Revolution,Meet Reality

In his jeans and kurta,scraggly beard and glasses,Marx- and Neruda-inspired Ram Sajeevan is almost real,even though he is a character in a story,Ram Sajeevan Ki Prem Katha,by Hindi writer Uday Prakash. Its a story that came to mind a few weeks ago when a young man on the campus,Akash,attacked a 22-year-old girl,Roshni Gupta,with an axe inside a class,apparently because she spurned him,and then killed himself.

When Prakash wrote the story in the Eighties,it was believed to be based on the life of JNU student and legendary poet Gorakh Pandey,who had committed suicide in a hostel. Gorakh,the much-loved poet of the revolution,gave JNU one of its most popular anthems Hille le jhakjhor duniya which was later sung by Indian Ocean. As well as the rural-urban conflict,the story is a comment on the universitys dreamy,self-obsessed Left politics.

Today,the dominant Left culture in the university faces a complex reality. Questions of caste and gender have become as important as class; the market has started sneaking in as large sections of students get depoliticised. New ideas have begun to challenge old certainties,however sublime or sacred. In many different ways,the romantic idea of revolution that once fired young minds and bound them together in a pristine space,which was so different from other universities,now seems to be unravelling.

With its thorny babools,rocks for chairs and tables,and deep pits and mounds,Ganga dhaba is a critique of todays glittering commercialised times,as former JNU Students Union president JNUSU Sandeep Singh calls it. It is a symbol of free thought and open exchange of ideas,with its uncontrolled space where any number of people can huddle anyhow around any stone. Here,students have planned revolution as well as found romance. But now,it is not the locus of life on the campus that it used to be. If you walk a little ahead,you will find another eatery,the 24/7 dhaba,which seems to be what the Ganga dhaba is a critique of. Here,you will find tables and chairs,a well-ordered space,a bigger menu and fewer people in JNU chic jeans and kurta. Ganga dhaba and the 24/7 dhaba spatialise the slow shift from Marx to market which has become visible on the campus.

Ajay Gudavarthy,who teaches political science at JNU,says students now have more disposable money and are spending it. Devendra Choubey,warden of Periyar Hostel,says,In our times,people subsisted on whatever they had and focused on their studies. But now a lot of students earn on the side. With extra money,they can afford to buy gadgets. You often see pizzas being delivered in the hostel.

When Choubey was a student and stayed at Periyar,people used to go to Nirulas at Priya. But that was hardly the consumerist sensorium the grand shopping malls that have come up across the road are. Many students now go to Big Bazaar at the Ambience Mall instead of Sarojini Nagar market, says Komal,an MPhil student in languages who is doing research in folk songs. Choubey says earlier it did not matter what you wore but what you spoke. Now students are careful about what they wear and how they look. Kurtas are being replaced by fitted T-shirts. You know its easier to raise your fist in the air and shout a slogan if you are wearing a kurta instead of a T-shirt, Choubey jokes.

The new economy and its culture of consumption are shaping the campus in various ways. People are busy these days, says Komal. There is a pressure to succeed. Now,more students go out to work or get coaching for competitive exams. And,of course,people also interact on the internet. In fact,sometimes students know each other only online, she says. Manindra Nath Thakur,who teaches political science at JNU,says the old sense of community has weakened. Now,teachers spend more time writing articles and books. The time they spend with students is not valued the way articles and books are, he says.

The rise in the number of students is also one reason for reduced teacher-student interaction,he says. Thakur says the four years,from 2008 to 2011,when elections could not take place at JNU were alienating,because elections offered a good mechanism to interact,initiate new students and group them around ideological issues. A long time without elections depoliticised students,who started bonding on grounds immediately available to them region,language,caste,etc. These days,I often see students befriending each other more on a regional and linguistic basis rather than ideology, says Sukhpreet Brar,who is doing a PhD in Hindi. Earlier,the rich and the poor interacted a lot and each had something to gain from the other. But now people tend to stick to their own kind, Thakur says.

Internet is drawing students away from addas. The political space is so contested and harsh that many take refuge in anonymity. Visit JNU Confessions page on Facebook. Its campus gossip often lewd,offensive and hard to believe discussed with a zeal that will seem out of place on the campus.

The fragmentation isnt just social,its political too. Choubey says just a decade ago,the juloos march used to be so long that it began at Ganga dhaba and ended at Kaveri. These days,the juloos has shrunk. There are only party people. Earlier,a large number of people sympathetic with the cause also used to take part. Now people follow their parties.

Caste politics has shown up the simple Left-versus-Right politics to be inadequate. It has forced every party to tweak its agenda. Vivek Kumar,who teaches sociology,says JNU was never the liberal space it was made out to be. They used to brush most caste issues under the carpet. But now,Dalits are vocal and aspirational. They dont tolerate this, he says.

