The violence that convulsed Jadavpur University this week is reprehensible and tragic. It is also, unfortunately, not exceptional. To treat each eruption of violence on campus as an isolated breakdown of law and order is to miss the deeper problem. Jadavpur has intermittently been a violent political space almost from its inception, a tendency that gained a ferocious form during the Naxalite years. However, the problem extends beyond one university. Violence has become embedded in West Bengal’s political culture, and the campus increasingly reproduces some of the pathologies of the larger society around it.
Violence here should not be understood simply as physical assault. It begins earlier — with the denial of dignity, the refusal to recognise the legitimacy of disagreement, and the transformation of political opponents into morally contemptible enemies. Even institutions of civil society, often populated by the supposedly cultivated bhadralok and bhadramahila, display an increasing propensity for abuse, humiliation, and degradation of others. From egg-throwing and public shaming to intimidation, beatings and political killings, there is a disturbing continuity in Bengal’s political repertoire. The intensity varies; the underlying grammar does not.
A university has a particular responsibility because it is distinctive. A university exists precisely because disagreement is valuable. Its intellectual purpose rests upon the proposition that truth does not need protection from argument; it needs exposure to argument. The central problem at Jadavpur is therefore not the existence of strong ideological commitments. Universities without ideological disagreements would be intellectually impoverished places. The problem is ideological intransigence — the conviction that acknowledging the other’s right to speak somehow weakens one’s own convictions. The negation of the other becomes a means of reaffirming the self.
One would be hard-pressed to find a political formation with a claim to innocence in this matter. The traditions of the Left and Right are so ideologically at odds that any attempt to draw a fine distinction between them is unwarranted. However, the chasm between their ideologies does not justify what has been a collective shortcoming in democratic temperament. Neither side has shown civility in listening, arguing, or disagreeing. Sometimes both succumb to the idea of exclusive campus access.
When administrations reject the demands of student organisations, criticism is entirely legitimate. Protest is justified. Demonstration is acceptable. Even prolonged and inconvenient dissent may be licit. However, once political disagreement becomes personal degradation, the democratic content of protest disappears. To lay hands on a student or member of staff or visitor, to put university property to the torch, to silence people by threats or to pervert a collective mobilisation into the coercion of a mob is not part of democratic politics; it is a repudiation of it. In employing such means, they are not furthering their cause but making plain they have no way of defending it by reason or persuasion. The political stripe of the perpetrators matters not. When acts of violence and vandalism occur at a university, they require unequivocal condemnation and subsequent legal action after an impartial investigation. Advocacy for pluralism is not contingent on tolerating those who seek to eliminate it by coercive means.
The government has a responsibility in this regard. It is for the state to see to the keeping of law and order; one cannot put it on a university to stand in for the agencies so charged. In any case, a university would lack the institutional means or the legal standing to put in place security of the sort that the government can provide; and there are no good reasons to make an academic campus something of a heavily policed place. Restraint is necessary for individuals holding political authority. Ministers and their associates need to tone down their intermittently hostile attitude toward universities, presenting them as if they oppose the state simply for having an inconvenient perspective or engaging in dissent. One should not consider a university a threat because of the disagreements found within it; that is its purpose.
An ideology cannot be defeated by beating its adherents. Nor can a democratic university protect itself by preventing an ideology from being heard merely because most people on campus find it objectionable. If an organisation or individual is not breaking the law, the right response to offensive speech is through criticism, debate, organising, and counterarguments. The democratic answer to an idea is another idea.
What is at stake in the Jadavpur crisis goes well beyond student politics; it is the university as a public space in common that is being eroded. For, violence is a matter of violation, of not acknowledging the selfhood of another. When an opponent is reduced to a category, a “Maoist”, “traitor”, “fascist” or “anti-national”, the moral scruples that would stop one from putting him to shame are all but gone. Such labels are made into weapons and political rhetoric can make physical violence seem the reasonable course of action. One would expect an institution of JU’s academic repute to be in a position to resist such simplification. It is not succeeding in that regard.
The writer teaches at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and was the Eugenio Lopez Visiting Chair at the Department of International Studies and Political Science at Virginia Military Institute, US
