Mumbai: In a controversial turn of events, the management of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, has suddenly, at the very last minute, cancelled a two-day conference organised to discuss the ‘Cultures of the Political Left in Modern India’.

This questionable decision – announced past midnight, just a day before the scheduled event – has left most participants both confused and upset. While the official announcement did not give any reason for this sudden decision, sources in IIT Bombay did confirm that the director took the decision following a call from a “senior bureaucrat” from the Ministry of Education asking to cancel the conference.

The two-day conference, as noted on the official website, is funded by the ‘Institute of Eminence Cell, Government of India’. According to many participants, including PhD scholars and senior teaching faculty from many universities across India and some from overseas, the decision was announced at around 1 am on December 11. The conference was scheduled to start on December 12.

“We had already boarded a train from Delhi and covered half the distance. We suddenly got a call from one of the organisers informing us about the decision. They didn’t know what led to the sudden cancellation either,” a participant told The Wire.

In all, already, 150 papers have been submitted following a call issued at the beginning of November. Of them, 15 papers were selected, a participant confirmed. One speaker, Juned Shaikh, an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was to participate in the conference online. These conferences and paper presentations, while leading to important discussions, are also crucial for career furtherance, one PhD scholar from a central university said.

The papers that have been submitted cover a range of topics. To mention a few examples, Devesh Khatarker, a PhD scholar in sociology at the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences at IIT-B, was to present his paper on ‘The Role of The Din Bandhu (a newspaper run by the Satyashodhak movement led by Jotiba Phule) during the Sweepers’ Strikes of 1889 Bombay’.

Yet another paper ‘Tracing the dialogue between Marxism-Leninism and folk culture: Emergence of Jan Sanskriti Manch as a cultural movement’ by two PhD scholars Mohammed Kamran Siddiqui and Shivam Mogha was to be presented at the conference.

A senior scholar participating has been quoted as saying that some papers were critical of the Left movement too. “That’s what we do as scholars. We are not party cardholders and do not aim to be either,” one academic, who would have participated in the conference said.

The conference, organised by Paulomi Chakraborty, Ratheesh Radhakrishnan and Sharmistha Saha, all teachers at IIT-B, aimed to “bring together scholars engaged in identifying and examining the histories of the cultural practices of the political Left in modern India”.

The organisers have not yet officially commented on the controversy publicly, especially on the question of the motive behind this sudden cancellation.

In an email, however, sent out by the organisers to the participants, they state: “Following the directive from the IIT Bombay director that the conference on the ‘Cultures of the Political Left in Modern India’ cannot be held due to unavoidable circumstances, we are forced to cancel the event.” While the reason is not clear in the email, the organisers have specified that they were “forced” to cancel the event. 

Meanwhile, to questions put to them by The Wire, seeking a response to the sudden decision of cancellation, IIT-B director Subhasis Chaudhuri said, “Since it was not under any of the six verticals under the Institute of Eminence, we were informed it could not be supported under that budget.” He, however, did not elaborate why this decision was taken just a day before the event and if the budget was not sanctioned, how had the institute taken the decision to go ahead with the conference in the first place.

The Institutes of Eminence was set up as a recognition scheme to empower higher education institutes in India by the University Grants Commission in 2017. The IoEs selected from public sector are given a grant of Rs 1,000 crore by the government for five years.

Significantly, only a few hours before the director announced the cancellation of the conference, Legal Rights Observatory (LRO), a right-wing legal collective had raised objections over the “motive” behind organising the event. “IITs are meant for technological education/research; diverting funds to further obsolete Leftist/ Communist ideologies is a criminal act,” the organisation claimed on its official Twitter handle.

Education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, the Union education ministry’s official handle, and Union home minister Amit Shah were tagged in the tweet. LRO sought “severe punishment” for organising the conference.

Speaking on this issue, students at IITB say this is not the first time that a faculty-organised event has run into trouble. In the wake of the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, and two other imminent countrywide exercises, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the National Population Register (NPR), a conference discussing the law had been organised on campus. The faculty members were allegedly asked to cancel the conference. The organising team and the administration allegedly reached a middle ground after the mention of NRC was removed from the conference’s topic.

