South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal

22 | 2019 Student Politics in South Asia

Jean-Thomas Martelli and Kristina Garalyté (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/5852 DOI: 10.4000/samaj.5852 ISSN: 1960-6060

Publisher Association pour la recherche sur l'Asie du Sud (ARAS)

Electronic reference Jean-Thomas Martelli and Kristina Garalyté (dir.), South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 22 | 2019, “Student Politics in South Asia” [Online], Online since 15 December 2019, connection on 24 March 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/5852; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj. 5852

This text was automatically generated on 24 March 2021.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Generational Communities: Student Activism and the Politics of Becoming in South Asia Jean-Thomas Martelli and Kristina Garalytė

Student Politics in British India and Beyond: The Rise and Fragmentation of the All India Student Federation (AISF), 1936–1950 Tom Wilkinson

A Campus in Context: East Pakistan’s “Mass Upsurge” at Local, Regional, and International Scales Samantha Christiansen

Crisis of the “Nehruvian Consensus” or Pluralization of Indian Politics? Aligarh Muslim University and the Demand for Minority Status Laurence Gautier

Patronage, Populism, and Protest: Student Politics in Pakistani Punjab Hassan Javid

The Spillovers of Competition: Value-based Activism and Political Cross-fertilization in an Indian Campus Jean-Thomas Martelli

Regional Charisma: The Making of a Student Leader in a Himalayan Hill Town Leah Koskimaki

Performing the Party. National Holiday Events and Politics at a Public University Campus in Bangladesh Mascha Schulz

Symbolic Boundaries and Moral Demands of Dalit Student Activism Kristina Garalytė

How Campuses Mediate a Nationwide Upsurge against India’s Communalization. An Account from Jamia Millia Islamia and Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi Jean-Thomas Martelli and Kristina Garalytė

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Generational Communities: Student Activism and the Politics of Becoming in South Asia

Jean-Thomas Martelli and Kristina Garalytė

1 The wide resonance of the aphorism, “from shadows to the stars,” closing the 2016 suicide letter of lower caste student activist Rohith Vemula1 suggests broken hopes for South Asian educated youth. It points at the tragic obstacles to political change and social upliftment experienced by many young people, reflecting a characteristic desire for individual and collective change. The astounding protests that ensued from Rohith’s suicide in India are now contributing to the revival of scholarly interest in the formation of political attitudes among educated youth, subjecting the question of students’ socialization into politics to academic scrutiny. Indeed, amidst the uncertain social, economic and political promises of the South Asian educational bulge,2 contemporary politics in university spaces in South Asia has the potential of shaping youth as idiosyncratic generations. They are characterized not only by their aspirations for a better future, but also by their ability to experience collectively, yet in their own way, major political and social events.

2 Making sense of this research agenda revival is core to this special issue’s enquiry, which runs through ethnographic and historical insights of eight contributions, covering youths’ experiments with politics in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. This introduction questions the relevance of student politics as an object of inquiry by asking whether it truly constitutes a field that is autonomous from wider organized politics. By interpreting student politics as political becoming, this collection of articles indicates that everyday campus-based activism is a potent vehicle for the (re)production of contemporary South Asian polity. Interrogations over the meaning of this “(re)”sprinkle the issue, as authors debate how student politics, understood as an experimental learning process of politics within a given educational space (Loader, Vromen and Xenos 2014) both produces and reproduces political imaginaries, cultural tropes and social hierarchies. While party politics is not always central in the conduct of student politics in South Asia, its socializing presence in campuses—especially for

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non-elite sections of the student population—stands out when compared to less structured student mobilizations in Western counterparts (Muxel 2011, 2018). Through introducing the articles of this issue, we are interested in mapping the poorly charted territory of politics among generational communities in university spaces in South Asia. Here our understanding of community entails three criteria: social ties connecting those who are part of the university environment; a physical or virtual proximity between its members; and a set of meaningful interactions that serve as collective binder (Kusenbach 2006; Schafer 2019).

