Best Of Both Sides Student Politics Is Democracys First Classroom

The Madhya Pradesh High Court, responding to a PIL filed by student leaders including from the NSUI, has directed the state government to conduct elections in the state’s university and college student unions. It is a welcome and long-delayed step. Student union elections in Madhya Pradesh have been conducted irregularly since 2006, when professor H S Sabharwal was murdered allegedly by ABVP activists (the six people booked were later acquitted) opposed to his conduct of elections in Ujjain’s Madhav College.

Unfortunately, Madhya Pradesh is not an exception. It represents the national norm of governmental indifference or even repression of student politics — a trend that has accelerated significantly in the last decade. The Allahabad University Students Union, which has in the past been led by stalwarts like Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna, Narayan Dutt Tiwari, Dr Shankar Dayal Sharma, and V P Singh, was abolished by the University’s academic council in 2019. Aligarh Muslim University Student Union — of which Mahatma Gandhi himself was a life member — has been inactive since 2019. At the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, the administration has dissolved the student union and moved to an unelected students’ council. Aside from Kerala and a handful of select universities — prominent among these being Panjab University, Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Patna University, and the University of Hyderabad — the tradition of student elections has come to an abrupt halt.

The ostensible grounds for this aversion is the role that money and muscle power play in student elections. This is a very real concern, as evinced by professor Sabharwal’s murder. But these are factors that operate in our Assembly and Lok Sabha elections as well, perhaps in a much more consequential way. The university is only emblematic of our society, just like our general body politic is. The refusal to conduct elections on these grounds is only a pretext. The recommendations of the Lyngdoh Committee (2006) on student elections have been made binding on educational institutions by the Supreme Court. They offer a meaningful and workable pathway to clean polls. Unfortunately, university authorities — for instance, at Allahabad University — have used the Lyngdoh Committee to shut down elections altogether.

The aversion to student politics is actually motivated by a desire to eradicate pipelines of student leadership. Globally, as well as in India, it is organised student movements that have led political change. Some of our most prominent national leaders have come from student politics — including leading lights of the current regime, such as Arun Jaitley, Manoj Sinha, and Ravi Shankar Prasad. Yes, student politics is often a launchpad for politicians. But when the gates of our Parliament are open for criminals and industrialists, why are student leaders not kosher?

Our claim to be a democracy, and even the mother of democracy, appears hollow when faced with the reality of how our students are denied their rights to unionise and be represented in the administration of our higher education institutions. Education is not just a process of formal skilling for employment, it is also the process through which a citizenry is created. We become voters after being students. The attempts to divorce students from politics, also seen in the craven statements by several of Delhi’s leading national universities during the protests last month, undervalue the meaning of education. Critical thinking and freedom of expression, which are pillars of academia, cannot be limited to the classroom.

An elected student body also serves another purpose — it enables the authorities, be it the university administration or the state — to have a meaningful conversation with legitimate representatives of students. The organic nationwide student protests of the last few months have shown the need for the same. Indeed, the angst of the students on the streets of India is not divorced from the denial of their political agency and infantilisation in higher education. Students are demanding a voice, in their educational institutions to begin with, and in the uppermost echelons of politics if need be.

The leadership of the Indian National Congress is very keen on student elections, to the extent that internal elections are now being conducted in the National Students Union of India (NSUI). But the successful democratisation of our higher education will need the support of all parties and a shared resolve. This must be one of the key pillars of any resolution to the current crisis in our education sector.

The author is in charge of the National Students Union of India, and former president, Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union