Forging Political Ethoses With Hammers and Sickles; a …€¦ · · 2014-07-03Forging Political...

Forging Political Ethoses With Hammers andSickles; a Glimpse Into JNU Left-wing Activism

on Campus

Jean-Thomas Martelli†∗

July 3, 2014

†King’s India Institute, King’s College London, Strand London WC2R 2LS, UK

ECPR Graduate Student Conference 2014, Innsbruck

Introduction of JNU as a Political Space

”Selection is also election” Bourdieu (1989: 103) warned the sociologist once,describing how entrance in prestigious higher education institutions turned out tobe a consecration for the progeny of the upper class. Young Indians – irrespective oftheir background – enrolled in a state funded institution such as Jawaharlal NehruUniversity (JNU) do not only gain a form of educational recognition but also astatus consecration; election (in the form of an entrance examination) introducesa separation, a ”discontinuity of a social boundary” (Ibid 1989) between thoseenrolled and those rejected. In other words, like many other elite institutionsacross the world, JNU central university elects its members to the noble rank ofyoung elite.

Nevertheless, the display of this obvious social uplift is not something commonwhen you happen to enter the campus. Whether an onlooker sits in the eveningin mess canteens, walk around class buildings covered with vivid revolutionaryposters, joins protest juloos (march) or election public debates, she will realise howmuch everything is about the people form below. In a place where fierce politicalbattles are fought within the ”socialist-communist-left fraternity” (Yadav 2014),and where six of the height major Students’ Unions is claiming a Marxist bound

∗E-mail: [email protected]

2 Introduction of JNU as a Political Space

Figure 1: An AISA poster near the Administration Bloc

the primary topos or argumentation scheme used vocalise deep sense of angerand injustice made to the subaltern. Lament comes systematically in defence ofdeprived ones; women, dalits, workers, peasants, tribals, Muslims and their count-less assailants – namely ”casteist forces, foreign imperialists, pro-corporate mani-acs, communal targeters, crony capitalists, state murders, brahmanical hegemons,hindutva fascists, minority witch-hunters, regressive administration, patriarchalfamily, farcical politicians, ruling class ideologues, feudal oppressors” etcetera.

In a campus soaked in the quietude of a green land made of flowery violetbougainvilleas, rainbow-feathered peacocks and human fed squirrels the student-made aesthetic of violence is quite salient; on the wall of the library a one-meter-large military boot is painted while smashing a rachitic adivasi, a rocket of anIsraeli fighter is pictured while blasting an innocent kid with a teddy bear; else-where a woman has her eye pierced by a fork with the following verse of the famousJNU based poet (who later committed suicide) Gaurav Pandey:

- every house is a burning ghat- every house is a place where you hang people- every house has many walls

From the eclectic set of interviews I collected from JNU students’ cadres andleaders of various Students’ Unions the word ”people” was strikingly recurrent,almost totemic. Here a some idioms picked up randomly form my fieldnotes; it isabout ”bringing up the voice of the oppressed” one claims, or smashing Modi ”anti-people” campaign, or promote economically ”people-centric” policies, or struggling

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Forging Political Ethoses With Hammers and Sickles 3

against militias and paramilitary ”war on people”, or mobilising ”masses of peo-ple”, or simply understanding the ”magnitude of human suffering”. Declarationsof solidarity for the wretched are ubiquitous.

When the count of JNU Students’ Union (JNUSU) and GSCASH votes (electedbody with two students’ representatives, called Gender Sensitisation CommitteeAgainst Sexual Harassment and dealing with issues of gender violence) is beingprocesses in one of the residences of the campus, activists from the major Stu-dents’ Unions gather in factional groups and sing partisan songs while waiting forthe results. In AISA (All India Students’ Association) – the biggest union cur-rently running JNUSU – most of the lyrics are inspired by Bihari peasant songsenphacising on struggle and deprivation. A friend translate a passage to me: wecannot even afford aloo (potato), rasgulla (sweet)they drink pepsi cola and wedon’t have access to the water in the well. Picking up a poem of Gaurav Pandey,activists warn Israel, the embodiment of the ”third world apartheid” that flowersof hope will grow on their graves and on the iron of their weapons. Right next toit DSU (Democratic Students’ Union) – union that sympathises with the Maoistguerilla cause – share a similar vindictiveness; ”by you, if you want revenge of thisjurum (crime), I am here to face the trouble. Whatever we have done, we will facethe consequences. The University General Body Meeting (UGBM) that precedesGSCASH elections is also the opportunity for left leaning candidates to come onstage and remind the numerous audience of JNUites of past struggles for woman’sright, including the various endeavors in the post 16 December anti-rape movement– i.e. protests that followed the 2012 rape of a young student in Munirka, a urbanvillage facing JNU. Marxist-Leninist SFI (Students’ Federation of India) candi-date Aparna Mahiyaria reminds the hearers that even after 100 years of women’sstruggle the latter are still ”sold as commodities on the wedding market” whileSFI seditious Sonam Goyal for DSF (Democratic Students’ Federation) remindsus, her two-years fight against the promotion of a faculty member suspected ofsexual misconduct, which included an initiative of a students’ referendum on thatmatter. I discovered later that electoral legitimacy in JNU depended much of theamount of exposure of candidates and for how long they ”hanged around” in thecampus.