3 Our concept of generational communities applies first and foremost, if not only, to youth communities, since the identification of individuals to a perceived and situated age group is rarely strong enough to form communities on that basis in other cases. Consequently, generational communities are in our understanding partly ascriptive, partly self-selected communities in which a set of networked and youthful cohorts are engaged, directly or indirectly with formal or informal education. Their distinctiveness lies in their production at the micro-level of shared thinking, self-fashioning and of framing perspectives and grids of understandings, as well as formative engagements with macro socio-political turns. Contrary to student communities which necessarily have administrative and academic existence, generational communities can be more inclusive, fluid, relational, processual, dynamic and eventful (Brubaker 2004). They may include non-students, teachers, alumni, peers, relatives contributing to educational life, friendships and more formal organizational linkages, as well as neighborhood ecologies, infrastructure businesses, coaching agencies, vocational training centers or placement structures tied to the educational field, NGOs and political organizations, cadres and leaders supporting student politics. The territorial boundaries of a generational community are not always overlapping with campus boundaries. Politics involving decisive inputs of students can happen outside university premises. Educated youth politics online is rarely restricted to batchmate-only discussion groups; networks of student activists entail both campus and non-campus territories, include university neighborhoods, nonresidential educational spaces, work and leisure nexuses, distant and part-time education. Thus, the scale of generational communities is not youth at large, but more granular and internally heterogeneous assemblages of youthful individuals engaged in group-making and generating political readings and events. As generational communities produce “situated actions, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, discursive frames, organizational routines, institutional forms, political projects, and contingent events” (Brubaker 2004:11), their perimeter of action can vary significantly, depending on parameters such as degrees of socialization, cultures of public participation, interconnectedness between educational spaces and wider geographies. Generational communities tend to survive the university years, albeit to varying degrees, orienting friendships, cognitive frames and political orientations, but also professional, family and other life choices of ex-students. Depending in part on levels of socialization and public engagement of individuals during university years, they continue to engage with their former educational setting, participating in alumni meetings, mentoring and counselling student activists, teaching new batches of students or simply loitering in campus spaces. The “prestige” and/or “stigma” of one’s participation in certain generational communities sometimes accompany individuals long after student years, orienting the way relatives, friends, colleagues and the general public introduce and perceive them. Hence, for many years a “passed out” (graduated) student activist can be referred to as “JNUite” (i.e. someone who has

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attended Jawaharlal Nehru University—JNU) or former UoHSU office bearer (i.e. member of the Students’ Union of the University of Hyderabad—UoH).

4 Working out an operational typology we suggest that student politics in South Asia navigates in between two ideal-types of generational communities. Building on both the contributions of this issue and the existing literature, our first ideal type understands the campus as a natural community, whose engagement with politics is mainly defined by its location in the socio-political space, being primarily structured around class, caste, gender, religion, economic aspirations, social upbringing and muscle politics (Lukose 2011; Jeffrey and Young 2013; Ruud 2014; Kuttig 2019). The second approach considers that what is to be represented in student activism is a political community in which, through ideational and agonistic politics, social lines of fracture are addressed, imagined, tilted and at times subverted. Whereas natural communities are primarily in-situ cohorts of networked individuals of similar age aligned with the broader socio-political context in which they thrive, political communities are also characterized by their ability to be politicized differentially through inter-cohort emulation, carrying the potential to emerge as autonomous counter publics (Warner 2002), showing degrees of collective volitional agency, self- organization and sovereignty. As a result, natural communities tend to emphasize student-specific concerns while being tributaries of the wider political field. Political communities rather converse with it, fueling debates and reconfiguring regional and national contentions (Gautier 2020). To sum up, natural communities tend to reproduce capital, morality, hierarchies and zeitgeists among students, while political communities tend to renegotiate such constructs—with more or less success (Nisbett 2007).

5 By bringing the ideational work of student activists back to the center of the academic discussion, this special issue does not attempt to prioritize ideology over other forms and aspects of student politics. In line with recent work on political youth engagement within the Global South (Oinas, Onodera and Suurpää 2017; Snellinger 2018), we aim at a more nuanced and balanced understanding of the interplay between pragmatic and idealistic motives within student political activism in South Asia. We highlight the contradictory nature of student political activism, as students seek “political opportunity within the framework of a revolution” (Snellinger2018:3). Oinas and colleagues (2017) remind us that it is important not to get “trapped in either/or polarizing analysis” and to acknowledge that student political engagement can be “simultaneously self-interested, pragmatic and utopian” (Oinas, Onodera and Suurpää 2017:12). In a shift away from reductionist, idealizing or denigrating approaches, contributions of this special issue place individuals and their collective agency within larger socio-political contexts that structure students’ engagement with the political.

