Top universities discuss 'discipline in campus'; students ask what discipline they are referring to
New Delhi: Days after administrative heads of some of the country's finest universities like the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia Islamia, Banaras Hindu University, Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Hamdard met on a webinar to call for increased "police involvement" to "discipline" a section of students at these varsities; student leaders who have in the last year or so led movements and been a part of change have questioned the way administrations look at them.
Student organisation leaders and members from JNU and JMI in the city ave called remarks made by professors at this webinar communal and a "method to disintegrate student voices". Students largely took issue with professors categorising them as those "interested" in academics and "rowdy elements with a different mindset and vested interests". The webinar was organised by JMI.
All universities that participated in the webinar have seen large scale student-led movements within their campuses time and again. Protests are a regular feature of the university. JNU Chief Proctor Dhananjay Singh said at the webinar, "A serious challenge was how the JNU campus was becoming a space to initiate and launch political agendas."
However, JNU Students' Union president Aishe Ghosh said that to students there is no distinction between academics and politics. "We, as JNU students, have never seen our university as an exclusion from society. When they speak about academics to be kept out of politics, we understand that academics cannot be kept out of politics because our policies are being driven by that (politics)," she told Millennium Post.
Citing the fee hike protest that shook the JNU campus last year, Ghosh said that it was "necessary" and if that is seen as political then "I would say it is both academic and political." She added, "For us to protest is for us to exist in the university. If we don't protest against fee hike, then we won't able to study here."
Arbab Ali, All India Students Association (AISA) member at Jamia said, "The role of police has become more vicious and communal. Now the police act as muscle for BJP and RSS and is actively involved in the suppression of dissent. It is not like that we don't fear the police. We fear it. How can we not? It was to the police's laathi charge that Minhajuddin lost his eye, it was to the police action that our library was vandalised and teargas shells hurled at students and their bones broken," he said.
He also said that by saying police "knows how to handle (the problem) in a more humanistic way" the VC was justifying the invasion of Jamia Millia Islamia campus and is calling the students the "problem".
"Students who practice dissent are the problem - meaning for Akhtar, dissent is the problem. And that has been exactly the case.
Ghosh meanwhile claimed that the proctor was a known ABVP activist. "So, when he says that students should be disciplined and more police interaction is needed to discipline students, firstly we need to question what discipline these teachers are talking about and what has their role been in this," she said.
