Over the last few months, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) is seeing a major uproar over cuts in its MPhil and PhD seats, leading to frequent confrontation between the administration and students, teachers. In the midst of all this, an MA student has found a creative way to register his protest against the vice-chancellor – through a rap song. Rahul Rajkhowa (22), an MA student of International Relations from Assam who finished his exams just a week back, has uploaded a nearly three minutes long rap on Youtube, to “vent” out his frustration on the seat cut. Titled ‘JNU student raps against JNU VC’, the song uploaded just two days ago, already has nearly 2,000 hits. “They landed a paper on his table and said, Sir there's just too many students on this campus…There's just so many people. He said simple, wipe out Mphil for the next 3 years. Cut away all the seats and watch em fight it out like fools for the next few years. Now there's 1000s and 1000s of bright minds fighting for less than 10 seats,” read the lyrics. Read | JNU seat cut: All eyes on JNU academic council meet Talking about how the song came about, Rajkhowa says, “A lot of my classmates and I wanted to do MPhil, and all of a sudden the VC decided to have such a major seat cut. In the School of International Studies, there’s only one seat each in the Centre for South Asian Studies and Centre for European Studies – the Centres we could apply to. Many of my friends have zero seats in their Centres in other Schools. Moreover, people from economically deprived backgrounds are finding themselves in a really tough spot. All of these factors contributed in me writing the song because I wanted to be all their voices.” However, the song doesn’t deal with juts the issue of seat cut, Rajkhowa also brings up Najeeb Ahmad’s disappearance when he says, “Hell you can't even find the boy that went missing on your watch. Everybody knew the boys who beat him up were from the Orange Party. They still walking Scot free. But how do you catch the guilty, When you got the government on your back”, or the tag of anti-national when he writes “Now call me anti national, for saying things rational.” His songs he says are “always against oppression” and influenced from “the 1970s music in the US”. “We write about objectification, domestic abuse, and other social issues. One of my earliest songs was on the December 16 gangrape. In this song too I’ve tried to deal with such things. After the February 9 incident for example, people started calling us anti-national, and I wondered whether we were anti-national or anti-government,” he says. With little hope of getting admission in MPhil, his focus now will be on his five-member Blues band called ‘Paperboat’ formed when Rajkhowa was doing his graduation in History from St Stephen’s College. The band also has an album releasing soon. Fame is not new to him, having acted in Yashraj Film’s Bewakoofiyan alongside Ayushman Khurana, Rajkhowa will now be seen in ‘Side A Side B’ a musical which recently premiered at the New York Indian Film Festival. For more stories on JNU, click here