6 In line with others (e.g. Snellinger 2018), we suggest that various streams of student activism have in common a vision of the campus as a springboard for securing symbolic, social and economic gains, often in articulation with the need to provide support for political parties, notably through identifying new cadres and incipient leadership (Hazary 1987). We indicate however that such a perspective alone does not entirely explain the specificity as well as the variability of the phenomena under study. It does not reflect either on the way student politics is enabled and enmeshed in biographical reconfiguration, nor on the conditions that nurture it. Complementing

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studies that outline the long-term individual consequences of political activism (McAdam 1988; Della Porta 2019; Fillieule and Neveu 2019) we suggest that student activism itself is characterized by individual and collective self-change, understood as a set of everyday intimate experiences and instrumental performances. Because of the trial-and-error aspect of students’ engagements with politics, we locate their distinctiveness in the way activists undergo and display self-change as a form of political becoming. We further locate political outcomes of these transformative processes within a generation that is youthful constituencies experiencing differentially social transformations and impactful political events in an identifiable sociocultural location (Mannheim [1928]1952). While advertisements of the self are a defining feature of student politics and do index claims to political representation (Martelli 2019b), their relevance depends on their target “audience,” that is, the student community in which representation claims are enshrined. Two popular modalities of youth self- fashioning emerge as politically successful. One is based on displays of generosity, service and charismatic strength to ensure responsiveness to the downtrodden and one’s community (Snellinger 2018; Michelutti et al. 2019; Koskimaki 2020); the other is rooted in signs of forfeiting or asserting one’s social status to ensure representation of the downtrodden and one’s community while powering student agitations (Martelli 2019b). Thus, student politics is characterized by the injunction to craft coherent narratives of the self (Naudet 2011) both morally acceptable and politically successful, for example through giving back (Garalytė 2020) or netaizing (i.e. embodying the ethos of the neta, the political leader).

7 This issue aims at mobilizing the notion of generational communities in order to address the relevance and the specificity of student politics in South Asia. How distinctive is student politics from mainstream political participation and what relationships do they entertain? What is the role of generations in renewing political participation? What are the sets of individual and collective practices and performances that enable to represent youth in contemporary South Asia? What is the role of campuses as spaces of political incubation? What are the regional specificities of student politics? To which extent the sociological and academic composition of the campus orient the political ideas and material demands produced on campus? While we go on engaging with the geographical and sociological plurality of campus activism in South Asia, we propose the aforementioned functional typology as an effective navigational compass enabling inter- and intra- regional comparisons, while facilitating comparative entry points with global scenarios. In the following four sections, we review the substantial variability of the phenomenon under study before categorizing the way student politics is portrayed in anthropological youth studies and more widely in relevant political science, sociology and historical fields. Prior to introducing the eight articles of the issue, we make a case for the study of educated youth self-fashioning from the lens of generational communities.

Fragmented Collectives: The Many Fault Lines of Student Activism in South Asia

8 Student political activism is a significant extra-curricular activity for students in university spaces, along with—and sometimes in lieu of—fraternities, publication clubs, religious groups, athletic teams and cultural organizations (Altbach 2006). Oppositional

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in nature, but not necessarily anti-establishment, the drawing of the contours of student activism in South Asia is hampered by a strong contextual modularity. We identify five overlapping parameters instrumental in shaping the character, magnitude and terrain of student politics in South Asia: academic environment, student composition, cultural and ideological legacies, public/private arrangements and finally regional historical dynamics in engaging with state and non-state actors.

9 From a structural point of view, the emergence of student politics always depends on the educational context. The underlying assumption in social movement theory is that the university-based social networks (Crossley 2008) as well as the absence of personal constraints to collective action in given territories (i.e. “biographical availability,” McAdam 2013) are conducive to making new generations join a broad range of contentious politics (Della Porta 2019). Biographical availability is indubitably higher in older public institutions than newer for-profit educational structures (Altbach 2006).3 In the former settings, traditional student cultures often offer the possibility of new political socializations (Fillieule 2013) before and after classes, thus “interrupting the flow of habits” (Schutz 1976) of primary socializations acquired from parental upbringing. However, the distinction between private and public institutions is blurred in places where formal higher education is highly dysfunctional, and where student politicization necessitates uncertain time investments (e.g. “timepass,” Jeffrey 2010; “time-use,” Andersen 2016), loitering (Lukose 2009), flirtation (Osella and Osella 1998) and male-centric leisure (Verkaaik 2004). In contrast, in more prestigious sites of higher education, students’ engagements with politics are tied up with personal experiences of upward social mobility (Garalytė 2020; Fernandez 2018).

