An opinion piece that seems to run contrary to prevailing emotions, especially at a time so raw after the recent violence in JNU, might seem insensitive. However, it is also important to make pertinent observations in the face of certain perceptions being presented as the only progressive-liberal narrative. This piece tries to analyse certain aspects of this incident with a little more context and also from the point of view of someone who attempts to follow the Ambedkarite path.

At the outset, this commentary does not condone any form of violence. There are no two opinions here about the perpetrators and their intentions, much as Delhi Police and the JNU authorities might want to obfuscate. The nature of the violence has to be condemned in the severest terms. The injuries sustained by the JNU students and teachers is a matter of grave concern and every attempt must be made to prosecute the perpetrators.

But one has to point out, rather painfully at the current juncture, that it is only with the rise of dalit-bahujan discourse, representation and voice in JNU – especially in the form of student organizations like BAPSA and BASO – that one at least witnesses an increased foregrounding of the dalit-bahujan world. The acknowledgement of its revered leaders, especially Dr. Ambedkar, whose photo is now totemically held aloft in each protest in the “Lal Salaam-Neel Salaam (and sometimes Satrangi Salaam)” declarations is a relatively recent phenomenon.

But to gain this foothold, this other discourse – other than the Left and Right discourse – has had to battle great odds to establish itself within spaces like JNU. As JNU dalit scholar Jitendra Suna recounted in a piece titled Death of a Historian in Center for Historical Studies, JNU, his advice to PhD scholar Muthukrishnan (who committed suicide):  “[Y]ou have to be cautious about your CHS centre. You have to think what kind of questions you are raising in the classes. You have to be careful. This centre is very much Brahminical.” Suna was also in the news recently during the JNU fee-hike protests and wrote a piece where he took a stance at variance with the rosy narrative about affordable education being disseminated regarding that agitation.

One cannot deny that student politics at JNU has been dominated until now by the institutional Left. Let’s perform a quick rundown of the major student left unions in JNU and their political affiliations. AISA, whose members have been JNUSU presidents thrice in a row since 2016,  is the student wing of CPI (ML)-Liberation; SFI, whose member is the current JNUSU president, is a student wing of CPI(M); AISF with certain mixed genealogy but a decided left bias (Kanhaiya Kumar was an AISF member); and, DSF has had connections with SFI. The DSU does not contest elections but it also harbors relations with left ideologies.

There are a few key takeaways here – and none that have not been made independently before by others.

One, we can clearly see the institutional Left’s hold in JNU student politics. This comes off as stark when seen in the background of the fact that the Left has steadily lost its position among the people of India, even where and when it had their votes in the first place (West Bengal, Tripura, Kerala). So, how exactly should one trust ideologies and programmes which have not been able to establish a hold in people’s hearts and which have not been able to make any dent in the capitalist system their ideologies urge them to struggle against? How does JNU’s left politics become a beacon of hope for the marginalised and disenfranchised?

Secondly, the Indian Left has had the most difficult time in its analysis of the Indian society in terms of its non-class cleavages, especially those of caste. That category has always been problematic for the Left and they’ve endeavoured mightily to have it subsumed in the economic condition of the laboring class. The landless in India are mostly Dalits so their condition has more to do with the land issue than with issues of their social, non-class hierarchy i.e. caste – has been one of the leading arguments of the Indian left. JNU’s left student groups have only very recently, under duress and the pressures to appear politically correct ad historically relevant begun exhibiting a lukewarm enthusiasm towards issues of caste.

As Dr. Ambedkar had observed in Annihilation of Caste: “If Socialists are not to be content with the mouthing of fine phrases, if the Socialists wish to make Socialism a definite reality then they must recognize that the problem of social reform is fundamental and that for them there is no escape from it. That, the social order prevalent in India is a matter which a Socialist must deal with, that unless he does so he cannot achieve his revolution and that if he does achieve it as a result of good fortune he will have to grapple with it if he wishes to realize his ideal, is a proposition which in my opinion is incontrovertible. He will be compelled to take account of caste after the revolution if he does not take account of it before the revolution.”

