JNU students have a democratic cause

The democratic character of JNUSU is reflected in the issue that it took up for which it fell foul with the administration recently. No one, least of all the enlightened JNU administration with a brilliant economist at its helm, would find the demand the students raised — that daily wage workers engaged in a central university must be paid the minimum wages — obnoxious.

The university could not have taken exception to this demand, yet it used its machinery to tear down posters on campus. How should the students have reacted to this? What should the democratic response of students to the undemocratic action of the university authorities have been? A group of students held the university registrar, who is in charge of the day-to-day working of the university, hostage in his car for about six hours. This was torture, to say the least, not a demonstration of the democratic culture JNU students boast of. But it goes to the credit of the students that they realised as much and JNUSU offered an unconditional apology. The matter should have ended there. But three months later, the JNU administration served rustication orders against seven students, apart from levying fines on some office-bearers of the students’ union.

This decision smacks of authoritarianism. The basic principle of justice says that any crime must receive commensurate punishment. The students’ action, especially after their apology, merited only a warning. But the JNU administration seems to have lost all sense of proportion. Although most university administrators are teachers themselves, they suffer from hubris when they are elevated to positions of formal authority — they tend to become oblivious of the democratic culture of the classroom. Students of JNU must not be cowed down by the administration’s ruthless approach. If they reconcile to the fait accompli, the authorities will be further emboldened to stifle anti-administration voices. If they are afraid that any more protest would invite further repression, they would do well to remember Gandhiji’s dictum, “I would prefer death to cowardice.”

The intelligentsia, on its part, must support the JNU students.

The writer is a Delhi-based academic and a former president of JNUSU