A lecture and a demonstration. S.A.R. Geelani came to a Delhi University seminar to speak on “Communalism, Fascism and Democracy: Rhetoric and Reality”. A clutch of ABVP (the BJP student wing) activists, including the Delhi University Student Union president, decided some show and tell was in order. They spat at the man on the dais, smashed window panes and hurled stones, hurting several people. The pamphlet for the seminar “was clearly pro-SIMI, which is a terrorist organisation”, spluttered an ABVP activist, by way of rationale. While the police and university authorities put up a feeble defence, they did not manage to stop the students (some of them decidedly middle-aged looking). Another student claimed, without a trace of irony, that inviting Geelani showed a “sick mentality” given that anti-social activities were increasing in the country. Student struggles have sparked deep change within political establishments, across the world. They are barometers of generational change within parties. Campus unrest has often been exuberant, even violent, but it brims with new ideas. As Todd Gitlin has written in Letters to a Young Activist, the ’60s counterculture in the United States was most productive when it “(1) had good arguments, (2) stayed non-violent, (3) won a hearing from serious-minded insiders, and (4) mobilised outside forces.” But this animal outrage, and flinging stones, is the only way the ABVP knows to confront a threatening thought. Perhaps before these student politicians get into politics, they had better learn to be students first.