Interestingly enough, beside the genuine competition – and sometimes acri-mony – between each students’ union politically active in the university (thoughNSUI, the students’ wing of the Congress, and ABVP, the youth avatar of theBJP, have a rather discrete presence on campus) all the participants share a sim-ilar cultural framework; or in a more academic fashion I would say that theyown the same collective action frame – understood here as a common schemataof interpretation (Snow 2000). Many of the slogans, such as Inquilab Zindabad(revolution longlive) or For Half the Earth and Half the Sky, We Should Fight We

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4 Introduction of JNU as a Political Space

Should Win belong the entire left community, they address each other as com-rades, they all have faith in the revolutionary path at least theoretically, havecommon admiration for early XXth century Indian freedom fighters like BhagatSingh, Rajguru and Sukhdev (but commemorating their death separately), portraythe Dalit leader Dr. Ambedkar as one of their inspirer, share a certain reluctanceto bring national party politics inside the campus (Hindustan Times April 5 2014),demonstrate a formidable aversion for Narendra Modi, current BJP candidate atthe Lok Sabha elections, wish GSCASH decisions to be made faster and binding,call for the re-instauration of JNUSU constitution to replace the current votingregulations – those resulting from the implementation of the Lynghdow commit-tee, a 2006 report officially meant to curb irregularities during student elections,including use of violence and money from political parties. Last but not least,all these comrades compete against each other using the same political repertoire(Tarrow 1994), which include recruitment of new members at the registration pe-riod, long-run campaigns in classes, dormitory rooms and cantines, the productionof discourses pamphlet, comics and posters, the organisation of mess meetings,marchs and cultural events, launching of micro-protests in Delhi, press confer-ences, calling for strikes, sit-ins, gherao (i.e. the encirclement by activists of anofficial in sign of protest) or even hunger strikes. Interestingly enough, what dif-ferentiate the students’ organisations lay more in their regional composition thanin the content of their speeches; AISA activists are likely to originate from ruralhindu-belt areas (i.e. Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Orissa) whileSFI members (and on a lesser extent DSU and DSF) would rather come from WestBengal or Kerala. It is not the purpose of this paper to make sense of this corre-lation but the geographical distribution of young activism in Delhi is too strikingto be left behind.

By raising both in-situ student issues (e.g. protesting against the non-increaseof the Merit-cum-Means pay scale, a scholarship for low income families, denounc-ing of resource shortages for GSCASH, addressing the problem of students with-out seat in student residences, opposing incomplete implementation of reservationsquotas, standing against discriminations at the JNU viva entrance examination)and ex-situ national debates (e.g. strikes in the car company plant Maruti-Suzuki,current privatization of universities, rape of Dalit and North East women, ForeignDirect Investment deal in retail, communal violence in Muzaffarnagar district, etc.)left leaning unions in JNU succeed to maintain frequent occurrences of containedcontention (Tilly et al. 2003) in order to put forward various ”progressive” claimsas militants coin it.

At the time of general campus elections, once a year in September, the elec-toral competition creates an episodic saturation of the campus social space withelectoral trepidation and clamorous political propagandists. GSCASH campaign

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have thrown dozens of pamphleteers in front of the gates of de the different schoolsof JNU, banners have been put in threes and myriads of leaflets cover the groundof popular dhabas (roadside eateries) and popular teas stall – like ”Sabarmati”,”Ganga”, or ”24-7”. Corteges of union members walk up and down the main roadto the entrance gate with their drums and chants – often running into rival groups– and diners at the north-east cafeteria can pass by a street play performed in sup-port of one of the candidates. Aspirants make consequent efforts to relate to themaximum amount of acquaintances, also trough texting and last minute shoutingin front of pooling gates, and so in order to maximize their vote bank (Pattnaik1982), which ultimately increases the sense of proximity between contestants andstudents.

In this contest Left versus Left the students’ community is – to my surprise– overall receptive and critical, and articulated debates on who to vote for aresteady and at times intense, fostering a highly argumentative ambiance amongthe student community. Asked about the difference in campaigning inside andoutside the university, the former Joint-secretary of JNUSU Kavita Krishnan con-firms that the JNU audience is ”intellectual”, and because of that topics can bedeepened without having to face intimidations and disruptive forces of broaderIndian politics. Just like in a cricket ground, it is possible to describe the cam-pus as a field, consisting – in a Bourdieusian sense – of positions occupied bysocial agents within specific boundaries. The field is rather hierarchised, withan intricate nexus of candidates, union leaders, party councilors, de facto cadres,active militants, sympatisers, friends and members. The field of politics in JNUcampus appears as a knowledgeable and democratic game valorising both socialand symbolic capital – oratorical ability, network of sympathisers, shared culturalexperiences, prestige of past actions taken and causes taken up.

