JNU’s new VC: Fit for government’s purpose

The government made it clear it will continue with policy to appoint VCs who would even be hostile to the culture and traditions of the university

By appointing Santishree D Pandit as the Vice-Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), the government has made it clear that it will continue with the controversial policy it has adopted towards the university. This policy is to appoint as Vice-Chancellor a person who is not only at odds with, but would even be hostile to, the academic and intellectual culture and traditions of the university. This would ensure that there would always be some friction and conflict in the relations between the Vice-Chancellor on the one side and the students and faculty on the other.

JNU is India’s premier university, and one of the few from the country to figure in international rankings. But it is also a university that the present government sees as the bastion of left-liberal intellectual traditions in the country. The government has therefore tried to control the university by many means. The appointment of the Vice-Chancellor is one of them.

Santishree Pandit is ideally suited for the job the government has in mind as she has strong ideological and political credentials that meet its requirements. Her predecessor, M Jagadesh Kumar, had also tried to run the university as per the government’s ideological bias and requirements and had several run-ins with students and faculty. His tenure saw many controversies, including the sedition row of 2016, the disappearance of a student, a mob attack on students on the campus, and callous handling of protests by students. He has been rewarded with an elevation to the University Grants Commission (UGC) chairmanship.

Also Read — Controversial JNU VC has a new home: UGC

Santishree Pandit may have even more extreme ideological credentials than him, having made them clear many times on social media. She is known to have taken extreme right-wing positions on Twitter, with descriptions of liberals and activists as “mentally ill jihadists” and JNU’s left activists specifically as “Naxal jihadists”. She has condemned ‘love jihad’ as terror by other means, supported calls for genocide, and even given an interpretation of Godse’s action as a “solution” for a united India. The tweets have been deleted now but her views are clear from them. She has also said that she would try to implement the “…Prime Minister’s vision with a focus on Indo-centric studies”.

It is the government’s prerogative to appoint Vice-Chancellors of universities. But when important and iconic universities like JNU are helmed by ideological warriors, the idea is to control young minds. Vice-Chancellors once used to be eminent educationists and administrators or other distinguished persons who would not bring their politics into governance and strive for excellence of their campuses in academics and co-curricular fields. But there are other agendas and roadmaps now. Vice-Chancellors like Santishree Pandit are tasked to implement them.

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