Jawaharlal Nehru University: Between the devil and saffron tide

Over the past year, the top-ranked Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Student agitations, anti-government protests and campus violence have transformed this Central government-funded postgraduate university — established in 1969 by a special Act of Parliament and named after the country’s first, and self-styled socialist prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru — into a live theatre for clashes between idealistic left-wing students and newly resurgent right-wing students unions affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the sangh parivar (RSS family) — the driving force behind the BJP-led NDA government which swept to power with a massive majority in General Election 2014.  A raucous anti-establishment citadel and bastion of student and faculty lefties for over five decades, JNU has become a prime target of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) — the students wing of the RSS/BJP — which instigated the arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar, president of the JNU Students Union (JNUSU), in February last year. Kumar was accused of raising “anti-national” slogans at a protest rally to mark the third anniversary of the execution of Kashmiri terrorist Afzal Guru, sentenced to death by the Supreme Court after an exhaustive set of trials and appeals in 2005. A hate object of RSS/BJP ideologues and ABVP as an over-privileged, over-subsidised university for children of the English-fluent socialist priviligentsia with barely concealed contempt for Hindi-speaking students of the BIMARU (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) states who have crowded into JNU under reserved quotas for scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and OBCs (other backward castes), JNU became a prime target of the RSS/BJP after the electoral victory of the BJP, to weed out “anti-nationals” and cleanse its Augean stables. The first step of the cleansing process was appointment of Dr. M. Jagadesh Kumar, hitherto professor of electrical engineering at IIT-Delhi and RSS sympathiser, as vice chancellor of the university in February 2016, following the end of tenure of former VC Sudhir Kumar Sopory. After his appointment as VC Jagadesh Kumar has lost little time in ringing in changes. Among them: slashing the annual student intake of heavily-subsidised Ph D programmes from 1,261 in 2016-17 to 194 this year; introducing an interview based admission system; and undertaking an unprecedented recruitment drive for 300 new faculty.  Regrettably repeated attempts of your correspondent to contact Jagadesh Kumar and obtain the rationale of his reform drive in this high-profile university, proved unsuccessful. Ditto a subsequent effort by your editor who obtained a promise from the VC to respond to an e-mailed questionnaire. Be that as it may, as a consequence of the sweeping reforms being implemented by Jagadesh Kumar who clearly has the full backing of Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar, the profile of JNU students could change drastically over the next few years as the new admission system allows the administration headed by the vice chancellor to supervise admissions. The earlier system of consultation with faculty and the academic council, which allowed professors to influence the choice of…