[The field is]a structured social space, a field of forces, a force field. Itcontains people who dominate and people who are dominated. Con-stant, permanent relationships of inequality operate inside this space,which at the same time becomes a space in which various actors strug-gle for the transformation or preservation of the field. (Bourdieu 1998:40)

After portraying initial components of JNU politics it is time go back to my ini-tial paradoxical statement; even though the university serves as one of the elitist– one commentator even calls JNU a ”white elephant” – institution of Indianhigher education (Sengupta 2005) it hosts proletarian and farmers-focused claimscrafted by semi-professional producers of discourses, all belonging to the eclecticfamily of electoral Marxism. Sandeep, AISA general secretary comes to me oncefull of enthusiasm; ”you see this dhaba, it is the favorite of the campus workers-they take their morning chai herewe are going to up a poster right next to it with

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6 Five understandings of JNU leftism

passages of the Labour Code in Hindi to remind them all of their rightsI got thisidea yesterday, clever hein?”. The favourable inclination towards the non-student,non-administrative personnel of the campus is quite obvious.

”Upwards youngsters talking about downgraded marginalised”, this is to sum-marise the political picture of a red university – once even described in an Americandiplomatic cable as the ”Kremlin on the Jumna” (Suroor 2011). What are the pos-sible explanations of this political picture? Here I propose five possible answers,based on my in depth ethnographic fieldwork conducted since January, which canbe grouped under the following title:

JNU Leftism: Social Appropriation of Broader Ideals and Professional-ising Mobilisation Structures

First, social movements literature agree on the fact that political ideas are gener-ally communicated over time through certain channels among members of a socialsystem (Chabot and Duyvendak 2002; Tilly et al. 2003). Indubitably, in thecase of JNU, a wide range of revolutionary ideas are diffused via a specific emit-ter being either a parent’s party (i.e. vertical diffusion) or a sister organisation(i.e. horizontal diffusion). A students’ union such as AISA is associated with theCPI(M-L) party and several of its members are active in both structures. SeniorJNU campus leaders such as Akbar, Anubhuti, or Piyush went in April and Mayto support CPI(M-L) candidates for the 2014 Lok Sabha election in Bihar andJharkhand, mainly in constituencies where the Marxist-Leninist organisation hasstrong candidates (sucha as Ara, Siwan, Nalandar, Koderma, Parteli Putta, Bha-galpur districts). In these remote and deprived areas militants have the occasion toconfront the roughness of daily activism with its lot of political assassinations suchas the Ara Bloc Secretary Budram Paswan, the former CPI(M-L) MLA Mahen-dra Singh, and the legendary ”Comrade Chandrasekhar”, the twice president ofJNUSU murdered in 1997. Since the party has a long tradition of violent of armedstruggle (the first time CPI(M-L) contested election, through the Indian People’sFront, was in 1985) senior Poltiburo members can provide the young batch withfurther stories of political sacrifices. So that when Abhyuday, the National GeneralSecretary of AISA is asked to give names of the martyrs of the party, he simplyanswers; ”it is an endless list”.

Facing the virulence of local electoral campaigns gives the opportunity forstudents’ to deepen their sense of ”class and caste injustice” in areas were poorgovernance is the norm and where local rulers are too often believed to be no-torious gundas (criminals). While visiting the Dalit welfare hostel (i.e. studenthall reserved for scheduled castes) in Khatira neighbor of Ara district (in Bihar)an AISA activist showed in me scraps of iron belonging to burned out bicycles,

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Figure 2: Amarnath Yadav, former CPI(M-L) Minister of the Legislative Assemblyin Darauli, Bihar, while posing with the statue of Chadrasekhar

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which remnants were kept in the courtyard after an attack of the Ranvir Sena, thelocal landlord militia. A couple day later I would pay a visit to the 27 years oldstudents’ Rinki Kumari, candidate for Maley – nickname of the CPI(M-L) here– and kept in Bhagalpur Central Jail after a rough protest in front of a policestation.

