Illustration by Abro
Across India protests have erupted against a controversial citizenship law, enacted in December last year. Even though the law is widely being deemed ‘anti-Muslim’, many non-Muslim Indians are also participating in the protests. They see the law — passed by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government — as an attack on India’s constitutional secularism, first established in 1950.
At the centre of the protests are thousands of university and college students. One of the most active campuses in this respect has been Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). On January 5 this year, at least 40 JNU students were admitted to the hospital with injuries. According to a January 6 report by the BBC, masked men and at least one woman, allegedly belonging to the student wings of Hindu nationalist parties, attacked students of the JNU and vandalised university property.
For decades, JNU has been one of India’s most politicised campuses. It is often described as a hotbed of radical left-wing politics. According to a study of politics in JNU, published in the March 2018 edition of Economic and Political Weekly, Jean-Thomas Martelli and Khlaiq Parkar wrote that on 33 occasions, radical left-wing student outfits have won JNU’s student union elections.
Even though the student wings of the BJP and the paramilitary Hindu nationalist organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) are also active there, only once have they won the presidential post in the university’s union.
What makes a university campus left wing or right wing?
The university’s union has remained in the hands of left-wing student groups and alliances, due to what Martelli and Parkar say is JNU’s “dominant anti-establishment discourse.”
The BJP and RSS student wings have lamented that anti-left politics is suppressed at the university. There are also, of course, universities and colleges in India where right-wing student outfits are dominant and left-wing student groups accuse them of repression.
So what makes a university campus left wing or right wing? Recently in the US, conservative think tanks, academics and student outfits have accused their left-wing counterparts of blatantly repressing free speech by disallowing conservative groups to operate on various campuses.
They accuse ‘radical’ left-wing professors of ‘indoctrinating’ students in the name of liberalism and socialism, while, in fact, turning them into ‘left-wing fascists’.
Such allegations are not entirely unfounded. In their 2005 essay for a journal called The Forum, researchers Stanley Rothman, S Robert Lichter and Neil Nevetti wrote that left-wing “ideologically-based discrimination in academic advancement deserves serious consideration.”
Even many ‘moderate’ commentators in the US have not hesitated in pointing out the proliferation of ‘political correctness’, purportedly formulated on ‘left-leaning’ US campuses, as the reason behind the off-campus ‘backlash’ that eventually put Donald Trump in the White House.
But, again, what makes a campus left or right wing? In February 2017, the American journalist Scott Jaschik (in an essay for Inside Higher Ed) analysed four studies conducted between 2007 and 2016.
The studies concluded that faculty members of most American universities leaned left. Professors thus play a major role in shaping the students’ ideological orientation and biases.