring need not be restricted to permanent positions alone, and the sourcing of faculty from ‘industry’ without the requisite qualifications will be an option that can be exploited. The UGC may somewhat shockingly (particularly in these times of hyper-nationalism) be ready to consider the simple attribute of non-Indian citizenship as a qualification and to devalue a domiciliary status in India, but is JNU ready to do the same? 

If  what is meant by a good proportion of foreign faculty is 25%, is the university ready to commit to an imminent process that will restrict all hiring to non-Indian citizens for the foreseeable future? And what of the objects enjoined upon the university then in the Second schedule of the JNU Act, of the special measures it must take “to facilitate students and teachers from all over India to join the University and participate in its academic programmes?” And most of of all, what happens to the reservation policy with regards to faculty recruitment? 

Third, an application under this scheme also entails an explicit commitment to an exclusionary model of student admissions, in which social justice has no substantive part. There is no mention of maintenance of reservations anywhere in the guidelines;  instead we are told that the focus “must remain on getting meritorious students”, and that admissions must be “purely on merit”. Further, admissions for Indian  students are capped to 70% of the total students admitted, as 30% is now to be ‘reserved’ for foreign students. Is JNU  ready to give up both reservation in admissions as well as deprivation points and other measures for social justice?

Fourth, the scheme also can (indeed, will) entail massive fee hikes without any regulation, both for foreign and domestic students. As per the document circulated, there are admonitions about ensuring that no ‘meritorious’ but ‘needy’ student is denied a scholarship, but we are all aware the sharp constriction if access that is produced by exorbitant fees. Furthermore what is categorically not envisaged in this business model is a university in which most students study on fellowships. Is this the vision of a university that the research that JNU is known for can be done?  

Fifth, the scheme actually seems to have no defined parameters of academic evaluation whatsoever. In the guidelines provided, and indeed in the proforma that needs to be filled out, evaluation for eligibility for the grant seems largely to be premised on a willingness to work towards institutional eminence, which is essentially defined in terms of getting into the world top 100 rankings. The simple fact of the matter is that no Centre/School/Special Centre can develop a purely academic plan to get to a particular world ranking. It can only plan to identify areas of development and research focus and to ensure that research funding is available for every faculty and student in these areas. But that’s what seems to be of little interest in the scheme of things it seems, as there are no provisions of the academic evaluation by subject experts that seem to be involved.

Sixth, there can be no doubt that an award will contribute to a fundamental loss of autonomy in academic pursuit for every faculty member and Centres/Special Centres/School. Award of the scheme involves signing a Memorandum of Understanding with “the government”, as the agreement “that would guide and govern the development of the institution”, failure to abide with which shall result in penalties. It does not take much imagining from then on to conceive of scenarios in which the MoU shall be elevated to the status of a categorical imperative, leading to an enforced obedience that can only be detrimental to research.

Seventh, that the actual financial details of the scheme are beneficial even in the medium term is far from clear. An injection of Rs. 1000 crore sounds attractive, but is it to be replacive of, in whole or part, the outlay the university receives of roughly Rs.200 crore p.a.? If so, this in effect works out to just five years of funding, with no clear understanding to what happens to existing funding — does it go or stay? The scheme also spells out the university will be responsible for raising money from outside sources, largely without regulation — indeed, the incentives to attract faculty are to be entirely self-funded. To add to this, the strong penalties for failing to achieve as yet unspecified targets introduce a level of uncertainty that does not inspire any confidence either.

All this for what a freedom to do what exactly — to give up university autonomy with respect to admissions and recruitment, to violate national reservation policy, and transfer the costs of education to the students? 

Ayesha Kidwai (President, JNUTA)

Pradeep Shinde (General Secretary, JNUTA)

Courtesy: Kafila.online
 

The post Nightmarish Visions: Indian government plan for ‘Institutions of Eminence’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Image: The Indian Express

This is the moment at which teachers need to finally accept that ABVP is not just another student organization. We have tended to take the position in our universities that we must not condemn or directly address ABVP, since we must not directly involve ourselves in student politics. Teachers must talk to administration, be publicly critical of its lapses, take all measures necessary to display and enact our solidarity with students under attack by this regime. While students take their own decisions on modes of struggle and so on, teachers see our role as supportive but with a critical distance.

However, now we may need to start thinking of ways in which we  recognize the organization of the ABVP as a serious threat to Indian democracy. I don’t mean individual students, who would also be in our class-rooms, and with whom it may still be possible to continue a conversation, and whose examinations we will continue to grade with utmost probity. as we have always done.

But the ABVP as an organization has a specific role to play, as storm-troopers in the project of Hindu nationalism, and we cannot afford any longer not to face up to this fact frontally.

