Month: November 2019

Indeed, the current Nobel Prize Winner for Economics, Abhijit Banerjee of MIIT, Boston, might find it both ironical and surprising. As a former student of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning (CESP) in the School of Social Sciences (SSS) in JNU in the early 1980s, he would know that JNU students have never been violent. Since the BJP-led government has come to power at the Centre, and since former JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested on charges which are yet to be proved, their relentless protests have been protracted, peaceful, passionate and unarmed, but never violent.

Except in May, 1983, and Banerjee, like many of us, former students of JNU, would know it too well.

In the scorching summer of May 1983, an epic battle was fought inside the campus when Indira Gandhi was prime minister. Earlier, the entire campus had opposed her and Sanjay Gandhi during the Emergency, students were packed off to jail, and Maneka Gandhi, herself a student then, was not really loved on the campus. In 1982, Mrs Gandhi was first stopped while delivering her speech by the entire campus; there was chaos, police lathicharge, slogan-shouting and scuffles. She had to leave the campus with a simmering wound to her ego and her heart.

It would really hurt, considering that she was the founder of this prestigious university named after her father, built on the vision and idealism of Jawaharlal Nehru, and which was meant to compete with world class campuses like Oxford and Cambridge in terms of academic excellence and intellectual rigour.

In May 1983, after a prolonged struggle and ‘peaceful gherao’ of the vice-chancellor, the then Lt Governor of Delhi, Jagmohan, who later became a BJP loyalist, ordered a violent commando action in JNU, the first in its history. Surely, this was Indira Gandhi’s revenge against the prodigal rebels. In anger and retaliation, there was students’ violence – short-lived, scattered, with just about a handful involved, and momentary. It was immediately controlled by the students’ leadership, and no violence has since been reported for over four decades. Thereby, after the armed commandos broke the strike, students stood in a long queue and courted arrest peacefully at Jhelum Lawns in JNU. Sine die was declared on the campus, and all the hostels were shut.

Almost 400 male students and 50 girl students were then imprisoned in Tihar Jail, Delhi, as ‘political prisoners’ for around two weeks. Abhijit Banerjee (along with this reporter, a first semester MA student), was one of them. Scores of charges were labeled against them. Several student leaders, including the president of the JNU Students’ Union, were expelled. Indeed, one of the former vice-chancellors had then remarked: “JNU students are not violent. They are argumentative.”

Since then, JNU has witnessed long struggles and resistance, on local, national and international issues, including protests against the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing in June 1989, indefinite hunger strikes, struggles across police barricades, day and night vigils outside the UGC office at Bahadurshah Zafar Marg in Delhi, and the prolonged struggle after 2016 when students were picked up by the cops, Kanhaiya was beaten up by rogue lawyers at Patiala House courts, doctored videos were planted in a certain TV channel, and JNU, under siege, was condemned and branded as a hub of “anti-national” elements by the BJP propaganda machinery, its government, and its loyalist media.

It was then that the finest minds from the campus and outside gave lectures to packed audiences of students at the Freedom Square outside the vice-chancellor’s office contesting and debating the idea of nationalism, nation-state, the freedom struggle, secular democracy, and the fact that the university is a center for the ‘adventure of ideas’, as idealized by Nehru in the first prospectus of JNU. Clearly, the vice-chancellor did not care to listen to even one such illustrious lecture by great academics, civil society leaders, and brilliant current and former student leaders. This was probably because he does not carry the intellectual, political and academic inheritance of JNU as a staunchly progressive, secular and pluralist university with a deep-rotted pro-poor and egalitarian essence, where debate, discussion and ideas open new windows of enlightenment, inside and outside the classroom. Surely, the vice-chancellor, had a different, a more sinister, agenda, and it was as clear as daylight.

As an RSS loyalist, he wanted to destroy the original essence of the campus, terrorise and tame it, and consequently turn it into a kind of commercial, subservient factory which can only produce conformist robots and clichéd consumerist brand images, not critical thinkers who would doubt everything, and who would want to create a better and more beautiful world. Young minds who would identify with the dreams of Rohith Vemula, a scientist who committed suicide after being hounded for months. Original, non-dogmatic minds who would make a synthesis between Karl Marx and Babasaheb Ambedkar, Kabir and Bhagat Singh, Pink Floyd and folk music, Rabindra Nath Tagore and Munshi Premchand. Clearly, he has failed in his diabolical project. That, however, has made him more relentless, more revengeful, and more and more unthinking.