Academic-activist Sujatha Surepally had similarly written for the website Round Table India, “We, the great comrades, revolutionaries and activists comfortably can speak about things which are not visible practically, like Imperialism, Iraq War, Capitalism etc. Endlessly we speak and we write. There we don’t see which caste person is speaking and of what class, it is considered as universal. But in India, the caste ghost is so huge that it cuts across all ideologies. Caste is capital here, it is feudal as well, it is an investment and it is labour, it is production.”

It is not as though the Indian dalit-bahujans have themselves not been aware of the issue of rural servitude and landlessness. Jotiba Phule’s Shetkaryache Asud is a chronicle of the oppression suffered by the rural agriculturists in Maharashtra. Phule’s analysis is centered on local Brahmanical deceit and extortion – but a version of that could be extended to other parts of the country and to more modern times as well. Dr. Ambedkar was also acutely aware of the situation and had made his own suggestions regarding land ceiling, redistribution and collective farming: “Neither Consolidation nor Tenancy Legislation can be of any help to the 60 millions of Untouchables who are just landless labourers…Only collective farms on the lines set out in the proposal can help them” (States and Minorities, Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Vol I p. 411 and elsewhere).

So, despite what the honoured Ms. Seetharaman tweeted about JNU being “the place…[which]…was one for fierce debates & opinions,” one can conclude that in much of political debates and opinions it was the party-Left position and agenda that has been offered as the perspective from the left. This also means that we cannot really expect any new left politics from JNU if all the student union members do is parrot party-lines. Kanhaiya Kumar ended up contesting elections on CPI party ticket – he has not gone on to spread any new political vision or offer any key insights into India’s social issues.

There is no doubt that there other spaces and avenues in JNU where there is vigorous debates and opinions bing exchanged, but in the political sphere, JNU offers an ossified Indian-Left culture. Merely sitting in front of large Ambedkar posters or chanting Jai Ambedkar in times of their conflicts does not indicate a fundamental conviction about and commitment to the dalit-bahujan cause.

There are several non-traditional-Left political models available in the world – maybe they are not all as wildly successful as one would have hoped but one cannot deny that they have tried to define their own brand of regional politics. The Bolivarian experiment in Venezuela, Evo Morales’ movement in Bolivia, the Podemos movement in Spain, Jose Mujica in Uruguay – these are examples of political formations which have had roots and/or association with traditional left parties but yet have gone on to forge their own version of politics, unique to the needs of their regions and countries.

So why JNU’s brand of left politics should be a rallying point for anyone is not obvious and self-explanatory. To many, seeing the chief protagonists in the violence,  seems like another instance of, sorry to say, the “Brahmanical Left and the Brahmanical Right” duking it out. Only, one has to make the necessary correction here – the Brahmanical Right stooped to new lows and barbarity – or wait, maybe not, because after all, they have a great practice as lynch-mobs throughout the country.

The dalit-bahujans have experienced the lynch-mobs with their iron rods, whipcords and belts for centuries now. They understand Brahmanical modes of oppression only too well. They’ve been chafing under Hinduism long before its Frankenstein, Hindutva, came into being. So, for them Hindu and Hindutva terror is an ever-present reality. They do not have film-stars rallying to their cause and more often than not they do not have colleges and universities across India which have hitherto never protested anything suddenly marching in their support. They understand the portents of a Hindu Rashtra because they’ve always been under one, declared or not.

In 2015, several parts of the country witnessed a “We are all Rohith” moment after Rohith Vemula’s institutional murder. Those professing left-liberal views then stood shoulder-to-shoulder with dalit-bahujans in expressions of solidarity. However, who exactly is fighting for the issues that Rohith highlighted and that came up after his passing? Recently it was his mother, Radhika, and the mother of another Dalit scholar who committed suicide, Payal Tadvi, who moved the SC “seeking to end such bias in universities and other higher education institutions across the country.” It is a lonely road that most left-liberals do not have the stomach or ideological commitment to tread.