The Hindutva Project

Those of us who can clearly see the current regime under Narendra Modi as involved in a many faceted project to bring about a ground level transformation of India into a Hindu nation, cannot remain innocent of the knowledge that ABVP is not just another students’ organization. It is the student’s wing of the RSS, the fountainhead of Hindutvavaadi philosophy, an organization acknowledged time and again by members of the BJP as  the revered source of authority for every action taken by this government from the Prime Minister downwards. The most recent pronouncement of this kind was by Defence Minister Manohar Parikkar who attributed the allegedly successful “surgical strikes” by the Indian Army against Pakistan to “RSS teaching.”

The RSS acts as an extra constitutional source of power, legitimizing a wide range of activities from violence against Muslims and Dalits under the garb of cow protection, to violent policing of social media and social spaces to weed out any form of dissent to its masculinist, savarna, anti-women, anti-minority Hindu nationalist project. The actual actors in these attacks need not be directly linked to RSS, but they are spawned by the legitimacy given to the Hindutva project by the current regime, and by the impunity enjoyed under it by the smallest foot soldier of Hindutva for the most criminal of actions.

There is of course, a split in the Hindutva forces along the faultline of caste, for a Savarkarite rendering of Hindutva required the modernization of Hinduism to eliminate caste discrimination and indeed caste itself, through internal reform and intermarriage. The Savarkarite project was to consolidate the Hindu community, to modernize and militarize it, and all of this requires Hinduism to break the Seven Shackles of caste discrimination that bind it. As part of this project of Hindu consolidation, probably recognizing that many communities that he wanted to bring under the umbrella of Hinduism ate beef, Savarkar even said:

…When humanitarian interests are not served and in fact harmed by the cow and when humanism is shamed, self-defeating extreme cow protection should be rejected…(Samagra Savarkar vangmaya,Vol. 3, p.341)

But BR Ambedkar was right, and Savarkar was  wrong. Hinduism cannot survive without caste, and caste cannot be eliminated without eliminating the Hindu shastras. And this is what explains the large scale extension of the violence of gau rakshaks from Muslims to Dalits, which cannot be contained even by Modi’s heartfelt plea to get the Hindutva project back on track – “Kill me, not Dalits”, he famously said. What he meant was “Kill Muslims, not Dalits.” But the visceral hatred of the caste Hindu self for Dalits cannot, it seems, be held at bay even for the Hindu Nation to succeed. A CRPF jawan who died in Pompore during a militant attack was denied public land for cremation by the upper castes of his villagebecause of his “lower” caste. His status as martyr for the glory of the nation did not protect him from this indignity in death. Within ABVP itself, caste prejudice is rampant, and there have beenresignations  from it on the issue of caste.

The teaching of Savarkar that RSS and its followers do take very seriously however, is the need to build a Hindu nation through producing hatred of the Other, even when that Other is intimately tied to one’s self. Criticizing Buddhism for destroying India’s “political virility” and preventing  the possibility of “common worship” that could have built the Hindu nation, Savarkar writes in Essentials of Hindutva:

Moreover everything that is common in us with our enemies, weakens our power of opposing them. The foe that has nothing in common with us is the foe likely to be most bitterly resisted by us just as a friend that has almost everything in him that we admire and prize in ourselves is likely to be the friend we love most. The necessity of creating a bitter sense of wrong invoking a power of undying resistance especially in India that had under the opiates of Universalism and non-violence lost the faculty even of resisting sin and crime and aggression, could best be accomplished by cutting off even the semblance of a common worship…(P 12 of pdf available on-line at savarkar.org)

This necessity of “creating a bitter sense of wrong” is in essence the Hindutva project, whose goal is paradoxically, to destroy the confidence of Hindus, an undisputed majority community whose heterogeneous cultures define this land, and to create in them a sense of humiliation, defeat and impending doom from minorities.

Not to recognize the Modi government as the chief driver of this project, a violent Hindu nationalist project, internally contested though it may be, is to fail comprehensively in understanding this current moment in Indian history. Every single one of the Indian state’s actions at this time –

promoting a Uniform Civil Code or endorsing the need to end the practice of triple talaq;
the massive on-going repression in the long saga of Indian military occupation of Kashmir;
the quick attribution of blame to Pakistan for the Uri attack and the consequent war mongering;
the tacit support to gau rakshaks.

These cannot be separated into discrete policy decisions as political commentators have tended to do. In such analyses, the first is seen to be motivated by a recognition of women’s rights, the second as unavoidable or even desirable, the third as sage and statesman-like, and the last, even Modi’s admirers concede, unfortunate. But in fact, every single one of these policy decisions is driven by the same agenda, the project of building the Hindu Rashtra.

