The problem with JNU is that it’s a space for political correctness, not for understanding & questioning the real issues and reaching at clarity. If we see statistically too, the students who are able to make good careers and fly abroad are already a privileged batch with bundles of exposure with academia & globe. The underprivileged portion of students who get into this posturing ploy barely manage to get their M.Phils.’ and Ph.Ds. realised, and if they do, they lack proper skillset.
Tag: JNU
Once the guests entered and we (the students of the North East) wanted to enter the Koyna Mess, were blocked right at the gate by ABVP representatives working alongside the security guards. Moreover, when we were about to enter, most of us heard the term “Naxalites” being thrown at us.
The ABVP screamed at us, that we were “security threats”. The representatives also pushed and pulled the students at the forefront of the gathering. We were manhandled. They did not allow us to enter, calling us “Naxalites”. It was in this moment when the students immediately and collectively decided to sit down outside the event and continued with our silent protest.
After a while, a few representatives of ABVP came outside to tell us that they will ‘allow’ us inside but without our posters which were our signs of resistance. It was then that we collectively demanded an apology from the ABVP for calling us “Naxalites” and “security threats”, which they outrightly denied.
If they believe that with attacks like this they are going to scare us into silence, then they are gravely mistaken. The ideas of Gauri Lankesh, the ideas Rohith have outlived them. They cannot browbeat us into silence, neither with their jails, nor with their bullets. We proved it yesterday itself.
I joined Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) as a PhD candidate in Modern Indian History in 2015. Except for a few months delay in getting hostel, the University was largely welcoming. There were of course protests and sloganeering on various national and local issues. I remember the Student Union was on a hunger strike for a new hostel to be constructed. While JNU was already known for its political culture, I found that inside campus many students were aloof to organizations of the campus and were busy in their academic or personal life.
In last few days there have been several attempts to create a dogma that Krish allegedly committed suicide for personal reasons, but this argument neglects the story of Krish’s life, his thoughts shared in different blogs and even the trajectory of earlier Dalit students suicide cases. Many Dalits students in different university campuses have committed suicide, but if the casteist institutions, upper-caste faculty and peers are responsible for continuously alienating the marginalised studies, equally responsible are we as Dalit organisations members, faculty and students for not being able to provide timely help to the needy students.
We are failing so many of our students, those who come to our universities with singular dreams sparkling in their eyes, when they enter they want to believe that such a place as they have wished to break into from far-flung places and rough homes is the one that will succour them and give them light and water to grow. Krish Rajini was a poet in his soul, not just a scholar, he rode among the clouds on his first ever plane journey from Hyderabad to Delhi and spilled words on to his Facebook that transformed effortlessly into poetry for the sheer radiance of his experience. And so we killed not just a budding scholar but a poet too.
On the 3rd of February, ABVP called a bandh in Jai Narain Vyas University (JNVU), Jodhpur, forcibly stopping classes and demanding suspension of the organizers of a conference and police action against them, as well as against myself. Police complaints have now been lodged, and perhaps FIRs, we hear. The charge? The conference, and my lecture in particular, was anti-national.
Could you ever have been
a human being
in this country,
just a boy
with his share of
sorrow?
And could your mother
have been a mother after all,
your brother, a brother?
Jawaharlal Nehru University’s so-called freedom square is always packed with people every time a protest is called in the avowedly progressive institution –the crush of people at midnight last March spilling onto the roads to hear Kanhaiya Kumar speak is still seared in popular memory. But when I walked in for a series of public talks last Thursday, none of that spontaneous mobilization was visible.
Now that it is very clear to everybody that the most famous and influential Indian campuses such as UoH and JNU have proved that they cannot overcome their local petty ego problems/narrow-mindedness of the organisations, even in the face of Modi and attacks on the very idea of Higher Education, after carrying out heroic struggles and inspiring battles, beyond their means and thus inspiring the whole nation and even the world that all is not lost in India to fascists and their is fighting back and fighting, while thanking the campuses and their organisations and standing in full support of them, we will have to make the difficult but absolutely important choice of not looking towards the campus organisations for the directions or models for how to fight Hindu Nazis in power in india.
The presidential candidate for BAPSA – Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students Association – Rahul Sonpimple in the presidential debate on September 7. Without mincing words, Sonpimple exposed the so-called Left unity being bandied about in the shape of the AISA and SFI alliance.
