It was a chance encounter that brought me in contact with Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). A relative of mine wanted to visit someone at the university. I was an undergraduate student then and accompanied him. Upon reaching the hostel, we found the door of the room locked in which the said person lived. The room next door was open and as we hesitatingly enquired from the man, he casually said, "(he) must have gone for dinner. Please wait here, he will come. I am leaving, so when you leave, please lock the door and leave the key on the ledge of the room".

We never met the guy we were looking for but I came back with a resolve to return to that university as a student, and that I did and never regretted.

Much has already been written on the still unfolding story around Jawaharlal Nehru University. To summarise the story so far in brief, on the 9th of February, a few students (apparently belonging to some left factions sympathetic to Maoist groups) had organised a meeting on the occasion of third anniversary of Afzal Guru’s hanging, the person who was convicted and hanged on charges of conspiring to organise attacks on the Indian Parliament in 2001. While the necessary permissions to hold the meeting had been sought and duly granted, it was upon the objection of ABVP (Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad), a student organisation affiliated with the ruling BJP, that the permission to hold the meeting was withdrawn 15 minutes before the scheduled time.

When the news spread, students of various other groups came together to protest against the administration’s decision to stop the meeting. Among those present was also the Student Union President Kanhaiya Kumar. The impromptu public meeting got into a verbal spat with the supporters of ABVP shouting from one side while the others shouting from the other. It was in this melee that certain students shouted slogans of ‘Bharat teri barbadi tak, jang rahegi’, and ‘Bharat tere tukde honge hazar’. ABVP, led by a BJP Parliamentarian from Delhi, followed it up with a formal complaint to the government.

It was then that both the Home Minister and the Minister for Human Resource Development gave strong statements calling for action against ‘anti-nationals’. Police swung into action immediately after that, arresting Kanhaiya slapping him with sedition charges and went into action looking for other ‘culprits’.

In the next few days, the situation became polarised enough across the spectrum where media, common people, academia have taken stringent stance for or against JNU itself, one side calling it a hotbed of anti-nationals and traitors subsidised on tax payers’ money, the other calling it a clear attack on an institution emblematic of freedom of speech, free thinking, right to dissent etc.

Since then violence has escalated and a bunch of lawyers have twice beaten up journalists covering the news, people defending Kanhaiya and even Kanhaiya himself. Police, on this front, has been a mute spectator, calling these minor ‘scuffles’. A band of BJP supporters have been congregating in front of the university itself shouting slogans against the ‘traitors’, calling for their hanging.

Students and teachers and JNU alumni have got together and led a series of protest marches inside and outside the campus including in other cities. In the meanwhile, national and international academic community has come out strongly in support of JNU, criticising the attempt to muzzle the culture of free speech and democratic spirit symbolised by the university.

This last part is the crux of the matter. JNU since its inception in 1969, has traditionally been seen not just as a bastion of left politics, but more clearly a centre of alternative politics, embodied in its everyday life and practices. Its student union elections are perhaps the only one conducted by the students themselves in a festive manner despite late night passionate and polarised debates. My teacher late Prof. Bipan Chandra used to proudly say that JNU was the only place in north of India where a girl could roam around alone at 2am in the morning without any fear. The jealous Delhi University fraternity used to call it ‘an island’, and we took it as a complement, saying that an island it was, but a utopia, which was physically possible.

So why are the thugs let lose by Modi and his ilk targeting this university? The answer in one sense is by now clear to all, that the university symbolises a radical ideological resistance to Right wing Hindu fundamentalism despite a growing presence of ABVP inside the campus.

But to get to the bottom of the recent spate of attacks on the universities and academic institutions, we will have to go back to the period of NDA 1, led by Vajpayee and Advani in the late 1990s. Murali Manohar Joshi, then HRD minister, swung into action, changing curriculums of the schools, putting in its own ideological thinkers in charge of the institutions, advocating for courses in astrology among other things, pushing for a re-writing of history to wean away the influence of the ‘corrupting’ Marxism and western liberal thought. In short, what the NDA 1 did was to take over the institutions and change its direction as per their agenda called ‘saffronisation of education’ within the overall discourse of academic politics.

It has not been a new thing. World over, ruling ideologies have done the same to perpetuate their ideas and beliefs. Cut to 2014 when NDA 2 came to power after a ten year hiatus, it did certain things which are quite symbolic in nature. It brought in a small time tv actress at the helm of affairs to run the education portfolio. It brought in a certain Sudarshan Rao, with not a single paper published in any academic journal, as the Chairman of Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), the premier institute to promote historical work in India. It brought in another small time actor infamous for acting in C grade movies to lead the premier Film and Television Institute of India (FTII).

The results, as are clear now, have been devastating, with a constant assault on the autonomy of educational institutions backed by ABVP present inside. So, you have Dalit student groups targeted in places like IIT Madras, University of Hyderabad where ABVP colluded with the ministries at the centre to bring pressure on administration to target these students resulting in students being sacked, arrested and, in the case of Rohith Vemula, also committing suicide.

Of course, Sudarshan Rao publicly stated his only aim in his new role at ICHR was to prove that Mahabharata was a real historical incident. Students went on a long strike to protest against the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan who remained unfazed till the end.

Strategy of the present Modi dispensation is clear: unlike the previous NDA rule, they are not interested in taking over of these institutions. They simply want to subvert them, destroy them. Had they been serious about learning, they would have at least tried to get serious right wing ideologues into these institutions. This is practically what Chandan Mitra, a BJP journalist turned politician, advocated two days ago, ‘close down the university’. It only shows Modi’s deep rooted suspicion of any kind of intellectual culture (even of right wing variety), which in the end will always pose a threat to right wing ideologies.

We have effectively transited from an age where you countered left wing books with the right wing ones to the ‘era of book burning’. Unfortunately, it is riding on the back of a larger public culture of aversion to nuanced understanding of things, including nationalism. It is heartening to see that JNU teachers have begun a series of lectures on the idea of nationalism as public educators and not just educators of students.

But we need a much larger push to drive debates on two things: one, that truth is never, never, black and white and second, among many other things, nationalism is a contested concept!