Can a university afford to be non-political?

The past few days have witnessed heated debates on the issue of Ashoka university professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad with academics and public intellectuals taking sides on the question of ‘appropriate academic behaviour’. 

One of the founding members of Ashoka University set the ball rolling when he spoke about maintaining distance from ‘politically exposed persons’ in the private sector and further should the university have such a policy? After all, as he pointed out, Ashoka University is also governed by the law of the land. Why is the idea of being political so scary? For many being apolitical is also a conscious choice born of leading an entitled life.

An average student/teacher in Ashoka University enjoys socio-cultural capital accumulated through generations and they can afford to be apolitical since they are already branded as meritorious.They are guaranteed a seat, attend lectures, get a degree, and so on. There is no need for a politics of presence. No one expects them to stand in the queue to clear admission tests, UGC-JRF/NET, protest against non-payment/delay of scholarships to secure their future. 

Alas, for the ordinary students in India’s public institutions be it central/state universities or the mofussil colleges, majority of whom hail from the marginalised social groups, the battle begins at the procedural stage itself. Application forms, securing seats, fellowships, pedagogy, caste, gender and language issues, infrastructure, peer pressure, etc. everything needs to be negotiated. 

For the average teacher in higher education, access to research opportunities, grants, promotions, etc., all depends on political goodwill. In JNU, the promotions of teachers who protested against the administrative diktats which flouted long established rules led to promotions being denied to the protesting teachers.

The Political Student

History is witness that radical movements have been triggered due to personal reasons which went on to destabilise empires. When Mahatma Gandhi was forced to deboard from his first-class coach on a train in South Africa, the seeds of struggle against racial injustice was sown. Similarly, Savitribai Phule and B R Ambedkar were humiliated by their ‘caste superiors’, it strengthened their resolve to fight for social justice. Can we label their struggles as ‘apolitical’? If so, the entire freedom movement, which involved people from all walks of life, is reduced to nothing. Our Constitution is a political testimony of the liberation story.

Any progressive legislation has a history of social movements in which different stakeholders within society participated and the subsequent laws benefited everyone. To illustrate, the Bhanwari Devi and the Nirbhaya case led to the Vishakha guidelines and changes in rape laws respectively, anti-ragging legislation, the proposed Karnataka government’s Rohith Act. These Acts are mandatory in every institution, private or public, and it is a fallout of political struggles.

More recently, the R G Kar case led to protests by the medical fraternity and supported by the larger civil society. Similarly, the students and teachers fought to preserve the ecology around the Hyderabad Central University and the court had to intervene to protect the natural forest.

My academic journey can be credited to various struggles in public universities, which nurtured my sense of justice, and shaped my academics. As a student, we fought to prevent caste-based ragging, implementing reservations and scholarships, etc. As a teacher, I worked with other stakeholders to reinstate the 200 point reservation roster for recruitment in public colleges/universities. There was institutional support to achieve social justice.

Sadly, over a period of time, this autonomy has been threatened by various ideologies. Even a simple task of setting a question paper can lead to legal action as happened with a professor at a college in Meerut.

Public Conscience

Megha Vemuri, the class president of MIT, is being valorised as an exemplar of personal courage to question institutional biases. In the process, she sacrificed her graduate ceremony. Unfortunately, students like late Rohith Vemula, Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, and many others, who stood for socio-political values are criminalised without any legal recourse.

At this crucial juncture, it would be wise to heed the words of Ambedkar, who emphasised on the idea of ‘public conscience’ as a key element to strengthen parliamentary democracy. Being aware of the glaring social inequities, he argued that “public conscience means conscience which becomes agitated at every wrong, no matter who is the sufferer, and it means that everybody, whether he suffers that particular wrong or not, is prepared to join him in order to get him relieved”.

This was the solidarity that was envisaged to further the idea of India, and for which millions fought/are fighting. Ashoka University’s founding member mentioned above is also consciously political as silence hides multiple social and economic fractures. As Karl Marx observed, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it”.

Any change is possible only through public conscience.

(N Sukumar is Professor of Political Science, Delhi University. Views expressed are personal.)