Just a quick note on the Uniform Civil Code. The women’s movement has long made it clear that the goal of personal law reform must be gender justice, not uniformity. First, because it is not clear to what standard would uniformity be held. That is, should we take the best practices of all Personal Laws and put them into a Uniform  Code for all communities? What if a practice in Muslim Personal Law is more gender-just than one in Hindu Personal Law – such as for instance, the marriage as contract than as sacrament? Would Hindus accept that the Hindu marriage henceforth should be a contract too?  The point here is that when the Hindu right demands a Uniform Civil Code or an end to triple talaq, it is as another weapon to use against Muslims, not because they care for Muslim women. If they did care for Muslim women, then they should be listening to the voices of Muslim women’s organizations like Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan and Bebaak Collective, which are in legal battle to remove such provisions from Muslim Personal Law, but which are firmly opposed also to the Hindu nationalist project and the violence it unleashes on Muslim women during communal violence. (I have written about these issues more at length  here.)

The Role of the ABVP

It is in this scenario that we must see the ABVP and its growing power in universities. ABVP, whether in power as official students’ unions or not, has the ear of key people in university administrations, and direct access to the Ministry of Human Resources Development. This was in evidence in JNU and Hyderabad Central University, the scripts of which crises I will not rehearse again here, they are too well known. But ABVP has been active in similar ways on other campuses over this past year, Allahabad University and IIT Madras for example.

Suffice it here to give two instances from JNU after the first crisis had subsided through the intervention of Delhi High Court. The first Academic Council meeting held in the current Vice Chancellor’s tenure (My 2016), at the height of the hunger strike by the students, ended in its abrupt adjournment. No faculty member or the JNUTA had any idea of when the AC meeting was to be reconvened, despite several attempts to get this information from various members of the university administration. The first intimation was to ABVP, in a handwritten note by a senior member  of the administration on a letter written by the ABVP President. An image of this letter was circulated on WhatsApp by the ABVP to indicate its closeness to power. Second, an Orientation Programme organized by the VC for new entrants at the beginning of the academic year of 2016, kept out all student organizations. However, some students were present as “volunteers”, and they happened to be from the ABVP.

The ABVP played a key role in the crisis concocted at Central University of Haryana last month over a dramatic performance of Mahashweta Devi’s story Draupadi (1978), in which the protagonist, an Adivasi woman, defiantly faces down the police who have raped and tortured her in custody. In Gayatri Spivak’s translation, Dopdi, (as she calls herself), at the end holds her battered and naked body  erect before Senanayak:

She looks around and chooses the front of Senanayak’s white bush shirt to spit a bloody gob at and says, There isn’t a man here that I should be ashamed. I will not let you put my cloth on me. What more can you do? Come on, counter me…come on,counter me…?
Draupadi pushes Senanayak with her two mangled breasts, and for the first time Senanayak is afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid.

The word “counter” is used in the Bangla original, and Mahashweta Devi meant by it an abbreviation for “encounter,” universally understood in India as the way in which political activists and “terrorists” are described as being killed (“in an encounter”) after being tortured to death in custody by police or army.

The ABVP termed the play anti-national’ as it “shows Indian soldiers in poor light” and filed a police complaint against the teachers and students who participated in the play, demanding that they should be booked under sedition charges. Subsequently, the faculty members involved, Dr Snehsata Manav and Dr Manoj Kumar are being targeted in disciplinary action by the university authorities and there were demonstrations at the gates of CUH supposedly by “villagers” from the surrounding areas whose sons are in the armed forces. The faculty members and students who are with them, continue the struggle for academic  freedom, with support and solidarity from the wider academic community in India and outside, but what is noteworthy once again,  is the role of the the ABVP in acting as storm troopers for RSS ideology and its militarist national imagination. University authorities under Vice Chancellors appointed by the Modi regime, are quick to act on the slightest complaint from ABVP.

Army, livelihood and patriotism

The fact is that in 21st century India, Mahashweta Devi’s story written in the context of the Naxalite movement in Bengal, still resonates. It is still an India of extensive police brutality and corruption; an India of farm lands and forests violently acquired by the state for private corporations through the deployment of its coercive state apparatus; an India in which armed and paramilitary forces routinely treat large sections of the country as enemy territory, under the full protection of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Widespread abuse of power and sexual offences by armed forces in areas under AFSPA have been authenticated by several investigative reports, not least among them, the reports of two distinguished committees – the Jeevan Reddy Commmittee set up by the government in 2004 and the Santosh Hegde Committee set up by the Supreme Court in 2013.  The fact is that the Constitution is suspended under AFSPA and that the armed forces in areas under AFSPA cannot be prosecuted for sexual crimes under the law of the land. The  fact is that police routinely torture, sexually assault and rape people in their custody, whether arrested for petty crimes or under anti-terrorism laws or as suspected Maoists. None of this is startling new information.

Image: Demos/Wordpress

However, of late, public references to this aspect of “maintaining law and order” attract the ever vigilant attention of the ABVP and of sundry publicity seekers, sworn to protect the fragile honour of “the army”. There are innumerable police complaints and on-going cases in court, against individuals who have raised this issue in speech or writing. Apparently the “morale of the army” is a delicate thing, and it is the duty of the Indian  citizen to cherish and protect it from being “affected” in any way.