10 Due both to strong endogenous political traditions and a certain degree of self- selection, studies on student movements in various countries acknowledge the leading political role taken by prestigious universities in the social sciences (Altbach [1991]2014; Luescher and Mamashela 2015). Globally the picture seems to hold true: Zhao (2004) finds that among people involved in the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement in China, students from the social sciences and humanities were overrepresented—for instance, of the 21 most-wanted student leaders of the 1989 movement, 14 majored in those areas. Ketchley and Biggs (2016) along with Gambetta and Hertog (2016) find that Islamist political activism after the 2013 military coup in Egypt was imbued by university students and graduates from prestigious institutions. However, the South Asian scenario only partly conforms to the larger picture. Early phases of Maoism in India (Banerjee 1984) relied on science students, while Nepali Maoism was more often carried out by students with sociology and political science majors (Snellinger 2010). While some emphasize that a handful of prestigious institutions in South Asia continue to harbor key value-based student movements (Altbach 2006; Martelli and Parkar 2018), others have outlined the importance of “provincial” educational institutions in deepening social movements (Pathania 2018). For instance, the 1974 “JP movement,” protesting against corruption and the doubling price of food grain in Bihar (India) was led by students of provincial universities of the state (Carrasco 2013). Similarly, 1968 protests in East-Pakistan emerged in the context of the massification of higher education and the increase of new non-elite colleges affiliated to older universities (Raghavan 2013).

11 As for the academic context, the social composition of students in educational settings is instrumental in shaping their political attitudes. South Asian youth from lower

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economic backgrounds are, when compared to more affluent youth globally, on average more involved in electoral politics, in particular when it comes to casting their vote (Jaffrelot and Van der Veer 2008; Kumar 2019). Standing against all-encompassing processes of the “creolization” of democracy (Yadav 1999), youth upper castes and classes are, like elder “privileged” cohorts characterized by their escapism in the face of the triumph of plebeian’s politics. Figure 1 below, summarizing key findings of a student survey in a pan-Indian university (Jawaharlal Nehru University, JNU) (Martelli and Ari 2018) confirms to an extent existing social biases towards political participation. It shows that social biases on campus are further differentiated according to students’ political affiliations, thus reinforcing the idea that the campus constitutes a cohesive political field. Such differences proxy the fact that group representation by specific student organizations is not entirely different than what is practiced by their parental organization(s) outside university spaces, even if JNU student politics displays comparatively higher levels of social inclusiveness (Martelli and Parkar 2018). All in all, the transformations of South Asian democracies, and in particular their vernacularization (Michelutti 2008), are shared by campuses and wider dwelling spaces alike, irrespective of whether their political attributes point to political violence in Bangladesh (Bal and Siraj 2017; Suykens 2018) or Islamic identity in Pakistan (Nelson 2011).

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Figure 1: Social Space of Student Activists in Jawaharlal Nehru University According to their Student Organization

In the correlation circle, “Orga:E.Day” stands for “organization of political events every day.” Similarly, “Partic:E.W/M” means“political participation every week or every month,” “Opinion Pol” should be read “opinion on student politics in campus” and “Mat/HighSchool” indicates “parents who have attained Matriculation or High school.” The following are the student organizations mentioned. DSU: Democratic Students’ Union, supporter of the Communist Party of India Maoist CPI(Maoist). It usually does not contest JNU student elections. DSF: Democratic Students’ Federation, splinter group of SFI, associated to Left Collective and Young Bengal in West Bengal. AISA: All India Students Association, student wing of Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist CPI(ML). SFI: Students’ Federation of India, student wing of Communist Party of India Marxist CPI(M). NSUI: National Students’ Union of India, student wing of the Indian National Congress. AISF: All India Students Federation, student wing of Communist Party of India CPI. UDSF: United Dalit Students’ Forum, sympathizer of the Bahujan Samaj Party (Majority People’s Party) BSP. It does not contest JNU student elections. ABVP: Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (All Indian Student Council), student wing of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Corps) RSS. Strongly supports the current Hindu nationalist party in power, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party) BJP. Source: Martelli’s Attitude Survey on Politics in JNU (2014-15), Multiple Factorial Analysis map by author. The full forms of student organizations can be found in Martelli (2020: Figure1).

12 The increasing size of student cohorts as well as the fast-growing privatization of higher education since the 1990s is having long-lasting effects on the conduct of student politics. Contributing to the portrayal of student participation in public affairs as unruly obstacles to both employment and access to educational goods, these two factors are fostering what Chatterjee (2012) describes as antipolitical politics. Within this framework, student politics is made responsible for “holding the education and campus experience hostage” (Snellinger 2018). Lukose (2006) for instance considers educated youth as a “gendered category of consumption.” She describes how in various South Asian spaces such as Kerala (India), students assert the ban of general strikes in the name of respect for public property and a well-mannered use of the public space (Lukose 2009). Rejecting the morally “dirty” participation in organized politics, the majority of youth in Nepal are considered by Liechty (2003) as a vanguard of middle-