The current agitation draws from the original principal of JNU as a central university which will represent widely women, minorities, and castes and classes from the most marginalized and backward economic index and geographical zones of India. Surely, students from Presidency in Calcutta or St. Stephen’s in Delhi are welcome, but not at the expense of young minds from the backyards of Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Eastern UP, Tamil Nadu, Bengal, the North-east and Jharkhand. The Old Admission Policy, which was scrapped after the May 1983 agitation, was a reflection of this original principle.

According to the Old Admission Policy, conceived after rigorous surveys and studies on the ground across India by the Centre for Regional Studies and Planning (CSRD/SSS), students were given extra ‘deprivation points’ based on regional, geographical, social and economic deprivation. It was not a standard ‘reservation policy’ based on pre-determined quotas. The students-faculty committees were actively involved in determining the deprivation points during and after the national entrance exams. There was, of course, the 22.5 per cent reservation for SC/ST students. This was the first time almost filled in 1989-90 when the Solidarity-led JNU Students’ Union led by Independent Students had swept the JNU elections.

Later, after many struggles, other forms of progressive incentives were added, including for students from extremely backward castes etc. The hostel fee and the minimum security was part of this egalitarian legacy. A large number of students in the campus, including children of safai karamcharis and mess workers, acquired high quality education in JNU because of these policies, defended and fought by successive students’ unions, and backed by the faculty.

Almost 40 to 50 per cent of students in JNU come from deprived backgrounds. This year a security guard has qualified in a language course. JNU nourishes this democratic atmosphere whereby economic background is no ground for collective aspirations, great idealism, peaceful political struggles and brilliant academic contribution to the university’s intellectual culture. Study and struggle, theory and praxis, research and grassroots politics, thereby, become part of a unique synthesis, creating not robots, but truly creative and critical minds. No wonder, JNU has contributed across the spectrum in India and all over the world — in politics, academics, sciences, journalism and media, even theatre and the arts. The BJP government and its vice-chancellor should thereby realize that two of its own Union cabinet ministers are from JNU.

That is why the unprecedented police violence on a peaceful march of JNU students to Parliament, against the hostel fee hike, makes a jarring note. The decision, as usual, was taken arbitrarily, with no discussion and debate, in a campus where most decisions are part of a democratic consensus, including academic decisions, or day-to-day decisions in the hostel or general body meetings. Surely, the wounds hurt and they will hurt very badly in the days to come.

Surely, the vice-chancellor and the government must move towards dialogue, consensus and reconciliation. They should know by now, that come what may, and however repressive may be the state apparatus, JNU is not going to crawl or bend. The muscle-flexing Hobbesian doctrine of being ‘Short, Nasty and Brutish’ will obviously not work in this campus. Instead, it might spark many more fires in other campuses in the country.

(The writer is a former president of Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union (1989-90)

Two suicides recently in Calcutta on the same day rudely shook the collective conscience of its citizens. In the tragic case of an 18-year old girl who came to the city to study nursing in a leading medical college death came by way of her hanging herself from the ceiling fan of the hostel room. Samapti Ruidas, who did very well in higher secondary school leaving exam with an average score of 91 per cent, had stars in her eyes when she took admission for a degree in nursing.

Full of life as is the case of girls of her age, Samapti was liked by her classmates. She did not betray any suicidal tendencies except for repeatedly complaining of difficulties she was facing in negotiating the subjects in English. Her father who earns his daily wage by painting buildings borrowed a big amount must be at an usurious rate to finance her study and stay in Calcutta in the hope that the family would see better times once the daughter had earned the nursing degree.

Unfortunately, what the girl didn’t anticipate that for her having all through studied in Bengali, mastering the nursing text in English would prove to be impossible. According to some doctors attached to the college where she was studying and also the police, the feeling of inadequacy of not being good in English and the gnawing fear that her ambition of becoming a paramedic was to collapse, drove her into depression which, however, remained unnoticed.