We must never therefore, address the question of bribes in army recruitments.

Never raise the issue of disaffection among lower ranks of the army at service conditions that include their having to act as domestic servants of officers. In 2015 Voice of Ex-Servicemen Society (VESS)  came out with a Charter of Demands that included the following:

The untouchability and ghetto system practiced by all Armed forces Ancillary services to be abolished. e.g. AWHO projects have separate enclaves for Officers and PBORs, even though cost of  the dwellings are same for both.
Elimination of sewadari system from Army. Soldiers are for Fighting wars – not domestic servants
Re-structuring and modernising forces in professional manner by removing colonial discrimination by their roots, in similar ways of modern Forces similar lines of American Army.
Discrimination prevalent in armed forces should be eliminated in all its forms. Forces have become VVIP racism hubs with almost every facility being reserved for officers, including toilets.
Reducing corruption in armed forces, by creating a platform wherein corrupt practices can be reported by PBOR without fear of retribution-Similar to Whistle blower protection act.

Never  address the fact that corruption is rampant in the military establishment, in some cases, affecting the quality of the equipment given to soldiers at the border, risking their lives.
Never ask why Hanumanthappa had to die in Siachen, why so many Indian and Pakistani soldiers die in that icy desert, from natural calamities like avalanches or just by being for sustained periods in that challenging terrain. Over 2000 soldiers from India and Pakistan have died there in these ways, not in combat, since 1984, when the two countries entered into competition for Siachen.
Sanjay Kumar writes:

Experts differ on the strategic importance of the glacier, but they agree that the icy terrain has become more of a prestige issue for both India and Pakistan rather than a security issue. The non-delineation of a formal border between the two countries prevents the demilitarization of Siachen. This will not happen unless both nations demonstrate foresight and vision in handling the issue. Furthermore, as The Hindu noted in an editorial:
The demilitarization of Siachen is definitely doable. This is not only because it is diplomatically possible, but also because there is a critical mass of opinion in both India and Pakistan that neither can sacrifice, or put in harm’s way, so many lives on the inhospitable glacier. If the initiative is not seized by both sides now, the vagaries of nature will continue to exact a toll on forces deployed in Siachen, even if peace holds.
Several initiatives were made in the past to solve the Siachen issue, but the deep seated mistrust between New Delhi and Islamabad always came in the way.
Amid the ongoing dispute, the real victims are the soldiers. Is it worth losing so many lives for this terrain?

But of course, “demilitarization of Siachen is a seditious proposal.”
It is overwhelmingly poor men who join the armed forces, as a means of livelihood. As Aakash Joshi wrote after the deaths of Indian soldiers at Uri:

So many of those that died at Uri came from poverty. Among the dead were seven cooks. Did they choose to die the way they did, or were they victims of an event in which they had no authorship? Why were the tents, in which many of those who fell at Uri were residing, not fire retardant? Or why, as Sepoy Biswajit Ghorai’s father asked, was a 22-year-old with just 26 months in the army sent to such a high-risk zone so early in his career? So soon after Pathankot, why is one of our forward army bases so vulnerable to an attack from across the border? There may well be reasonable answers to all these questions. It is, however, our responsibility to ask them.

Can the ati desh bhakts give us a reason why the armed forces face such huge shortage of personnel while there is red blood flowing in their veins? Shouldn’t every real nationalist from Arnab Goswami to the ranks of the ABVP be filling those posts? (At the salaries the jawans earn, of course. It would be inspiring to see Arnab manage on a monthly income lower than the cost of one of his dashing  suits.) And what sacrilege that the Defence Minister of this most nationalist of governments should assure Parliament that improved pay structures are being put in place to reduce attrition and attract new recruits into the armed forces. What an insult to the patriotism of our brave soldiers who join the armed forces only to protect Bharat Mata. Surely it is seditious even to utter the words “pay” and “armed forces” in the same breath?

RSS attack on thought

Ultimately, what the ABVP and its progenitor, the RSS demand, is the substitution of critical thinking (indeed, of thought itself), everywhere and particularly in universities, by slogans of the Hindu nationalist project, enshrining them violently as above any questioning.

Bharat Mata ki Jai.
Indian Army ki jai.
Pakistan Murdabad.
Gau hamari mata hai.

With these four slogans, the RSS could run a full fledged education programme towards a nation that would eliminate minorities and Dalits, independent women, all dissent, and most importantly, create that “bitter sense of wrong” Savarkar thought essential for Hindutva to succeed, towards the Other.