Similarly, student-organised events too have been cancelled several times in the past years, more particularly after 2014.

In 2015, a lecture titled ‘Kashmir: The Blind Side of Indian Nationalism’ was denied permission by the IIT-B administration. Westminster university professor Dibyesh Anand was scheduled to speak at the event.

In 2019, another event organised by students to discuss the abrogation of Article 370 was also denied permission. The students, however, had gone ahead with organising the talk inside the institute’s park instead of at the scheduled venue. 

Policing academia

The NDA regime, post 2014 has made quite a fetish of policing the campuses jn an attempt to control the debates and dialogues that emerge from withing student scholarship.

 Just two months ago, a controversial circular issued by the Delhi University required every department as also students organisations to seek ‘police permission’ before any seminars or discussions were organised. Though this ‘advisory’ was purportedly issued following police advice after an incident at Miranda House in which men scaled walls, entered premises and allegedly harassed women students during Diwali festivities on October 14, the the advisory does not mention the character or nature of events it seeks to police. Does it for instance also apply to students protests seminars with speakers and listeners from outside the college attending, and performance events as well? 

Advisory: ‘Shouldn’t be opened for all’

Issued by proctor Rajni Abbi, on October 27, the advisory stated that the guidelines were being issued “in the light of an advisory received from the police department”.

These guidelines were categorised under six points. It stated that “no event without proper permission of police should be organised or in case of emergency/ lack of time, at least one-day prior intimation should be given to the police station Maurice Nagar.”

Moreover, the advisory stated that only “a few college/ department students” should be allowed entry if events or fests are to be organised. It added that “entry should be allowed only after registration for the event” and that too “with the ID of the college”. “It should not be opened for all,” the advisory notes.

DU has also advised the colleges to deploy volunteers at the time of events and the advisory stated that the “number of volunteers may also be intimated to the police”. Quite apart from police permission, the advisory reminded the colleges to take “necessary permission from other departments, like fire and electricity” for such events.

Finally, it added that if any of the guidelines were not followed then the concerned college or department shall be held “solely responsible” for any untoward incident that may happen during any such event organised by them.

Related:

IIT Bombay E-Summit 2022 faces flak for inviting Arnab Goswami and Sudhir Chaudhary as speakers

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Former President of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner, and the former President of Brazil,Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil.19 November 2007. Fabio Rodrigues Pozzebom/A. Brasil/Wikimedia Commons.

Lenin Moreno won the presidential elections in Ecuador and the Latin American Left, after several consecutive setbacks, has been able to take a breath of fresh air. But it is rather a sigh, for Moreno lacks the charisma, the economic resources and the popular support needed to carry on with the Correísta agenda. The challenge in Ecuador and in most Latin American countries is not to resist the end of the progressive cycle – a process with growing contradictions and setbacks – but how to rearm the forces working for progressive social change.

The news is good, for there are other forces on the left showing the way: they are pulling off micro-revolutions at the local level. Those who remain in power, and those who want to get it back, should take good notice and start reinventing themselves if they want to avoid definitely losing the battle against the steadily advancing Right throughout the continent.

End of cycle

The wave that started with Hugo Chávez in 1999 was an innovative proposal: a reaction to neoliberal policies and to the need to rebuild politics with the "kick them all out" social demand as a backdrop. Evo Morales, Rafael Correa and Lula da Silva brought new players into the political system, whole sectors of the population who had never been a part of it, and Kirchnerism too activated previously apathetic social sectors. Bolivia and Ecuador reformed their constitutions to include indigenous rights and the rights of nature. Tens of millions became middle class, public services were expanded, and wealth distribution improved.

Opponents explain that these advances were due to high global commodity prices. They indeed made it possible, but they do not explain it. There were other high commodity price periods in history, such as that of the agro-mining export model (between 1870 and the First World War), or the 1970s, which it is doubtful whether they in fact contributed to advancing rights. As opposed to these previous periods, an agenda was now in place for the extension of rights.