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class consumerism. Within such a template, antipolitical politics can take the form of youth-led protests against corrupt politicians, as was the case of the Anna Hazare movement in India (Tawa Lama-Rewal 2018). Fetishizing notions such as merit, this strand of politics negates the existence of social divisions, often contributing to their reproduction. For instance, the caste-neutral narrative of academic achievement at work in the reputed Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) often benefits upper caste students. Indeed, as they inherit higher abilities to valorize their soft skills (Fernandez 2018) and their insider’s knowledge of most profitable admission and placement strategies (Henry and Ferry 2017), they are able to transform their privileges into narratives of merit. However, while IITs’ administration and upper caste students advocate castelessness to curb positive discrimination programs in India (Deshpande 2013), social divisions based on caste are reinforced on campus through sartorial and language differentiation (Subramanian 2019) as well as endogamous participation in clubs and societies. Overall, such practices contribute to the labeling of organized politics strictly in terms of corruption, immorality, unruliness and time- waste (Osella 1998; Sitapati 2011; Chatterjee 2016; Jeffrey and Dyson 2014), thus comforting a disciplining public discourse on political activities in educational institutions (Lyngdoh 2006; Teltumbde 2019).

13 Away from centers of excellence often located in state capitals and major urban centers, student politics in provincial towns are often seen as a way for young individuals to secure material benefits through brokerage and networking for political mileage, even if these activities sit uneasily with ascriptions to notions of public service, social devotion, honesty, largesse, moral purity and principled honesty that emanates from the field of student activism (Ruud 2001; Banerjee 2008; Nielsen 2012). In place of selfless “social workers” (Alm 2010), political youth are often moved by aspirations to social success grounded in economic benefits. In Bangladesh, Ruud (2010) and Andersen (2014) find that students looking for political careers and relations (Andersen 2016) are central in allocating hostel seats in exchange for student participation in protests (also Price and Ruud 2012). Jeffrey (2010), whose respondents display a resolute anti-political tone—like those of Lukose (2009)—shows how student leaders from the Jat caste in western Uttar Pradesh (India) become intermediaries between local state officials and private educational entrepreneurs. Thus, brokerage by student leaders in Northern India often appears to operationalize caste-based aspirations to control campus spaces, pushing student activists to compete for the leadership of their caste community (Kumar 2012). In several studies set both in Pakistan and India, urban youth do not seem to be moved by grand narratives, but rather by appeals to masculinity, fun and individualization. This is often manifested through acts of violence, whether in the name of a party (Verkaiik 2004) or Hindu supremacism (Hansen 1999), both offline and online (Sharma 2019a).

14 However, occurrences of self-gain do not preclude students’ ideological commitments. The ideological premises associated with armed insurgency are often weaved around youthful desires to escape the control of elders, both in India (Shah 2006; 2018) and Nepal (Zharkevich 2009). When compared to non-political youth, the moral standing of heroic and “utopic” commitments to change society becomes the main drive for the activism of Nepali youth (Hirslund 2012; 2018). In contemporary Bangladesh (Suykens 2018), and in the post-civil war context in Nepal (1996-2006), such endeavors are substantiated by a Brahminic war culture of sacrifice (Lecomte-Tilouine 2006),

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martyrdom (Ramirez 2002; Zharkevich 2009) and struggle (Snellinger 2006), constantly renegotiated in the light of the unsavory compromises of electoral politics (Snellinger 2018). Student politics therefore exemplifies the tension between “politics as usual” and political idealism; the latter having further potential currency when the campus is separated from the “vicissitudes of the real world” (Bourdieu 2007:8). Ahmad (2009) for instance indicates that the campus-based radical student organization Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) emerged in India’s Aligarh Muslim University because it did not have to abide by the democratic beliefs of Muslim constituencies outside campus. Contrary to that, its rival, the Students Islamic Organisation of India (SIO), aligned with the democratization trajectory of its parental organization (the Jamaat-e-Islami), which prevented it from radicalizing in the wake of the increasingly assertive anti-Muslim agenda of Hindu nationalists at the turn of the 1990s. Campuses also emerge as important incubators of feminist and queer groups (Martelli 2020) as well as spaces of contestation of dominant nationalist narratives (Singh and Dasgupta 2019). In the light of such evidence, it is necessary to revise the reach of the many studies portraying students as inevitably de-politicized after the colonial period (Altbach 1969, 1970a, 1970b, Mehta 1971; Vidyarthi 1976a, Chopra 1978).