(Even towards the wildly popular and talented Fawad Khan, whose scintillating presence in a Bollywood film would apparently violate Bharat Mata herself. But Fawad Khan is the real threat, for remember Savarkar’s dictum, “everything that is common in us with our enemies, weakens our power of opposing them.” And Fawad’s talent lies in his ability to appear accessible to the viewer; not a “star”, but a possible boyfriend or husband, a colleague at work. Actor Ramya has a case lodged against her  for seditionfor stating, after a trip to Pakistan, that “Pakistan is not hell”, and the people there are “like us”. No Ramya, they are not like us. We have nothing in common with or enemies).

Independent thinking is a serious problem for this project of Hindutva nation-building. Take for instance, an interview with President of JNU’s ABVP unit,  Saurabh Sharma, a doctoral student in neuroscience, in which he says:

“…no Indian will ever agree with [the] claim that we have forcefully occupied Kashmir. May be a handful of Indians will agree…but a majority call Kashmir, the heaven of India.
Go back to text books. I have never read in any school book that Kashmir is not an integral part of the country.

The reporter asks: But there will be some differences in what you read in school text books and what is taught in colleges?
Sharma replies:

I would have never got full marks if I had written in my exams that Kashmir was not an integral part of India.

This anti-thinking perspective fostered by RSS and so obediently displayed by the ABVP is far from absent in more mature adherents of the ideology. Recently, the proceedings of the Academic Council  of JNU once again hit the headlines when two courses submitted for consideration by the Centre for Sanskrit were after deliberation, returned to the Centre for reformulation. The very next day, before the minutes of the meeting were formally circulated, there were stories in the media that anti-national JNU had rejected courses in “Yoga Philosophy” and “Indian Culture”, because of course, Sanskrit by definition is Indian and nationalist, and any courses proposed by that Centre should be reverentially passed. The real reasons for rejecting those courses emerged from an extensive discussion in the AC, in which renowned historians and scholars of Indian philosophy exposed the shoddiness in conceptualisation and dubious academic merit of the courses. One by one every member of the AC spoke and the overwhelming majority took seriously such academic objections. Serious Sanskrit scholarship is not the issue. There are many accomplished Sanskrit scholars outside the Sanskrit Centre in JNU, some of whom gave detailed comments on the courses (these can be read here). And on the other hand, the Chair of the Sanskrit Centre has come out publicly against serious Sanskrit scholarship, in a petition to remove renowned Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock, from  Editorship of an important translation series. Historian  Janaki Nair has pointed out the many illiteracies of that petition here.

Utterly revealing however, was the comment by an external (non-JNU) member of the AC, whose turn came after most had expressed their views. Declared he passionately, “Sanskrit is for the nation, and these courses are necessary for India. I say, if we can’t wage a war, let us go for a surgical strike.”

Such language and imagery in an academic context, during a discussion of academic courses, leaves nothing to the imagination as far as the RSS agenda is concerned. The conflation of Sanskrit with India, and the identifying of academics making scholarly arguments about courses proposed by the Centre for Sanskrit, as the enemy to be waged war upon, reveals in its entirety the Hindu nationalist programme for the elimination of thought.

Provoking violence

What is left then, for the Hindutva project to do, is to send out its storm troopers, the ABVP, to obliterate all space where thinking can take place, by physical violence.
In Delhi University, students of Pinjra Tod (which translates as Break the Cages), who have been in a militant campus-wide campaign for over a year, for freedom and safety in public spaces for women, have been physically attacked by the ABVP. In their words:

After an exhilarating march through the lanes of Delhi University last Friday, we arrived at Vijaynagar tea point to begin our night vigil against sexual harassment. The Vijaynagar tea point, which is usually occupied only by men, took a different dimension that night as women took over and redefined the nature of that space. When we began our Pinjra Tod street play, Satender Awana (Ex-DUSU President from ABVP) arrived at the vigil along with his drunken companions. As expected, they smirked, laughed, passed comments and started to take videos on their phones, as though our protest was for their entertainment. The ABVP men ordered the chai-wallah to shut down, acting as the bully they are, in a display of their male, upper caste entitlement and insecurity. At the end of our play, Awana and Co, very predictably, began to scream “bharat mata ki jai!” One of these ABVP men in a green t-shirt, thought it would be ‘fun’ to flash a hundred rupee note at a Pinjra Tod activist and provocatively dance with it, in a desperate attempt to shame us by suggesting that we were ‘randis’ dancing for their pleasure. On being challenged, the man caught hold of the Pinjra Tod activist’s wrists and kept tightening his grip, while attempting to corner her with his friends.
We women were not going to tolerate this infuriating display anymore! The anger that lies buried in us from facing such harassment and aggression everyday in our universities, was to erupt that night. The manner in which ABVP behaved at the vigil, was not an isolated incident, but it happens repeatedly in our classrooms, during elections, on the streets, in public meetings and protests, turning the university into a hostile masculine space, instead of a democratic and liberating one for all students.

