Opinion In JNU today, the price for free speech is Rs 20,000

Their initiation began with critical thinking and the confidence of having a collective that is vibrant and relentlessly fighting for its rights. And it was not just students, but teachers and karamcharis as well, who held their own protests or stood in solidarity with each other. Even the administration held regular medical tests for hunger strikers and kept track of their daily deterioration of health, hospitalising them if needed. The administration, therefore, recognised hunger strikes as a legitimate form of protest and did not criminalise it.

We knew, of course, that our rights do metaphorically come at a price. But the Pink Palace under the occupants of the current regime has stooped to a new low. They have, quite literally, put a figure to that price. Twenty thousand rupees. The latest updated manual for students criminalises all forms of protests. The new “Rules of Discipline and Proper Conduct of Students” says that holding dharnas, hunger strikes, “group bargaining” or any other form of protest within a 100-metre radius of any academic or administrative building can lead to a fine of up to Rs 20,000 or rustication or expulsion.

We remember how, in the tumultuous years of 2016-17, the Pink Palace was converted into what we called the “Freedom Square” — a giant open-air classroom for thousands of students to gather and learn from the best of minds what freedom, nationalism and democracy entail. The same Pink Palace is unrecognisable now. The parking lot where we held the hunger strikes looks like a prison today, with its iron bars.

The hollowing out of campus has been relentless over the last few years. We are witnessing police cases against student activists; tampering with reservation policy; violations in recruitment processes in faculty positions; denial of space for the student union in statutory bodies; discontinuation of the uniquely inclusive deprivation point system in admissions and finally; denial of student union election and so on.

Back in our time, the most vibrant times on campus began after dinner as the hostel messes turned into nocturnal classrooms for lectures, debates, dissensions and enquiries. These public meetings discussed a range of topics, from unsustainable mining in Adivasi tracts by big corporates to concerns around jobless growth or critiques of various government policies. Today, any of these can be considered “anti-national”. The manual says “Printing, circulating or pasting posters/pamphlets (text or picture) carrying derogatory religious, communal, casteist or anti-national remarks” will invite the wrath of the Pink Palace. At a time when defending minority rights itself is considered anti-Hindu, and thereby communal, such directives aim to censor all dissenting thoughts. The price? Ten thousand rupees.

The price to be paid for what the JNU administration describes in its manual as “defacement” of walls is again Rs 20,000. The walls of JNU have always been a talking, breathing, sentient surface. They told a thousand stories through brush and paint. While in other educational institutes, walls are either sanitised spaces or have nooks earmarked for posters, here the walls were free. From Niyamgiri to Palestine, from workers’ rights to women’s freedom, from Marx to Ambedkar, from Savitribai Phule to Rosa Luxemburg — our walls had a space for all shades of opinion. Right-wing organisations too, put up their own posters and held their public meetings. The JNU walls were symptomatic of the spirit of inclusivity that made both students and teachers fight for a campus that, with all its limitations, still strove to open its gates for students of diverse, deprived and marginalised backgrounds, who engaged in critical pedagogy and socially sensitive research.

It is only the protests, the hunger strikes, the colours on the wall and the many voices of dissent that helped us to not merely become figures “that wait with patience and obedience for the master of show, to be stirred into a mimicry of life” in the words of Tagore. The current manual is an attempt to convert these walls to just brick and mortar by sucking the very soul out of them.

Bhattacharya was a PhD scholar in JNU and submitted his thesis in 2016. He works at the Centre for Financial Accountability and writes on issues of socio economic justice, equity and democratic rights. Lahiri was a PhD scholar in JNU and submitted her thesis in 2013. She is an activist and researcher, who is currently a consultant to SPECT Foundation