15 It is tempting to “stick“ homogenizing and straightjacketing ideological tags to specific universities, which end up flattering out in-campus rivalries. Here are some of them: Marxism in Tribhuvan University (Kathmandu, Nepal), Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi, India), Jadavpur University, Presidency University (West Bengal, India) and colleges in Kannur (Kerala, India); ethno-nationalism in Punjab University (Punjab, Pakistan), Jaffna University (Tamil Sri Lanka), Banaras Hindu University (Uttar Pradesh, India) and Guwahati University (Assam, India); minority and Dalit politics in Baluchistan University (Baluchistan, Pakistan), Hyderabad Central University (Telangana, India) and Aligarh Muslim University (Uttar Pradesh, India); reproduction of caste dominance in Allahabad University, Chaudhary Charan Singh University Meerut and Patna University (Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, India); muscle politics in Rajshahi University and Dhaka University (central Bangladesh). Two overarching elements bind the politics of these various sites of student contention together and link them to the broader South Asia scenario. First, they are always male dominated, making university politics a playground for the political forging of assertive middle- class masculinities in South Asia (Lukose 2009). Second, student protests are often characterized by their ability to present grievances to a “disembodied” state (Kaviraj 2005). Such unfaltering enchantment of educated youth with an elusive institution makes the state the “central repository of people’s moral aspirations” (Kaviraj 2005:295) despite the shortcomings of its main components (government, administration, police, army). The public-funded character of politicized universities complicates the relationship of student politics with the administration and the ruling dispensation. In those, students are supposed to embody simultaneously the aspirations of the state and of wider society: this tension is important to make sense of the regional and national political significance of student politics. From a functional point of view, public universities favor social mobility of incipient elite (Altbach 1969) and contribute to the selection of state manpower (Mayer and Rubinson 1972). From a symbolic point of view, they “signify the status of nationhood” (Burawoy 1976:82). Through institutional arrangements on campus (such as positive discrimination for deprived students), such educational spaces mediate between the elite and subaltern, contributing both to the formulation of a national identity and to the reformist agenda

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of the state (Deshpande 2016). Because public universities are embodiments of the South Asian public sphere, institutional attacks on them—notably through the privatization of higher education and the vilification of student activism as anti- national (Singh and Dasgupta 2018)—are indubitable markers of illiberalism.

16 Student politics in South Asia entertains a desire to access the state, notably through their links with political parties. This is the case because student activism constitutes a springboard for future leadership (Hazary 1987; Snellinger 2019), in particular when harnessed to regional (e.g. the Bodoland movement in India’s Assam), and national movements (e.g. Maoist youth in Nepal or the Telangana movement in India). In the absence of such movements, aspirational politicians tend to invest in select students’ union elections—in Dhaka University in Bangladesh, or in Kumaun University and Delhi University in India to cite a few—through self-funding in the hope of securing networks and visibility to get a ticket from a national political party (Oommen 1974; Leah 2019). As many universities do not conduct (or have banned) elections of student representatives, agitation and patronage become the only alleys to win favors of political parties.

17 Albeit ethnographically rich, regional approaches to student politics tend to reduce university sites to one overarching ideology and social practice, while overlooking how such construct emerges out of value-based forms of political competition among agonistic student groups (Ahmad 2009; Nelson 2011; Martelli 2020). For instance, during the sixties, Christiansen (2020) indicates that the Leftist party of the National Awami League (NAP) dominating student politics in Dhaka University was ideologically structured around the conflict between a pro-Soviet and a pro-Maoist faction. Adopting a more diachronic fashion, Martelli (2018) suggests that the Left in JNU is not a homogenous bloc, but a set of rival groups that produced three distinguishable ideological narratives.4 Consequently, ideology in campus can be understood as a result of shifting identity markers, indexing personal political ambition and factional positioning (Garalytė 2020; Schulz 2020).

18 The regional context is a crucial (if not the main) parameter accounting for the variability of student politics in South Asia. While many of them invoke the legacies of various nationalist movements for independence (Reddy 1947; Rajimwale 2001; Wilkinson 2019; Christiansen 2019), student mobilizations are shaped by the socio- cultural dynamics in which they emerge. For instance, the aforementioned 1974 JP movement in India combined invocations to the glorious Indian freedom struggle for independence, while reacting to local distress, such as the doubling price of food grain in the state of Bihar. Particularly active in peripheral and borderland spaces, students appear to have a crucial role in regional movements for linguistic recognition and state autonomy, whether in Sindh, Baluchistan, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Kashmir, Assam, Mizoram or Nagaland (Forrester 1966; Baruah 2014; Deka 2015; Levesque 2020; Pathania 2018; Paracha 2019; Sharma 2019b). They take the form of anti-Hindi or anti-Urdu protests, ethnic and tribal rebellions and claims for substantial self-rule.

