Moment Of Reckoning For Student Movements

While the government has managed to forge a feeling of solidarity across campuses in the country through its repressive measures, the discourse sidelines some key uncomfortable questions. 

- Deepti Sreeram

Among the many conversations that I have had with Umar Khalid, PhD scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), and the ‘dreaded anti-national’, the one that came to my mind soon after the news of his surrender was on his relationship with the members of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) on campus.

“I was sticking posters when this ABVP guy came to me with a smile and told me how asli ladaayi (the real fight) is always between them and us [Democratic Students Union (DSU)]. He was telling me how there is no fun in fighting the other organisations,” he had said.

Umar, then a member of DSU, often recounted DSU’s frequent altercations with the ABVP, and even as he narrated his disagreements, there was always a sense of decorum. Khalid might have disliked the ABVP to his heart’s content but that never stopped him from talking to them.

So on 9 February, 2016, when Umar and nine other JNU students organised a cultural evening titled ‘A Country without a Post Office’, to condemn the ‘judicial killing of Afzal Guru’ and in support of Kashmir’s right to self determination, the most that the organisers expected was an internal inquiry. “We did expect a proctorial inquiry since we were sure that the ABVP would file a complaint against us but noone ever thought that this would go beyond that,” one of the organisers told me later.

For a university campus like the JNU, proctorial inquiries weren’t a big deal since it could happen at the behest of a complaint registered by any student on campus. However, matters soon escalated and by 10 February, JNU was trending on Facebook.

When I woke up that day learning that some of the organisers and student activists had appeared on prime time TV, notably the TRP driven News Hour debate with Arnab Goswami, I had spoken to one of the organisers asking why they had committed this blunder.