Since then, both male and female students identified with Pinjra Tod have been facing daily harassment and physical intimidation from ABVP goons at different places on campus. They are however undeterred, and march ahead with the slogans:

Bharat ki Mata Nahin Banenge.
Sabhi Pinjron ko todenge, Itihaas ki dhara modenge.
(We will not be Bharat’s mothers/We will break all cages, change the direction of history)

In JNU recently, a group of ABVP students provoked a fracas in a hostel with a student associated with a Left organization, who also happens to be Muslim. The administration immediately issued a disciplinary notice against the Left student, but no action was taken against the ABVP students. The student has since then, disappeared,  JNU students are in protest against the administration, and once again an atmosphere of intimidation, especially this time, against minorities, has been unleashed on JNU campus. From a newspaper report of a eye witness account of the actual incident, it would appear that Najeeb was targeted specifically as a Muslim by the ABVP group.

JNU is a campus where physical fracas are very rare, but the ABVP clearly manages, whether it is in power (as in Delhi University), or out of it (as in JNU), to create such violent scenarios.
​​​​​​​
Most disturbingly, recently, arms were displayed by supporters of Delhi University Students’ Union  President, in the DUSU office, for which no satisfactory explanation was given.
Within the last three months, here are three incidents on campuses one finds in the news.

In Bareilly College, ABVP leaders assaulted a male student “for asking questions in class”.

In Mangaluru, an ABVP activist assaulted a male student, this time, for answering a  question asked by a woman student outside an examination hall.

In Trichy, tension prevailed at the Government Law College with allegations of state president of the ABVP compelling students to join the organization.
These are just a few of the reported incidents that made it to the media.

ABVP has evidently been given instructions from Nagpur to provoke violence on campuses. We, teachers and students, who are in a deadly serious struggle to save our universities, must recognize the game plan, and  remain calm. We will wage the struggle in the best way we know – through our non-violent, militant protests.

And our relentlessly critical thinking.

Also read: To JNU with love, from Pakistan
Also read: The Real Classroom: Outdoor Lectures Dissect Nationalism at JNU

The post The RSS War on Thought and ABVP as Foot Soldiers appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Courtesy: Kafila.org

Sudhir Chaudhary of Zee News has been spewing venom at students and teachers of Jawaharlal Nehru University for some time now, and I have been informed by concerned friends that over the last two days there has been a concerted campaign against me personally.

Since I do not watch so-called news on a channel that appears to brazenly doctor videos and seems ignorant of minimum levels of journalistic ethics, I am relying on links sent to me by well wishers.

On March 8, I believe a clip from a video made in 2014 was circulated, in which I am heard saying that Hinduism is the world’s most violent religion, because its very foundation is the caste system.

I am told that Sudhir Chaudhary challenged me to prove the video was doctored. (Of course, he did not say anything about recent stories about recent doctored videos on JNU such as this or this or this or this.)

I am certainly not going to engage with an alleged criminal extortionist, but here let me say that the clip I have seen circulating on Twitter, which I assume is the one on Zee, is not doctored, but it is massively decontextualised.

I post below the link to the entire event – which was not a classroom lecture, but a political meeting organised by a student group in 2014 after the Kiss of Love protest was attacked in Delhi by Sangh supporters.
I will first deal with that video, and then Sudhir Chaudhari and IBN 7.

The background

First, the background to that event organised by Democratic Students Federation at a night meeting in JNU.
 

Taking a cue from Kochi, Kolkata and Hyderabad, students of JNU and DU called for a rally outside the office of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)…[While the protest in Kerala was an outcome of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha volunteers vandalising Downtown Cafe in Kozhikode, the rally at Kolkata was triggered because of a 17-year-old girl being refused entry into the Star Theatre because she was wearing a skirt.]
The event saw as many as 600 people in attendance at Jhandewalan metro station. The RSS office was heavily fortified by police, who didn’t permit the participants to go up till Keshav Puram (where the office is located). But the protestors were resilient and marched on for 2 km around the area until they were stopped by 40-50 slogan-carrying RSS workers near Desh Bandhu Gupta Road….
The sea of support on the page was peppered with derogatory comments from various Sangh Parivaar groups, some of them more disturbing than others. “We need a special ‘chumma’ from you tomorrow. Kal Pankhuri sabko akele chumma degi”; “Why only kiss of love, why not f*ck of love?”; “I will attend only if you give me 20 girls to have sex with”; and many more along similar lines.
The organisers were flooded with calls and messages from RSS affiliates, with the Bajrang Dal giving an open call on Facebook to attack the protestors….
[A] student said: “Online, people trolled around saying things like ‘If you carry out this protest, we’ll rape you, we’ll kiss your sisters’ etc, which is simply unacceptable. How can the RSS form their own notion of morality?”
— 'Fighting back with love: Delhi's Kiss of Love campaign registers strong protest against moral policing' – DNA, November 8, 2014

At the meeting after this event in JNU, apart from students, two teachers spoke, Rajarshi Dasgupta and myself. I begin by giving Rajarshi, an old friend and colleague, a kiss on the cheek, in the spirit of the event. The Hindutva trolls have got their boxers in a twist over that too. Poor guys. They really need to get a life.