19 Despite the importance of these mobilizations, an overemphasis on “movements of identification” might overshadow another emerging type of student mobilization based on what Rosanvallon (1998) calls “movements of expression,” that is those movements of young collectives forged by generational experiences and situations rather than fixed identities (see also McDonald 2004). Structured by online communities which connect atomized experiments of overwhelming historical events

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(Percheron 1991, 1993), such as the triumph of Hindu nationalism in India or the unfaltering moral policing of women in South Asia, educated youth can turn passive networks into organized resistance (Bayat 2010). The formalization of such student mobilization, in which self-expression and concerns over quality of life gain gradually more prominence among educated youth globally (Inglehart 2008), does fuel students’ initiative to reclaim individual autonomy for women, including the 2014 Kiss of Love protest in Kerala, the Pinjra Tod movement in India’s capital as well as numerous attempts to reclaim patriarchal public spaces through social media campaigns—with names such as Why Loiter, Meet to Sleep or Happy to Bleed (Martelli 2017; Savory Fuller 2018).5 This complicates our representations of educated youth politics, which tend to provide stylized depictions of student years as inherently agitational, undisciplined or revolutionary, thus blanketly imposing ahistorical psychological generalizations on the multifaceted socio-political experience of students. In order to accurately represent the political significance of students in South Asia, we go on to unpack four common clichés structuring the study of educated youth and politics in South Asia.

Challenging Student Leadership’s Essentializations: Heroes, Entrepreneurs, Villains and Inheritors

20 While the historical importance of students in reformist and revolutionary politics in the Global South is indisputable (Gill and De Fronzo 2009), a series of decontextualized normative assumptions about the political potential of educated youth obliterate generational effects and straitjacket them into sets of psychologizing postures: the revolutionary lion heart, the innovative entrepreneur, the dangerous deviant and the dynastic heir (Schwarz and Oettler 2017). As we deconstruct these four canvasses of educated youth, we stress the political consequences of the formation of students’ social capital and its importance in establishing attributes of leadership. It is of prime importance to identify both scholarly and developmentalist essentializations of youth as they obfuscate the understanding of the political significance of educated youth in contemporary South Asia, notably when they assign deterministic rationales to youth- based mobilizations. By shifting the focus from what the educated youth inherently “is,” to the empirical mechanisms of production of their subjectivities in the region, we not only deconstruct limiting analytical frames, but also pave the way for the introduction of the notion of generational communities, which precisely emphasize collective meaning production.

The Heroes

21 Let us start with the first of such approaches. Marxist understandings of youth as subculture, epitomized by the ‘Birmingham School’ in the early 1980s (Jenkins 1983; Lave et al. 1992), gave specific emphasis to the youth as a form of opposition against class oppression. The idiosyncratic approach to the politics of youth is often associated with the idiom popularized by Marx and Engels (Tucker 1978) labelling the youth as the “alchemists of the revolution” (see also Jeffrey 2013). Most accounts of the youth by communist organizations in South Asia adhere to this approach and depict the Indian youth as a potential force of agitation against the establishment (Rudolph and

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Rudolph 1987; Paracha 2019). Various manifestos and press releases of South Asian Communist and Maoist parties emphasize the rebellious nature of students.6 According to these views, student political activists carry an inherent but mostly latent ability to reject mainstream careerist party politics. They can “acquire a heightened or radical consciousness through ideological engagement and praxis in order to transform aspects of society through the political process” (De Souza 2004). Portrayed as a courageous vanguard challenging gerontocratic regimes, students become the symbol of resistance to oppression rather than a historically embedded category. However, even if generations as age cohorts experience value change in rapidly changing economies (Inglehart 2006), evidence shows that such age groups in South Asia are not always politically distinguishable from older cohorts (Kumar 2019). It is only when we comprehend generations as communities of experience (Percheron 1993) engaged in self-making that student politics becomes a relevant axiom to understand engagements with “high-risk activism” (McAdam 1988).

The Entrepreneurs

22 This type of othering, emerging out of the perception of students as necessarily utopian and revolutionary is diametrically opposed to developmentalist approaches in vogue in Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Equally diligent in othering, they have promoted the image of educated youth as a source of non-political entrepreneurial potential (Robehmed 2015). International agencies conceive the demographic surge of educated youth as an innovative potential waiting to be unleashed, individualizing and depoliticizing their difficulties in pursuing their business projects (Siroux 2008). For instance, the South Asia program of the World Bank “Youth Solutions!” (2013) promises to empower youth through funding NGOs promoting Information Technology (IT) skills. Similarly, transnational organizations, such as the Education Commission, aim to challenge “regression to group allegiance” through fostering education in the Global South (2016). While agreeing on the fact that the overall rise in educational level has enabled youth to emerge as entrepreneurial leaders, Krishna (2002, 2007) demonstrates that in western India, such silent revolutions have not depoliticized educated youth but given them political roles instead. The crumbling of birth communities as building blocks for votes, increased state expenditure on development in rural areas, and the structural weakness of political parties has had tremendous impact on local political intermediation. These have turned educated youth carrying out vigorous and ingenious legwork on the ground into intermediaries between the state, university administration, admission seekers and households (Jeffrey and Young 2012; Young, Kumar and Jeffrey 2016). This has established them as for-profit brokers, community benefactors and vote aggregators for political parties—in place of village headmen, older community leaders and big landowners (Krishna 2011; Poonam 2018).