In a piece of news that came to light recently, another of India’s premier institution, the Indian Institutes of Management, sought exemption from reservation among faculty: “The Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) have collectively approached the government seeking exemption from reserving faculty positions for Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST), Other Backward Classes (OBC) and Economically Weaker Sections (EWS).”

How do dalit-bahujans trust these so-called institutions of higher learning? The IIMs which have been largely politically quiescent till now, have seen some murmurs of protest in recent days against the CAA and now against the JNU violence. But we have yet to hear any protests over the most recent demand by their institutions for exemption from reservations or the shockingly lopsided diversity composition at their institutes. The current demand of the IIMs is actually a reversal of some crucial steps taken after a long battle by dalit-bahujan activists, in making them comply with legal directives and making allowances for reservations, such as the reservations at IIM-Bangalore in their FPM programme.

It is not that the example above of IIMs is a one-off. The painstaking work of the activists behind documentaries like Death of Merit makes it clear how discriminatory the elite institutions are towards those from disadvantaged castes (Death of Merit, as a project started after the suicide of a Dalit student at AIIMS). But there are a plethora of examples from our esteemed institutes like our IITs, of right-wing prejudices and caste-bias. Fresh-off-the press is the example from IIT-Kanpur from where the recent Faiz controversy issued; the banning of the Ambedkar Periyar Study Group by IIT-Madras was also an incident in recent times that made visible the hostility towards dalit-bahujans (IIT-Madras’s culture of discrimination has been studied in depth by Ajantha Subramanian, among others); and IIT-Kharagpur hosts the SANDHI project, about which the project webpage states: “The idea and operational framework of ‘SANDHI’ emanates from the convergence of four concerns drawn from an ancient realization as evident in the tradition of ‘Srutis’ (realized or omniscient web of knowledge systems) in India.”

JNU has afforded opportunities to several bright women and men from the marginalized background – that is not being contested. But, it has remained enmeshed in a Left-ideology that needs an overhaul and needs to come to terms with Indian social realities. While for many in the country it is the blue-eyed child of Indian student-politics, that unfortunately is on account of the sorry state of student politics in India, rather than any revolutionary political vision or analysis that JNU offers.

It is not being denied that these are trying and traumatic times for the university. The battle against the brazenness and impunity of the right-wing forces is urgent and worrying. But the battle in and over JNU does not represent some sort of existential battle over the soul of India or safe spaces in India, as some commentators are trying to argue (“The Message After JNU Attack Is Clear: No Space Is Safe”). For dalit-bahujans, no space is ever guaranteed to be safe – they could be selling biryani in the National Capital Region and be assaulted for something we may call selling-biryani-while-dalit “crime,” on the lines of the Driving While Black reality in other parts of the world.

There is a need for some balance in how we view and present the issue, especially in emotionally charged times like the present. A longer perspectival view would probably be advisable. Affordable education is a crucial need, especially for those from marginalized social status. A fair and equitable environment is also a prerequisite for those from such historically oppressed backgrounds to gain their education and flourish.

While the current challenges posed by the nationalist government are only too real and need to be countered, the civil society cannot forget that India has some very deep and troubling social inequalities which need urgent attention. Our educational institutions, which should serve as sites of analysis, reflection and deconstruction of the social evils, should not end up perpetuating them. As scholar Suraj Yengde put it recently, “The problem of post-Aryan India has always been a caste problem and thereby it remains a Dalit problem.”

Author – Ananda Maitreya is a writer and a student of social movements. He has been involved in various struggles of the marginalized people, including Dalit and Adivasi movements and the Palestinian struggle.

Image credit – PTI