I will give you below some of the vicious and misogynist comments made by these Ma Bharati ke veer sapoot [these brave sons of Mother India] which should leave us in no doubt about the violence of Hindutva-vadis, who object to Hinduism being called a violent religion.
Here is the part of the video where I speak. I stand by every word and gesture. And I post it not as self advertisement, but to set the record straight.

So – do I stand by my statement that Hinduism is a deeply violent religion, that its very foundation is violence towards women and castes declared as “lower”?

This is a lesson thousands of us have learnt from Ambedkar and Periyar, and it is a lesson well learnt. Ambedkar burnt the Manusmriti on December 27, 1927, during the Mahad Satyagraha, and that day is observed as Manusmriti Dahan Divas by Ambedkarites every year all over the country. On March 8, former ABVP students joined with other JNU students to publicly burn the Manusmriti on International Women’s Day.

One of the key texts that form the very foundation of Hinduism is this violently misogynist, anti-women and Brahminical text that Ambedkar dissects in Philosophy of Hinduism, that erudite essay which concludes:

Inequality is the soul of Hinduism. The morality of Hinduism is only social. It is unmoral and inhuman to say the least. What is unmoral and inhuman easily becomes immoral, inhuman and infamous. 
— BR Ambedkar, 'Philosophy of Hinduism'.
 

This is why Ambedkar was deeply dissatisfied by a mere temple entry movement.

I didn’t launch the temple entry movement because I wanted the Depressed Classes to become worshipers of idols which they were prevented from worshiping or because I believed temple entry would make them equal members in and an integral part of the Hindu Society. So far as this aspect of the case is concerned I would advise the Depressed Classes to insist upon a complete overhauling of Hindu Society and Hindu theology before they consent to become an integral part of Hindu Society. I started temple entry Satyagraha only because I felt that was the best way of energizing the Depressed Classes and making them conscious of their position. As I believe I have achieved that purpose I have no more use for temple entry. I want the Depressed Classes to concentrate their energy and resource on politics and education and I hope that they will realise the importance of both.
— BR Ambedkar, 'Do Depressed Classes desire Temple Entry?'

We know that these misogynist and Brahminical views continue to hold sway in 21st century India – from caste violence against Dalits to urban middle classes practising untouchability. And here are some brave men on Twitter who protest that Hinduism is not violent.

[Click here to learn more about FGM]

It’s not just me of course, many many women have faced this kind of abuse in social media from desh bhakts who have no other work than to fantasise about rape and violence on women, and in their frustration, to count condoms that others get lucky enough to use.

Turning now from the criminally ignorant to the radical revolutionary Periyar:

If god is the root cause for our degradation destroy that god. If it is religion destroy it. If it is Manu Darma, Gita, or any other Mythology (Purana), burn them to ashes. If it is temple, tank, or festival, boycott them. Finally if it is our politics, come forward to declare it openly”.
— Veeramani, January 1981 (2005), 'Collected Works of Periyar EVR', Third Edition, Chennai. The Periyar Self-Respect Propaganda Institution, p. 489.

I stand on the shoulders of giants when I say that Hinduism is a violent religion.

I also believe that there are believing Hindus who are struggling from within to change the hideous aspects, and they face as much opposition as those of us who claim not to be religious. And yes, all religions are patriarchal and oppressive, and there are men and women within those faiths as well as those who have exited, who regularly battle it out. For instance, take this rally on International Women’s Day on March 8, in Mumbai, in which women of different faiths came together to protest notions of purity and hygiene that marginalise women, and to question the role of clerics and priests.

Also take a look at PK Yasser Arafath’s paper in Economic and Political Weekly (Vol. 49, Issue No. 49, 06 Dec, 2014) in which Arafath questions the ways in which certain Muslim/Islamist groups criticised the “Kiss of Love” protests in Kerala.

He argues that Muslim/Islamist organisations that conducted counter-protests against the “Kiss of Love” failed to comprehend the trajectory of Hindutva’s urbanspatial intervention, and have misread Islam’s own engagements with the “body”.

***

The case of Sudhir Chaudhary

Zee News Editors Sudhir Chaudhary and Samir Ahluwalia were arrested in 2012 after a complaint by Jindal Steel and Power Limited that they had demanded Rs 100 crore in return for not airing negative news against the firm. Chaudhary and Ahluwalia were released on bail later. Chaudhary and Ahluwalia were caught on camera demanding Rs 100 crore for not airing negative news against the firm.

That case is still going on, and in June 2015, a Patiala House court issued notices to them questioning their bail.

But wait, there’s more.
In 2007, Sudhir Chaudhary was head of a channel called Janmat. Where is that channel now? Why doesn’t it exist?