The caste groups such as United Dalit Students Forum and All India Backward Students Forum have excavated their own traditions of thought which were not very visible on the campus earlier. They are now rejecting what they see as Left behalfism. Earlier,they had a client-patron relationship with the Dalits. Hum dekh lenge,they used to say. Since Dalits have found their own voice,the Left parties have to put the face of BR Ambedkar on their posters, says Kumar.

An activist says an eminent Dalit professor,now retired,who got his job under the general quota,could not get a single upper-caste student to do a PhD with him in his 35 years in the university. Vivek Kumar says caste discrimination at JNU has always existed,at all levels administrative,academic,political and socio-cultural. The Left did not encourage Dalit thought and worldview. Ambedkar and Jyotiba Phule never got the place they deserve in the courses. Now that they have been forced to recognise caste due to Dalit activism,they have started paying lip service to our cause, he says. But Kavita Krishnan,a Politburo member of the CPI M-L and a former joint secretary of JNUSU,says it was her party that struggled against the dilution of OBC quotas on the campus and has been opposing the anti-reservation group Youth For Equality. I dont know why they see us as an enemy and not an ally, she says. Vinod Arya,a Dalit student,says,Earlier,few Dalits would raise their issues. But now,with so many Dalit groups active on the campus,they have the confidence to raise their problems.

If caste has become a big faultline at JNU,there is a greater demand to address gender issues too. Earlier,you could be deemed progressive on all counts if you were an idealistic young man dreaming of revolution. But now there is a deeper scrutiny of political assumptions. The idea that girls can go out in the dead of night is too simplistic as a measure of womens freedom. It assumes that only a nocturnal monster can harm girls. It discounts the fact that male prejudice and sexual violence can operate in broad daylight,sophisticated talk and at classrooms and seminars, says a girl student who does not wish to be named.

Aparna has a lot of politics to choose from she studies Sri Lankan Tamil poetry,is a Dalit and calls herself a feminist. The last fact puts her at a remove from the political parties because just as the outside world is patriarchal,so are the political parties here. She is sceptical about most JNU narratives nostalgic,declinist,revivalist however poetic. But this doesnt mean she has no narrative of her own. Her narrative is corrective,that JNU can improve. She is happy more women are complaining about gender issues,which should be seen as a welcome change instead of eliciting a what-has-JNU-come-to reaction. JNU was already a patriarchal space,she says; more people now know about it. The more we know and rectify,the better,

she says.

Krishnan of CPI-ML says the gender debate at JNU is more audible because the Left groups recognise gender issues and not because the Left at JNU is less gender-sensitive. We have been raising gender issues since the Nineties. Gender sensitisation in our party is an ongoing process. Patriarchy is everywhere,but we recognise this fact and address it within our party.

Gender and caste issues were always addressed on the campus,Gudavarthy points out,but they are now being articulated in different languages,which are often conflicting. There has been a strong identity focus in the last 10 years. Earlier,the same issues were articulated in a different language,of class and region. The Left has not been able to provide an alternative to identity politics. It requires an innovative political imagination to handle new tensions, he says.

The gated community of JNU protected from the noise of the aspirational Ber Sarai and Katwaria Sarai,the elite IIT,a middle-class Munirka and the consumerist arcades of Vasant Kunj for long prided itself on its boutique liberalism. Earlier,if a butterfly flapped its wings around a Latin-American dictator,it could cause a storm at JNU,but a storm at,say,Munirka,would rarely bother a butterfly on the campus. Now,things are changing. After the December gang rape of a young woman,which took place not far from the campus,students and political parties drove the protests in the heart of Delhi,rubbing shoulders with the bourgeoisie. Krishnan of CPI-ML became the face of the protests,perhaps the only Left leader in recent times to get a huge popular following.

JNU has now woken up to a diversity of politics and a multiplicity of languages. Either the dominant Left politics will have to transform or the campus will no longer be the Kremlin on Jumna,as an American diplomat once described it in a cable to his government. Krishnan says that people forget that it is only because of the Left that the diversity of ideas has found an expression in JNU. Thakur believes JNU is quite dynamic and it would find intellectual resources to manage the change.

The recently revived JNU magazine,Parisar,says that the campus has 200 native and foreign species of birds,80 species of butterflies,30 species of reptiles and 15 species of mammals. Many of these are rare and protected by laws. It seems JNUs diversity of biology has also started reflecting in its ideology. Ram Sajeevan the species,so to speak,spotted often earlier will now find the campus crowded,because the simple ideological geometry of Left versus Right is being redrawn by ideas that dont fit too neatly into either of these categories.

Amid all the change,the one constant on the campus is its stone-age landscape of rocks and caves. A primitive terrain contains all life on campus,which a student breezily describes as pyaar,padhai and politics. The JNU terrain not only transcends all ideology but history itself,giving the campus an instinctual,elemental climate infused with power and desireas poet Kedarnath Singh writes in the campus magazine: Yes,this is my house/And perhaps this is the stone on which laid its head and slept/The first axe that hunted the first tree./Even today,this stone smells of a sweat/Which is perhaps the odour of that first woodcutters body/That feeds the whole modernity of my campus.