HCU Protests | Hyderabad is a metaphor for a bigger set of issues

We need an ecology that goes beyond a preoccupation with higher-order mammals and looks at nature in its full diversity. A university is the ideal home for creating this constitutionality

A protest by the students at the Hyderabad Central University (HCU) has raised the possibility of a variety of interpretations. It shows how the same event can be interpreted at different levels of politics.

The facts are stark and simple. The Revanth Reddy-led Congress government in Telangana on a Saturday (when it is difficult to get stay orders from the courts) moved in a stack of bulldozers in an area contiguous to the university to cut down groves of trees. The students discovered this and protested, and they, along with faculty members, were lathi-charged.

An event like this can be treated with restricted reportage. The quality of interpretation determines the range of possibilities of politics. A conventional model tends to restrict it to a law-and-order problem. The government said the lathi-charge was in order as the protest was not in the university but on government land. There is also the politics of reportage. There are generally a few days of uproar, followed by benign neglect of the potentialities of the event.

A politics of suspicion becomes reduced to politics of indifference. The general objection made is that the Opposition was using the environment to relaunch its politics. The chief minister pleaded for closure and normalcy by contending that the move was completely legal. The goal was to create an IT park which could provide a source of employment.

It is interesting how the park, which has green connotations, acquires an ironic note in these new development programmes which are responsible for ecological indifference.

There is a possibility of a second interpretation: the students triggered it by talking about concerns beyond Hyderabad. They raised questions of climate change. Climate change is not just a word, it is a concept, an appeal to a certain ethics, and a summons to a way of life. The students were arguing that we must go beyond the current philosophies and ideas of land. They suggested that the area of land available was not just real estate; land must be seen as an ecosystem. They suggested that what was being violated was the relationship between humans and the environment. Then, there are the rights of the trees. They were pleading for a wider ecological understanding. A futuristic approach that went beyond the current ideas of law and order and development.

In this, they were making three important points. First, they emphasised that the university is a trustee of biodiversity. It is not only a repository of multi-disciplinary knowledge, but is also an archive and repository for diversity. Diversity, in fact, is one of the ethical identities of a university. The students were looking at the university as part of an ecosystem.

The second point is that universities in India in the traditional sense contain huge tracts of land which are reservoirs of diversity, and they need to be sustained. to see them as a park only creates passivity and pomposity. One needs a more proactive sense of diversity. This is what the students were trying to articulate, though not entirely successfully.

In fact, listening to the students reminded me of the exemplary professors of philosophy at Hyderabad. Ramchandra Gandhi was not only the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi but also one of the most articulate professors of philosophy. A close friend of mine, he once told me of two speeches at Harvard.

The first was by Alfred North Whitehead on whom Ramu (as Ramachandra Gandhi was known to us friends) worked on for his doctoral thesis. Whitehead, in one of his opening speeches in Harvard, banged his head and said, “Gentlemen, I have disturbed the most distant star.” As a cosmologist, Whitehead was showing the connectivity of creation.

The second lecture was by philosopher George Santayana. Santayana, in one of his final lectures at Harvard, said as he was leaving, “Gentlemen, I have a date with spring”.

Today, one must decide whether Hyderabad is going to meet the future like an ecological celebration or will just reduce itself to an arid law-and-order problem.

Hyderabad is a metaphor for a bigger set of issues. What the protest is raising is a set of problems India is facing. The government is avoiding the issue of climate change or changing it to an issue of technical response. The students are emphasising the philosophical and ethical issues of the Anthropocene. There are two cosmologies at work here. One is the 19th-century world of mechanical industrial systems, and the other is the possibility of what English scientist James Lovelock called the world of gaia/Gaia hypothesis. it’s a new way of looking at nature. We go beyond looking at nature as a commodity. We also give nature a different set of identities, which allow it to play a different role.

We must understand from the protest both the philosophical status of the tree and its constitutional role. A tree is more than just a living organism — it is an ecological system which has a definite role in integrating soil, seed, and society. A tree, as Native American myths point out, is both an epistemological and a mythological system. A tree must be looked at as an ecological person. One must give seeds, soil, birds, animals, and trees a place in the constitutional system. A theory of human rights which restricts itself to higher mammals alone is no longer adequate. We need an ecology that goes beyond a preoccupation with higher-order mammals and looks at nature in its diversity. A university is the ideal home for creating this constitutionality.

The Hyderabad Central University can become a centre for a new kind of knowledge system. It is beyond IT parks and their pretentious claims to the economics of development.

(Shiv Visvanathan, a social scientist, is professor at OP Jindal Global University.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.