Over time it became increasingly clear that the CPI(M-L) affiliation immergesstudents in a Manichaean cosmology of conflict, inspiring to Dhiraj Kumar (younggraduate in economics and office secretary in Patna) such comment: ”I am notfearing anybody, a candidate of Maley never forget his enemy”. He tells me that asa Dalit he has no other choice than joining AISA since ”feudal people” were beatinghim in his student residence. Causes taken up by the party and its students’ leadersare emotionally intense, immediately palpable and connected to their everyday lifethere: example is given of the rape of a 12 years girl, Navya Ranjan, or the oneof a scam-story of land acquisition in the neighboring industrial ara (e.g. theBiada plant in Kahagaon). The list of revolutionary martyrs in the activists’personal pantheon is long, so is the one inventorying local civilian massacres.Aslam, CPI(M-L) and PhD holder from Jamia Millia Islamia mentions about theNagari Bazaar massacre where 11 CPI(M-L) activists were shot in 1998. Sanjeev,journalist and sympathiser of the work of Maley in rural areas, evokes the massacreof 58 Dalits in Laxmanpur-Bathe and Kavita the carnage of Bathani Tola in 1996.While hosted in a pro-AISA Dalit’s room in Bhagalpur, Abhyuday takes a gravetone to indicate that apart from Maley, ”there is nobody else fighting”. In thesame room, on the opposite bed, another comrade, Sudhir adds that in this SC/ST(acronym referring to deprived castes and tribes) dormitory ”we are all Aisa, hereit’s not a hostel, it’s a temple”.

Whether urban or rurals, locals or outsiders, it is no surprise to see the amountof emotional anger of AISA activists in JNU after they encounter (or rediscover)the severe condition of low peasantry and Dalits in Bihar. Ideas, values and feelingstravel form the mofussil (i.e. provincial area) junction to the campus T-point –the very central landmark of JNU campus. One of the most remarkable elementsof this Marxist-Leninst ideological diffusionism is the passionate rejection of thecaste and class ethos. Irrespective of their actual social origin, AISA activistsemphacise grandly on their closeness with ”the people” and refuse to be attachedto any kind of social-elitism. For instance, collecting interviews made me realisethe importance for many activists of the concept of ”declassing onself”.

While distributing pamphlets for her candidate at the GSCASH election, Ashutosh,AISA student in JNU tells me: ”we are all [he points at another AISA comrade,Anant]middle class and we need to declass, we have to follow the model of Chan-drasekhar. But to declass is very tuff []because you have to relate with the workingclass”. A discussion over chai with Dewa Cherpa, a DSU militant provides a simi-

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lar account; ”leaders also have to fight against their own origin. The most difficultfight is against yourself”. This idea is found also among the influencers of JNUactivists such as the radical educationist Prof. Anil Sadgopal, which once at aseminar portrayed the founder of the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha, Shankar GuhaNiyogi and conclude on how ”true” left leaders have to ”declass themselves”. DSUmember Abdul, reflecting on the obvious correlation between those who try to de-class and those who benefit from advantaged social position, comments: ”comradesare deliberately not claiming scholarships, is this part of the declassing process?[]In any case, because I am not upper castethen I am supposed to go up, not theopposite. Playing at being a revolutionary seems then to enclose a refusal of so-cial attributes traditionally attached to the privileged India, including the urbanand intellectual etiquette. For instance, Khaliq, JNU MPhil students admits thatonce, while debating politics with a left student leader on campus he was conde-scendingly interrupted and accused to be ”too urban”, hence not understandingthe ”condition of the people”.

In many instances, while living among activists of CPI(M-L) in Bihar I feltstrong rejection of city-based forms of intellectualism. Members of the partysystematically emphasise their commitment with the Kisan Mahasabha (peasantunions) or worker’s trade unions while some affiliated students openly complainabout leading bhuddhijeevi (intellectuals) of their own party. Wishu, PhD stu-dents in Bhagalpur and aspirant Maley candidate for the next Assembly electionsin Bhagalpur tells with a witty tone to one of his friend in the hostel: Buddhijee-viyon ne communist partyion kee gand maardee hai (intellectuals have sodomisedthe communist party). How to deal with such comment when many JNU comradesare de facto intellectuals – since they study in the most prestigious research-basedgraduate school of the country? Is the only solution left for a JNU Marxist-Leninistmilitant the one of ”squandering its own cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1964)?

We have, in fact, seen at least two ways of relating to privilege and twotypes of operation of privilege. Inheritance always implies the dangerof squandering the heritage, especially when it consists of culture, thatis, an acquisition in which the manner of acquiring it is part of itsessence. (Bourdieu and Passeron 1964)

At the militant’s personal level the dialectic between infra and extra campus ex-periments enable her to broader contacts with the parent’s party and its ideologi-cal lifeworld. For example, theoretical understanding of Marxist-Leninism can besharpened via the attendance of the National Party School that AISA regularlyorganizes from time to time in Orissa. More broadly, campaigning outside thecampus offers the opportunity to strengthen ties will party full-timers, those whodevote themselves fully for the party with little or no financial compensation, ac-cepting therefore a life of frugality and absolute commitment. These full-timers

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also visit the campus, animate seminars forums and protest, ”sewing” further theconnection between the in and the texlitout of campus politics. It is no surprisethen to encounter leaders that have an extensive, passionate and conceptual un-derstanding of struggle and revolution in line with their life trajectories.