The other case involved a 74-year old retired cop Asim Mukherjee who took a fatal leap from the fourth floor of the building where he lived with his wife. Here is a case of the victim suffering from depression for quite some time which further deepened as his wife was diagnosed with life-threatening illness. According to the police, Mukherjee attempted suicide twice before. Here is an instance of a man already suffering from depression could not cope with the prospect of loneliness if the ailing wife would predecease him.

The above two cases fall in a pattern. If you come across a woman in India suffering from depression, subject to troubled moods and disturbed brains and slowly becoming unrecognisable even to her relatives and friends, she is one of every four women and every ten men suffering from a disease which has many layers of severity all leading to ebbing of life. Of course relief is there if the victim of depression herself or her near ones will seek medical consultation for her. The earlier the better. The dreaded disease does not spare any sections of society. For example, leading film actor Deepika Padukone became a victim of depression which she openly admitted in a TV interview with Barkha Dutt. Consultation, medication and the care of her mother who came to live with her in Mumbai and ensure that she didn’t miss out on medicine and parental love.

Having herself suffered the trauma of a dreadful existence, Deepika thought of creating an institution to help people stranded in a twilight zone. Her ‘The Live Laugh Love Foundation’ has been formed with the objective to reduce the “stigma, spread awareness and change the way we look at mental health. This is a platform where you can seek help for yourself or a loved one, find comprehensive knowledge, connect with professionals and find comfort knowing that you are not alone.” The last point is particularly important for there are many instances of victims of depression being slowly deserted by friends and relatives leaving them confused and condemned to loneliness. The spread of depression here should ideally be viewed in the context of the World Happiness Index 2018, which measures happiness in 156 countries where India slipped 11 places to find itself in the 133th position. It does not say well of the Modi government that people in neighbouring countries, including China and Pakistan are found happier than us. Some consolation that we are found happier than people in the war torn Afghanistan.

It is well proven cutting across nations that once a person is overtaken by a feeling of loneliness deprived of people to whom they can open up runs the risk of developing suicidal tendencies. Depression if not attended to at early stages could play havoc with individuals. Without proper counselling and medical attention, a stage is reached when depression if not leading to suicide could leave the victims emotionless and inert. According to the World Health Organisation, human brain disorder due to depression is the most acute in India, followed by China and the US. WHO says at least 6.5 per cent of Indian population suffers from some form of serious mental disorder. It is not that cure is not available for the suffering ones. But sadly the country has an “extreme shortage of mental health workers such as psychologists, psychiatrists and doctors.”

From celebrities like Van Gogh (37), Ernest Hemingway (61) and Virginia Woolf (59) to ordinary people will die by suicide for a variety of complex reasons. Specific issues leading people to turn suicidal are as different as their DNA, involving chains of events, which are not always fathomable.

In the meantime, National Crime Records Bureau says in a report that daily wage earners (DWEs) have the largest share of people killing themselves among all occupational groups. The distress of DWEs, who are among the most economically deprived section in the lowest strata of society in terms of income and spending power was sought to be ameliorated through schemes like rural employment guarantee scheme and old age pension. What, however, is not understood why DGEs should be made to work at less than minimum wages for agricultural labourers.

The latest suicide figures relate to 2016. DWEs ending their lives by committing suicide at 25,164 were up 5.7 per cent over the previous year. That they as a group are exposed to most severe economic hardship is borne out by the suicide of 11,379 farmers and agricultural labourers in the same year.

Explaining the reason for the acute privation of DWEs leading many of them to commit suicide, Anamitra Roychowdhury of Jawaharlal Nehru University  told business daily Mint:  “Consecutive years of drought in 2014 and 2015 likely increased the supply of labour to the non-farm sector, impacting wages and availability of work…. Growth in real wages for casual labourers halved between 2004 and 2017… also paints a dismal picture for the non-farm sector.”

The November 8, 2016 demonetisation which played havoc with the economy and now the severe downturn felt in all sectors will further raise the level of deprivation of weaker sections. It will not come as a surprise if more and more heavily indebted DWEs and farmers commit suicide to end their miseries.