Because it was closed down after Chaudhary allegedly ran a fake sting operation on a school teacher for supposedly running a sex racket, as a result of which she was attacked by a mob on camera. She took the matter to court later and the channel was found guilty of manufacturing a sting (the “student” in the supposed sting turned out to be a journalist). A local businessman with a grouse against the teacher had allegedly connived with this courageous, ultra nationalist journalist Sudhir Chaudhary to frame her.

The channel was then closed down for a month and now runs as Live India.

The Indian Government banned the channel for a month due to the false sting. It was banned because it breached the Cable Networks Regulation Act, 1995, by broadcasting an admittedly doctored sting operation.

Is there a fit case for similar action against Zee News now?

The case of IBN 7 and Love Jehad

As for IBN 7 which on March 8 canvassed the views of the ati desh bhakt as to whether charges of sedition should be slapped against me, you can read details of what it did in 2009 here.

From the content it appears to have been made in October 2009, at the time the police presented its report to the Kerala High Court saying there was no evidence of in the state of Love Jihad, that alleged ploy by Muslim men to seduce Hindu women to Islam in order to conver them.But the video was uploaded on July 22, 2013.

This alleged investigation by IBN 7 is certainly shocking, but not for the reason you’d imagine. In the entire video of about 30 minutes there is not one shred of evidence presented. All you have is an extremely high-pitched commentary by IBN reporters that claims the existence of a widespread ring of Islamic Love Jihad – jis ka “baakayda manual bhi hai” – this manual is not shown to us, in fact, no evidence at all is shown to us. Indeed, after a series of claims and assertions, the commentary actually confesses that off camera, the police tell us the names of many organisations involved in this, but "saboot na hone ke chalte" (because there is no proof) we cannot reveal those names.

But it’s worse than giving us no evidence. There is outright misrepresentation of what people say. At one point, claiming to show us a Love Jihad ke haathon barbad ladki, there is a glimpse of a pixellated face and a girl’s voice says the following words in Malayalam “through the use of mobile phones, then in schools, through friends, in ice cream parlours, theatres, in these sorts of places…” it’s only a fragment, one cannot make out the context of what she is saying. Off camera a man’s voice asks something I couldn’t catch. She replies “..there is attraction…”

But on the screen appear in Hindi, as she is speaking, the words:
"Meri usse mulaqaat ek bus stop par hui thi. Vo roz mere peechhe aata tha. Kisi tarah mera number uske haath lag gaya. Voh roz phone karne laga. Mujhe laga ki vo mujhe pyar karta hai, par ye meri galat phehmi thi…” (I met him at a bus stop. He used to follow me every day. Somehow he got my number. He phoned me every day. I thought he loved me, but it was my misunderstanding….)

The viewer is led to believe that the Hindi words are a translation of what the woman says in Malayalam, even though her voice stops after that fragment. There is also a reference to a diary of the woman, but no pages from it are shown to us. The Hindi script on screen goes on to detail a situation in which this woman is kept in a house, many men come to her in cars, and so on. Not that any of this, even the Hindi words on the screen, mention Muslims or conversion, but this does not stop the IBN 7 reporters and anchor from repeating in a high decibel way, ad nauseam, that they are exposing through this, the Love Jihad campaign.

From other voice fragments in women’s voices (in Malayalam) it is clear that they are talking about common seduction techniques – for example, that men give clothes and cosmetics as gifts, take the girls on picnics and so on. Again, what the context is in which they say this is not clear. But while they do not mention Love Jihad or Muslims, the reporters’ commentaries, the Hindi voice-overs and Hindi text on screen keeps linking all this to both. The reporter says he has toured all over Kerala and found hundreds of girls are missing – what does this prove? Nothing, of course, but sure enough, the links are made by the anchor and reporter, to you guessed it, Love Jihad.

In the most shocking piece of dishonesty, the commentary presents the pixellated face supposedly of a father waiting for his daughter who went missing six months ago. The voice-over says that their home was then attacked by armed men who threatened them against going to the police, and told them they would never see their daughter again. The mother’s pixellated face and voice then appear, and what we heard in the voice-over is written in Hindi as she speaks, as if she is saying "then our house was attacked" and so on.

But what she is actually saying in Malayalam is this:

“She went away of her own wish. She did come back briefly once, and we tried our best to persuade her to stay. If she didn’t want to stay with us, we said we would put her up in the convent, but…”

If this blatant dishonesty is not a fit case for a complaint against IBN 7 under the Cable Networks Regulation Act, 1995, what is?

These are the desh bhakts, G Sampath calls it "goonda nationalism" – spewing violence and hatred, criminal extortionists and brazen falsifiers of facts.

No wonder so many of us prefer the proud anti-national company of Narmada Bachao Andolan, Soni Sori, Kabir Kala Manch…the list is endless.

Nivedita Menon is Professor at Centre for Comparative Politics & Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University. A version of this appeared first on Kafila.
 

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