We have of course been talking about the end of the progressive cycle for some time now. The fall in the price of commodities left bare many of the contradictions of the region’s left-wing governments. Some critics, both on the Left and the Right, complain that these governments consolidated the extractive model, re-primarized the economy, signed free trade agreements, and implemented neoliberal adjustment plans, alienating popular sectors and indigenous groups who had been supporting them.

Most serious still, they became a force that stopped looking ahead. They entrenched themselves in government, concentrating and verticalizing power, co-opting other institutions and the media, and furiously resisting any criticism. I myself heard one of the main figures of the Workers' Party in Brazil complain about the "ungrateful" people who were taking to the streets to protest. We have recently seen the followers of impeached Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo reach an agreement with the current president, Horacio Cartes.

That is, the Left has stopped listening to the street. In the more extreme cases of late Chavism in Venezuela and Sandinism in Nicaragua, the Left has reached absolute degradation.

At the same time, the Right has been reinventing itself. It has stopped talking about the past and has begun to promise a future. With a positive discourse and plenty of colour balloons, it is now competing for public spaces by organizing marches, or choses to create political parties (the Republican Proposal in Argentina, the NOVO Party in Brazil, Creating Opportunities in Ecuador, the Anti-Corruption Party in Honduras), instead of knocking at the doors of the military barracks, as it used to do in the past.

Of course, this has allowed leaders linked to the Panama Papers to take power, it has made it possible for a bunch of deputies and senators involved in corruption cases to remove a president from office on charges of administrative irregularities, and has led a banker linked to the worst crisis in the history of Ecuador to having real chances of becoming president.

There are no contradictions this time around: the neoliberal agenda is coming back, social spending is being frozen, salary increases are being negotiated in a Spartan way, while payment to international creditors and tax exemption to mining companies are being decreed.

This is why it is crucial that the Left (in all its diversity) should renew itself. Not to romantically long for the return of those gone by, but to reinvent itself. Which means proposing again an agenda for the expansion of rights, for the redistribution of income, for political autonomy, for diversity and for defending the environment – and carrying it out.

Political experimentation

The good news is that this agenda is already under way. Not in the parties’ establishment, but in the streets. A constellation of creative initiatives is making its way, experimenting from below with new narratives and new power forms. Traditional groups and social movements which defend human rights, biodiversity, sustainable economies, inclusion and gender diversity are now being joined by actors who are also contending for political power.

The Wikipolititians in Guadalajara, Mexico, are pursuing a national strategy aiming at changing the noxious relationship between money and politics, and they are not only proposing it but actually following it.

Former Chilean student leaders who are fighting in Congress for public education are currently organizing the Broad Front, which includes Valparaiso’s municipal experience.

Porto Alegre in Brazil is experimenting with citizen candidacies. And in Brazil also, the Activist Bench has been calling upon a great variety of organizations to support candidates from different parties who defend agendas for citizen participation and the inclusion of Afro-descendants, feminists and LGBTI people.

In the Colombian periphery, a group linked to the Green Alliance won the elections, established the first open government platform in the country and is now experiencing with creative teaching in public schools.

In Nicaragua, a political party is emerging that intends to organize itself through "sociocracy", a decision-making methodology which avoids verticality. And they are all looking very closely across the ocean at the two women mayors of Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, ​​who are constantly innovating in participatory and collaborative public policy mechanisms.

For reasons of virtue, survival, or strategy, the Left must necessarily get back to listening to the streets. This is what recently elected Lenin Moreno in Ecuador, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and the Coalition of Parties for Democracy in Chile must face if they want to stay in power, the Workers’ Party and Kirchnerism if they want to get it back, and Morena in Mexico if they want to win it next year.

Matías Bianchi is a political scientist with a PhD from the Institute d´Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) and the director of the think tank Asuntos del Sur. He tweets as @matiasfbianchi
 

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