The intellectual instruction is further consolidated by the continuous interac-tion between Students’ Unions and various other ”sister organisations”. The diffu-sion of ideas takes place and dialogue with covalent ideological views are there tocomfort radical political stands. For instance, Aparna, SFI students’ representativein GSCASH is also very active in Jana Natya Manch, an ”agitational-propagandatheatre” (Hashmi 1988) while Srirupa is committed with another critical politicaltheatre, the Revolutionary Cultural Front. Similarly, for its April Unit ConferenceDSU union received in campus representatives of groups such as Bhagat SinghChattra Morcha (Banaras Hindu University), Inquilabi Chattra Morcha (Alla-habad University), Students’s for Society (Chandigarh), Democratic Students’sOrganiation (Patiala), United Students’s Democratic Federation (Kolkatta) andRevolutionary Cultural Front. Several other organisations and forums, like theStudents’ League, The New Materialists, Campus Front of India, JNU Gorkha Stu-dents’s were also present. Such events are dramatically important in confirming afaction in its political trajectory, uniting social agents and crafting a genuine espritde corps, that will ultimately create strong affective and comradeship bounds withthe community. Aarti, newly arrived on campus and affiliated to AISA recognizesherself that ”who you hang around with defines your political affiliation”.

This affective enchantment, born of the ability to love and admire one-self in one’s like-minded neighbors, is one of the foundations, alongwith the logical conformity linked to the homogeneity of mental struc-tures, of what is known as esprit de corps. This feeling of group sol-idarity in fact lies in the community of schemata of perception, ap-preciation, thought, and action that grounds the reflex complicity ofwell-orchestrated unconsciouses. (Bourdieu 1989: 84)

Second, when exploring the social world of youth in a stage of emerging adult-hood (Arnett 2001) scientists have to acknowledge that cultural transmission isalso transmitted through the university apparatus, which includes classes, teach-ers, literature available on campus etc. JNU has a history of scrutinising socialissues through a Marxist angle and numerous teachers (many of them being for-mer JNU students) profess a socialist understanding of the ideal society. TheMarxist economist Prabhat Patnaik attracted crowds of students in his classroomuntil his recent retirement and current political science professors Ajay Gudavartyand Rajarshi Dasgupta (among others) had in their youth leading roles in leftiststudent politics. It is noted that numerous professors along with social activists,

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journalist, politicians gather in post-dinner meeting in mess halls and address stu-dents and partisan speeches on issues titled like: ”in Solidarity with the MarutiWorkers’ Struggle”, ”Remembering Bhagat Singh in the Era of Re-Colonisation”,”SIT ’Clean Chit’ to Modi: Fact or Fiction”, ”Breaking the Fetters of Fascism andUnmasking the Facade of Indian Democracy”. At times, even academic seminarsresemble more Marxist ideological tribunes rather than proper scholarly debates.Such events range from a ”Third Annual Programme on Marxism and PopularCulture” to a seminar on ”Neoliberal Capitalism’s War” (C.f. poster), including aConference on ”Understanding Maoist Politics in India” where calls for revolution-ary violence made by some speakers received warm applauses form the audience.

In the same vein, JNU campus hosts its own Marxist bookshop, the People’sPublishing House, and Students’ Unions such as DSU organise episodic readingsession on revolutionary literature – the readings being selected by senior leaders.Chepal, DSU member finds it easy during a casual chai conversation to relatethe work of Althusser with the existence of class struggle on campus. Srirupa,ex-DSU candidate at the GSCASH election advices me to read selected texts ofLenin, Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar while Kavita, formerly from AISA wouldspecifically mention the pamphlet A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work (Engels1881) or The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Engels 1984).On several occasions, during interviews my respondents found the reading of TheManifesto ”exciting” or even ”emancipatory”. So, it seems that the developmentof abstract thinking, along with the taste for political debate is established withinthe boundaries of the broader left-wing political family; you learn to articulate ideawith socialist idioms. In JNU, getting inspired by communism and its internal logicis not a difficult achievement since Marx is considered here (contrary to many otherleading educational institutions) as culture legitime; the latter is put forward byteachers and leaders that embrace the world through this specific ideological andconceptual grid.

Through its value-inculcating and value-imposing operations, the schoolalso helps to form a general, transposable disposition towards legiti-mate culture, which is first acquired with respect to scholastically rec-ognized knowledge and practices but tends to be applied beyond thebounds of the curriculum, taking the form of a ”disinterested” propen-sity to accumulate experience and knowledge which may not be directlyprofitable in the academic market. (Bourdieu 1979: 23)

The effects of enclosure [in the university], compounded by those ofscholastic election and the prolonged cohabitation of a socially veryhomogeneous group, can indeed only favour a social and mental dis-tance from the world that, paradoxically, is never more apparent than

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Figure 3: Poster pasted in the corridor of the School of Social Sciences

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in the (often desperate) attempts to rejoin the social world, particularlythrough political commitments (Stalinism, Maoism, etc.) whose irre-sponsible utopianism and irrealist radicalism attest that they remain aparadoxical way of denying the realities of the social world. (Bourdieu2004:9)

Third, student activists tend to better appropriate cultural values when they arerewarding politically. Pragmatically speaking, students’ leaders are quasi politi-cians and professional producers of discourses, they are the ones who craft politicalclaims and articulate signifying collective grievances on campus. In one word, stu-dents’ activists have a ”political tongue” (Bourdieu 1979: 461) and in order tomaximize the impact (and therefore the benefits) of their discourses they have totailor it to the specific audience they face. It has to be noted that JNU populationhas been fundamentally transformed in the past decades because of the raising ofreservations in the university. When the share of seats for Other Backward Classes(OBC) – castes recognised by the Indian Government as socially and economicallydisadvantaged – were extended to higher education in 2006 it created a situationin which half of the students are by matter of fact from deprived categories.

