Even though I am one of those 48 teachers who have been issued a chargesheet for taking part in a peaceful protest march organised by the Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers’ Association, this article is not about the semantics – the bureaucratic/legal interpretations of the ‘rules and regulations’, and the mechanism of ‘discipline and punishment’.
Instead, this is about an intensely ‘subjective’ experience of loss and pain, and the ‘objective’ reasons for this pathos.
Let me begin the story with a personal note. The other day a friend of mine asked whether his daughter should think of JNU for her postgraduate study. And I gave a categorical reply: ‘No’.
This happened for the first time in my life. I was always over-enthusiastic about my university; I used to tell people: JNU is a dream, a project, a fantastic experiment – a public university reconciling excellence and equality, a creative space conducive to the growth of critical thinking, emancipatory ideas and alternative life-practices.
Fear destroys creative learning
However, today I have lost that confidence. How can I ask my friend to send his daughter to a university where the psychology of fear or the bombardment of threatening circulars invades every sphere of life?
When you see a senior professor with a dissenting voice is humiliated in the one-dimensional Academic Council meeting, and others prefer to remain silent, the message is conveyed: don’t question the ‘competent authority’. When you see a young professor, despite the presence of many senior and experienced professors, is recruited as the Dean of the School of Social Sciences, you realise that nothing matters – be it the institutional norm or the academic convention; what matters is only the ‘discretionary power’ of the ‘competent authority’.
Or for that matter, when the aesthetically enriched and politically meaningful posters are removed from the walls, the students are asked to be aware of the ‘limits’ to their agency. When the teachers whisper whether they should write their names in the attendance registrar (even though it has not yet become mandatory) in order to be ‘safe’ (the biometric, they fear, is coming), you realise how the backbone of the teaching community has been systematically destroyed.
Or for that matter, when for a peaceful march in which not less than 150 teachers participated, they target 48 teachers, the strategy is clear: divide, fragment and demoralise.
Fear is an anti-thesis of creative learning. With this sort of toxic environment, everything becomes hypocritical, empty and superficial – be it a lecture on Gandhi’s civil disobedience, a term paper on Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, or a seminar on ‘Marginality and Resistance’ (and even inaugurated by the ‘competent authority’).
I know that I am somehow becoming pessimistic. I ask my research students: submit your theses as early as you can; this is no longer the place you dreamed of. I realise that so many stalwarts spent their life-energy to build this university. It took time. But then, see the irony. In three years it can be finished. Is it that in our times, destroyers are more powerful than creators?
Bureaucracy and the mysterious castle
Let me share yet another story. Nothing is easy here. A student works for four years, writes her Ph.D thesis, and then, somewhere a clerk or a section officer makes a technical mistake – say, a wrong spelling of the title of the thesis. She has to move around, meet all sorts of officials, and experience humiliation.
In order to help her, I tried to meet the concerned staff in the Academic Evaluation section. No, it was not easy. The security guard interrogated me. Yes, 29 years of teaching, my students teaching in different universities of the country and the world; and now suddenly I realise that this is no more my university; it is the university of the registrars and rectors, section officers and security guards; and of course, this is the university of the ‘competent authority’.