JNU's excess factor

JNU: Nationalism and India’s Uncivil War

Author: Makarand R Paranjape

Publisher: Rupa Publications

Pages: 278

Price: Rs 595
 

This is an almost-rigorous account of what ails India’s premier national central university, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). The author, who claims to be the senior-most professor at the university and teaches English there but is currently seconded to the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla as its director, makes no bones about his admiration for Narendra Modi or his contempt for a certain kind of JNU student (and teacher). He views the crumbling intellectual and physical stature of JNU pityingly (he believes dispassionately). In between, he takes generous swipes at “illiberal” liberals but doesn’t really explain how he is different from them.

Plunged from the more tranquil — and sanitary — environs of IIT Delhi, into the deep and politically murky waters of JNU, Makarand Paranjape confesses to initial bewilderment. IIT Delhi is just down the road from JNU and it is true that its streets are cleaner, and the atmosphere is more “orderly”. But when he quotes a JNU-ite as “snorting contemptuously” that “cleanliness is a bourgeois value”, well, it would have been nice to know what kind of Marxist believes that. It sounds a lot like false consciousness.

Dr Paranjape’s bewilderment with JNU continues through his interview (an account of it is replete with dry humour). He gets the job and tries to move from IIT to JNU, and finds he has to enlist the assistance of the Indian Army. “JNU had nothing to give me, when I joined,” he says. He is in for more surprises. “JNU was dominated by a futile and deluded, not to mention negative and destructive, Leftist student politics, shielded and protected by powerful faculty lobbies. The world may have changed but JNU was caught in a time warp,” he writes.

He says JNU fees (when he joined) was “something like Rs 20 a month”. Yearly tuition and room rent was less than Rs 1,000. And he observes: “Bang next to us was Vasant Vihar, one of the poshest Delhi colonies. In fact, right opposite in the haphazard and unauthorised Munirka shanties, a room in one of the precarious slanting towers was Rs 7,000 per month. Seven times what it cost to live in JNU for a whole year.” Many such non-sequiturs pop up in the book.

And then he meets Kanhaiya Kumar — formerly of the CPI, latterly of the Congress, and the supposed tukde-tukde gang. It is akin to meeting a group of bullies in the schoolyard. The book describes how Dr Paranjape holds his own at a face-off “teach-in” lecture on nationalism in 2016 when Kanhaiya Kumar, then president of the JNU Students Union, said grandly: “ham aapke lecture ko chair karenge”. For him, things go from bad to worse — all the more, because he takes it all so seriously. His antipathy to Mr Kumar runs through the book like a hot, red burn wound — all the things he should have, would have, must have, said to Kanhaiya….

Then there’s the episode in which a procession is taken out in support of Afzal Guru, the man who was convicted of masterminding a conspiracy to lead the attack on Parliament, to which he confessed under duress and was eventually hanged. Some students believe it was judicial murder. A slogan allegedly chanted at the procession is “Bharat tere tukde honge, Inshaallah Inshaallah”. Dr Paranjape says permission for the procession was obtained under false pretences. Dear oh dear. But then he adds, “that our top universities were hosts to anti-state separatist cells which turned enemies of the state into heroes, was certainly not a healthy practice, in my view.” They were ideologically bolstered, he says, by famous writers and public intellectuals such as Arundhati Roy, “who shamed India in the foreign media”.

So, as Lenin asked: What is to be done?

Dr Paranjape’s alienation with JNU seems to have been complete with this and his struggles with his colleagues in the JNU Teachers’ Association (JNUTA). His own transformation is thorough: He is now no longer bullied, he’s fighting back for his beliefs that you may not agree with, but that’s JNU for you — it challenges you all the time, demanding, seeking, feasting on you especially if you don’t agree with it. Dr Paranjape sees this, at Rs 20 a month, as “parasitism”.

It isn’t. It is democracy. But it can be unsettling if it is IIT you’re used to. What Dr Paranjape wants JNU to be is “cleansed” of “excessive” Leftist and right-wing politics without specifying who is to decide what is “excessive”. “Would it be too much to dream of a clean and spruced up campus with decent-looking fee-paying students regularly going to class? As in most respectable universities in other parts of the world?” he asks wistfully.

His prescriptions for the university are the same as the prescriptions for India: Dharmic nationalism, not merely majoritarianism. “A new India also needs a new politics. That is what the rise of Modi actually signifies.” he says sagely. “Divisive minoritarianism should not be replaced by aggressive majoritarianism and hyper-Hindutva…it is dharmic and spiritual nationalism which is India’s distinctive contribution to the world,” he says.

You may not agree with it — and many won’t. This is a book written with scrupulous honesty, even innocence. But in JNU, can we have more excess, please?

And one thing is clear — JNU can never be a cliché. It is long past that stage of redemption.