22.5 per cent (15 for SC and 7.5 for ST) seats in each Programmeof Study are reserved for Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe candidatesrespectively. []27 per cent seats are reserved for OBC candidates (noncreamy layer). (JNU prospectus 2014: 43)

In this context a fierce debate started between an anti-reservation group (Youthfor Equality or YFE) and the left organisations that were supporting the strength-ening of SC/ST and OBC communities in campus. For instance, unions such asAISA opposed the practice of ”cut-off” marks, an administrative procedure thatallowed the university to do not fulfill the OBC quotas in case candidate gradeswere below a certain level. In parallel, the period also witnessed the raise of or-ganisations defending specific interests of Dalits such as the All India BackwardStudents’ Forum or the United Dalit Students’ Forum. Because these groups rejectpatron-client relations with left parties, unions that traditionally defended theirinterests – such as DSF, SFI, AISF (All India Student Federation), and AISA hadto convince unprivileged students that their stand for them was not mere ”leftbehalfism” but sincere brotherhood (Kumar 2013:5). Concretely, this means thateven more efforts are made by mainstream unions to gain trust among these com-munities, which eventually strengthen leftist pro-deprived-people rhetoric. Themost representative sign of this turn is the progressive replacement of Englishby Hindi in campus political speeches. Kavita remembers that when she joinedin 1991, ”speaking in Hindi for politics was shocking [] but later on the picture

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started to change. Reservation has brought more Hindi”. The sociological com-position of the majority of students’ in JNU has therefore brought changes in theMarxist-Leninist (and Maoist) students’ politics discourses on campus.

Fourth, it has to be made clear that the strength of the left parivar (family ofcommunity) on campus is not only cultural but organisational. DSF, SFI andAISA have an ordered, codified and hierarchised structure, a network of membersand activists but also resources accumulated over time and collective coordination(McCarty and Zald 1977). Their culturally encoded way in which militants artic-ulate their Marxist praxis is therefore embedded is an institutional frame. AISAclaims 800 members, SFI 600, DSF 1000 and recruiting new members is an es-sential part of the union’s work when the registration period comes – this goesthrough offering guidance and one-to-one assistance to the new students. In ad-dition to their members represented in university bodies the unions have differentoperational echelons. DSF has a President and a General Secretary, nine secre-tariat members and 25 people in an Executive Council. AISA claims seven vicepresidents, 8 joint secretaries, and executive council of 85 members and a Councilof approximately 100 people. Executive members of AISA are also in contact withdistrict state and national representatives and their respective council/committee.Contact with parent’s parties cadres is permanent, for instance in AISA a CPI(M-L) politburo member like Kavita is in regular telephone contact with JNU campusleaders (Sucheta, Akbar, Sandeep, Anubhuti). The National General Secretary,Abhyuday is in charge of the liaison between the different campuses in which AISAhas significant presence, mainly in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Karnataka.

The AISA-CPI(M-L) nexus is structured enough to have experts in differentdomains; in Delhi Tapas is considered as their ideologue and Kavita as their leadingfeminist figuge – she is president of the All India Progressive Women Association– one of the cultural branches of the CPI(M-L). The party has member dedicatedto the production and editing of the party material and at the campus level AISAmembers also have their micro-specialisation. Vishaka for instance, uses the artis-tic skills she inherited from her mother to make impressive large-scale posters orone-page comics for AISA and Akbar, president of JNUSU is the Chanakya (theIndian version of Machiavelli), the political adviser of the union, always keen inpromoting and discussing political strategies with campaigners such as Shehla, theformer GSCASH candidate. At the grassroot level new recruits are usually giventhe task to distribute pamphlets and flyers before elections, join protest marchesand be active in their respective hostel/dormitory. Ishita Mehata, SFI memberacknowledges that ”AISA recruits so many BAs from the school of languages, theirmuscle power come from there”.