Come Wednesday night, Jawaharlal Nehru University in the country’s capital will witness another session of the much awaited presidential debates. If the analyses and estimations from last year’s elections – which said that Kanhaiya Kumar’s speech swept all the floating votes toward his favour – are anything to go by, the night of the debate indeed is not a mere spectacle of wit, oratory and rhetoric, but also serious electioneering. But, this year’s elections look riveting and engrossing for another reason—the clear emergence of the Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students’ Association (BAPSA) as a force that has been systematically sussing out and exposing the casteism practiced by the Indian Left, particularly the parliamentary Left parties. With its call for the unity of the bahujan on a platform of ‘shared reality of different oppressions’, BAPSA is hoping to scrape together all such votes that have not been represented and respected by the erstwhile Unions.
Indeed, many in Kashmir are bitter, even though they give their unconditional solidarity to those hounded by the Indian state. They feel the protests so far have not understood the truth of the event: that its truth is not in lectures about “true” or “real” nationalism but in an embrace of sedition.
I am a northeast side country boy,
Chasing dreams in a city where they try to treat me like a toy
Never really understood the ploy
But I stood my ground, nah I ain’t being coy
My JNU comrades and friends, by doing what you have done thus far, you, like student rebels earlier have already begun to change the world for the better. This is a victory that nobody can snatch from you, a victory that has drawn unprecedented solidarity and support in your favour. Taking inspiration from this we shall continue to stand with JNU and together face the harder times ahead, ‘asking questions, chanting slogans, walking to the left where the heart resides’, taking one step back if necessary but making things difficult like hell for the fascists.
In fact, one of the failures of politics within the ‘University of Ideas’ has been its inability, while pointing out the horrors of Indian nationalism in Kashmir, to demonstrate the problems of nationalism within the so-called mainland.
As the philosopher Walter Benjamin noted, in a context not entirely dissimilar to one we are living through, “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” Rest assured, the casteist Hindu Right and the merit-wielding technocrats will not care whether the dead came draped in red or blue.
Scenario 1: A student leader in Delhi is arrested on charges of sedition, days after an event in a university triggers right-wing ire. The student…
Taken from Chittibabu Padavala’s Facebook post The regime not long ago couldn’t take the fierce and sustained student resistance of UoH, the enormous energies required…
Delhi, for all its self-righteousness over us “regionals” and with its moody earnestness, wont fight our battles. The fact that solidarity in and from Delhi matters in the “national narrative” is part of the problem and not part of the solution. Delhi and its ideologies represent, what we in Bangla call, the ghost in the mustard.
It is time to ask if this movement led by JNU can integrate – not co-opt – the plurality of metaphors that can constitute various nationalisms or alternative visions.
There has been a lot of talk about what exactly ‘Azadi’ (freedom) means, especially in the wake of Kanhaiya Kumar’s post release midnight speech at…
Although Comrade Kanhaiya Kumar has been granted Interim bail for six months, it is important that we peruse the order and opinions of Hon. Justice J. Pratibha Rani to understand deeply its ideological implications.
Arif Ayaz Parrey imagines the questioning of Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya by the Delhi police A thulla (passive aggressive term for a Delhi policeman)…
The BJP’s election promises were false. Its nationalism was never meant to be democratic. So far the BJP had at least pretended to work with democracy; now the façade is gone.
As the events at JNU have unfolded over the past week, there has been a stunned silence from the upper echelons of corporate India.
While the use of words like Azadi and plebiscite in multiple struggles across India can potentially create grounds for meaningful solidarity, Kashmiris have repeatedly witnessed that the appropriation of such terms rarely creates a space to debate the political status of Kashmir or resolve the longstanding issue through political means.
Last few days have seen several #AssamWithJNU #JusticeForRohith protests and rallies demanding justice for Rohith Vemula and against the assault on JNU, police crackdown and arrest…
I am an ex-student of JNU. I am a single woman living alone in a Room-on-the-Roof in Munirka DDA. I am one of those ex-DSU members whose comrades are being telecasted with photographs since yesterday in ZeeNews as the most wanted criminals in primetime.
Remembering Najeeb’s Disappearance from JNU and its Students’ Politics
The problem with JNU is that it’s a space for political correctness, not for understanding & questioning the real issues and reaching at clarity. If we see statistically too, the students who are able to make good careers and fly abroad are already a privileged batch with bundles of exposure with academia & globe. The underprivileged portion of students who get into this posturing ploy barely manage to get their M.Phils.’ and Ph.Ds. realised, and if they do, they lack proper skillset.
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