Successful unions also need to have a hold on their communication strate-

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gies. Events are announced on posters pasted in the main schools (each schoolin JNU has its own specialization and several disciplined-based departments) anddistributed on mess tables for dinner. Apart from press conferences in particularoccasions, Students’ Unions mainly reach their audience via word of mouth andsocial medias declarations. On Facebook AISA seniors advertises main upcomingprotests and events, post comments on the latest national and local political is-sues and promote achievements of the union in the representative bodies of theuniversity:

Historic AC [Academic Council]meeting in JNU: AC ratifies Open Ac-cess Model for JNU Press as Proposed by JNUSU. A Glorious Chapteradded to the History of JNU Students’s Movement. []The PowerpointPresentation of Open Access model proposed by JNUSU [JNU Stu-dents’ Union] convinces the AC []What is of immense pride for theentire JNU students’ community is that this revolutionary step wasimagined by the students’s and progressive section of the universityunder the initiative of the the students’ union. (Akbar, post on Face-book 26/04/2014)

Fifth, if effective resource mobilisation by Students’ Unions is a way to understandthe dominance of left politics on campus, such university power control cannot beachieved without the guidance of skilled community organisers. Campus politicalorganisations depend upon its members for generating work (energy and time spentin addition of the study requirements), make money contributions and adopt somerisk-taking behavior (occasional fight with ABVP goons i.e. rogues, confrontationwith the police in protests); however most of the actual control and initiativesin the union come from a handful of dedicated leaders. While many occasionalmembers refer often on the playful component of their militancy, senior membersseem to emphacise more on how they ”get things done” for the group. Activistslike Akbar might deny the label ”politician” to define their action – ”I am nota politician, I am a revolutionary” he tells me once – but their everyday actionsdemonstrates a mastery of concrete attributes of a professional decision-maker.

Talents of public orator are required to relate with the widely eclectic publicof the campus. Speeches that address a large audience like JNUSU meetings,University General Body Meetings or Presidential debates (i.e. specific publicmeeting occurring once before elections) will happen in Hindi and include ”hereand now” issues, comments on broader politics and often accusations towards otherStudents’ Unions and their parents’ party – the SFI candidate for GSCASH forinstance was repeatedly asked to justify the violence of their party, the CommunistParty of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)], against farmers in Nandigram, West Bengal.

Public speakers in JNU need to master a high degree of rhetorical knowledge inorder to address the wide range of social groups on campus according to their spe-

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cific requirements and linguistic particularities. While following the candidates atthe GSCASH election in their class-to-class campaign I noticed formidable abilitiesfor improvisation and adaptation according to the composition of the class. Thetheme of ”gender sensitization” and broad presentation of the role of GSCASHwould be put forward by the AISA candidate Shehla when addressing bachelorclasses in the school of language (a special emphasis would be made on classes ofPersian, Arabic and Urdu that host a high rate of Muslims). Speeches to moremature students, Masters and Mphils in other school would be more political, men-tioning the need for speedy justice and an increased representation of students inGSCAH committees. In between each class speech candidate Shehla would receiveadvices from a team of AISA senior students, asked for example to emphacise moreon minorities issues or to add the slogan ”freedom without fear” at the end of herspeech.

”People from the North East do not like to be addressed in Hindi, you shouldbe careful not to do so” admits Kavita; student union leaders while campaigninghave to bear in mind that certain audiences require tailored communication. Can-didate Ufaque from DSU, noticing the more urban and arty crowd of the Art andAesthetics auditorium (where she entered for her campaign discourse) suddenlydecided to switch her speech into English. During class-to-class campaigns an im-portant skill is the one to convince the teacher that the intrusion in the classroomis appropriate at this specific moment. Candidates are often asked to restrain theirallocution to two minutes, which requires the ability to condense arguments andcoin appealing slogans.

Orators of each union have also to face repeated invectives of hostile studentsand various political adversaries, obliging them to carry out articulated answersin a minimum of time. Discourses are auscultated and desiccated, and everyfaux pas is instrumentalised by adversaries. These verbal spars give comparativeadvantages to astute debaters, which are often associated with a favorable parentaland educational background. Ufaque recognises that in order to become politicisedshe had first to adjust with the rhetorical level of her classmates when she wasdoing her Bachelor in Lady Sri Ram College – one of the best in the county. Unionactivists are also required to speak continuously for the entire period before thevoting, resulting in candidates having severe dying voices. Oliver, 2012 contestantfor a seat of Councillor in SIS school recognises that most difficult is ”to repeatover and over the same message, especially in room-to-room campaigns”.

The professionalisation of students’ leaders is further achieved through theiractivism outside the campus – i.e. with sister and parents’ organisations. Forinstance, AISA leaders on campus, supported by CPI(M-L), launched under thebanner of JNUSU a movement against the election of Narendra Modi as PrimeMinister, camping in Varanasi – where he is candidate – during the days before

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the Lok Sabha voting. This sort of event offers a wide range of political activitiesin a frequently intimidating environment, in contact to new kind of audiencessuch as railway workers, Yadav households, Muslim shopkeepers, urban dwellersetc. The case of the so-called ”Varanasi Chalo” (Varanasi let’s go) campaignillustrate well the range of competences that students’ leaders need to master.JNUSU representatives have to organise accommodation for all the campaignersand manage to make 25 people travel by train (knowing the current shortage oftickets for such rail travels the task can become quite challenging). Leaders arealso required to successfully manage negotiations with other non-elected students’organisations in order to convince them to join the movement. Once in Varanasifrontrunners need to successfully target neighbors suitable for their campaign, theyalso have to arrange press conferences and make sure that tensions do not ariseamong the cadres. Overall, the handful few top activists are responsible of thegood atmosphere of the group and on the success of the ”staying together” feelingof the community. Being a young militant is not primarily about carrying politicalclaims to the fore, it is more prosaically ”hanging around” with friends that have asimilar understanding of society and spend most of her time engaging in the samecampaigns, same protests, same free time

Similarly the work of senior campus leaders in their parents’ party enrichestheir political know-how and their confidence as aspiring decision-makers. Inplaces where the party requires active campaigning (or building up new bases)she will perform a wider range of political activities including assisting Ministersof the Legislative Assembly (parliamentarians at a state lever) or even Membersof the Parliament, giving speeches in the local market chowks (i.e. street corner),standing and speaking on a rostrum in crowded party conventions, preparing rallymeetings, agitating students in their hostel, giving instruction to campaigns vans– those vehicles who carry voting messages through loudspeakers. This politicaltraining outside the campus can, in addition of comforting the political status ofthe student militant provide him with practical tools to improve the communi-cation and the functioning of the union back in campus. The professionalisationprocess of students’ leader is therefore encapsulated in the dialectic between theinside and the outside, between the campus and the broader political arena.

Students’ Unions in the university are entrenched within the electoral systemof the campus, and apart from DSU’s tradition of electoral boycott (it opposes theapplication of the 2006 Lyngdow Committee recommendations, which enforcesa set of policies supposed to prevent the ”criminalisation” of student elections)all the other unions have the Students’ Unions elections in September as theirfocal point in their agenda. The only festival on campus is JNUSU notes Akbarwhile Abdul regrets that the student agitation is cantoned to the election, notingthat ”there is no beyond, everything dies out after elections”. The success of

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Figure 4: Results of the GSCASH elections, April 4 2014

a JNU students’ union is therefore analysed through the lens of their electoralperformance. For instance, AISA candidate happen to lose the April GSCASHelection after two years of continuous electoral successes – i.e. the union currentlyoccupies all four central panel seats in JNUSU, including the one of President,Vice-President, General Secretary, Joint secretary as well as many councilor seatsin each school.

The result triggered a series of ”crises” meetings in AISA in order to under-stand the reason of the defeat and elaborate an appropriate strategy for the nextelectoral period. What is crucial to understand here is that elaborating efficientcampaigns to catch votes is part of the process of professionalisation of studentleaders. Crafting an appealing programme is important, recruiting new membersessential, and engaging with diverse ”electioneering mechanisms” the norm. Stu-dent Khaliq deplores for instance that unions ask students to cast a ”freezing-vote”for the GSCASH election, which means casting one vote only instead of the twoallotted – thus disadvantaging direct competitors. Other students claimed thatsecret alliances were made before presidential elections, in which leading Students’Unions were approaching ABVP voters, and asking for their vote for central panelseats. A trade-off would occur on the following line: each student being allowedto vote both for seats for representatives at the university level and at the schoollevel, left union members would ensure that the hindu-right students’ union securecouncilor positions in its ”strongholds”, namely science schools and the Sanskritcenter – for left unions this basically mean asking its own members to vote fortheir political opponents in those units.

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Concluding remark; the importance of networks

Like other human beings, a Marxist-Leninst comrade is a biped that walks on twolegs. The left one is cultural, based on the social appropriation of diffused subal-tern values, pro-people rationales and martyrs’ identifications; further muscled-upthrough the contact with senior leaders, party officials and influential teachers.The right one is rather organisational, based on factional adoptive kinships, ona progressive (built over time) sense of belonging to a well-ordered community;this structure is galvanised by experienced and devoted leaders which accumulatepolitical experience both inside and outside of the campus. ”In JNU we have morespace to practice compared to DU [Delhi University]” says Michael, a DSU activist.This political practice involves the existence of a political field which borders ex-ceeds the walls of a the campus; it includes a myriad of network interactions withsister organisations, parents party, brothers’ students unions in other universities.Contrary to what many might argue, the radical-left cosmos visible in JNU is nottrapped within the autarchic boundaries of the academic island, but inserted in ascattered, yet dynamic nexus of activists (cultural, social and political) and activesympathisers – greeting each other with warm laal salam. This is how politicalethos are forged in JNU campus; with cultural hammers and structured sickles.

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20 CONTENTS

Keywords: Activism, Network, Campus, JNU, De-classed, Political Ethnography,Field, Identity, Safe Territory, Fieldwork, Bourdieu

Contents

Introduction of JNU as a Political Space 1

Five understandings of JNU leftism 6

Concluding remark; the importance of networks 19

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