The Villains

23 Contrary to approaches depicting the youth as dormant entrepreneurial capital or as the spearhead of revolutionary resistance, other accounts portray the youth as a category of social deviance, and a potential source of delinquency and conflict with older generations (Cohen and Young 1981). Deviance in South Asia and elsewhere is

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often associated with the psychologically destabilizing (Morch 1994; Hudon and Fournier 2012) status of youth as unfinished adults and “emerging adulthood” (Arnett 1994, 1998, 2001; Arnett and Taber 1994; Aronson 2008), thus establishing the precariousness and instability of the pre-adult phase (Hall [1904]1972; Steinberg 2010; Crone et al. 2016). Because “youth” here means the transition from more established social categories of childhood to the independent unknown of adulthood, it embodies developmental “instability” and potential “anti-social” commitments.

24 In the deviant approach, pioneered by American sociology in the interwar period—and championed by the sociology department of the University of Chicago (Bulmer 1986)— the youth tend to constitute alternative systems of symbolic meaning for individuals sharing a similar subculture (Cohen 1955) and labelled “deviant” by members of the dominant culture (Becker 1963). Explanations of student protests in the post- independence South Asian context, in particular in the 1970s and 1980s, focus mainly on deviance and inter-generational conflicts. Adulthood in the making is seen as turbulent in terms of changes in status (Fusselland and Furstenbenrg 2005), such that potentially radical political commitments often happen at that fateful critical moment inherently related to the development of the individual’s personal identity (Erikson 1980).

25 Fictional accounts of youth protesters as troublemakers are not rare in South Asia, as best exemplified by the case of Raju in the novel of S. Weeraperuma, Sunil: The Struggling Student (2009), in which a Sri Lankan up-and-coming young student leader, Raju, galvanizes protesters towards murder and loot. Salient in the scholarship on Indian youth, authors have focused on conflicts in values between parents and dependents (Rege 1971; Singhvi 1972) while others emphasize the weakening of traditional authority structures (Sinha and Gangrade 1971; Malik and Marquette 1974) in the family and at school (Shils 1968), and the alienation of youth from the decision- making processes of political institutions (Singh 1968b, Di Bona 1966; Ahluwalia 1972). As Shah (2004) summarizes, the prevalent theory adopted by Indian sociologists and social psychologists in the 1960s and 1970s crystallized the notion of the “generation gap,” marked by youth impatience to acquire autonomy, urging them to get rid of their tutelage and enter conflicts with adults (Kakar and Chowdhary 1970; S. L. Sharma 1971). Additionally, through focusing on the conflict between generations, this literature relied heavily on the idea of “student indiscipline,” stressing the inarticulate feelings of educated youth. Altbach (1970) reports that 5 percent of student agitations were due to non-academic issues in 1964; 5 percent in 1965; and 17.4 in 1966. Such indiscipline is often used as a synonym for goondaism (criminal behavior) (Oommen 1974; Sinha 1975), violent disturbances (Cormack 1961; Gusfield 1970; Di Bona 1966; Singh 1968, Ross 1969; Vidyarthi 1976) and a recurrent effort to bribe voters in order to win student elections and negotiate elective posts and further political careers.

The Inheritors

26 Through renegotiating these representations in light of the ability of politicized students to fashion youthfulness locally, we examine educated youth as both makers and receivers of political narratives. We conceive them as not only an important section of brokers, voters and kingmakers; we also point at their functional share in the elected body. Following Chandra (2016), it appears that young politicians—graduates or

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dropouts—backed by influential families are able to represent the “youngest ever electorate” (Rukmini 2014) and because of their presence, old patriarchs are more likely to step down in order to transfer power to them. Among the members of the Indian parliament elected in 2014; more than 20 percent are from political families (Chandra 2016), and the ruling party renominated seventy percent of its dynastic parliamentarians in the 2019 national elections. French (2011) has counted that among elected members of the then Indian parliament aged 40 or below, two-thirds had a political family background. Thus, in a democratic context, young heirs are seen as capable of compensating for the organizational weakness of their party (Chandra and Umaira 2011; Amundsen 2013; Carlevan 2018).

27 If it is true that older generations, parents, the state, faculty, politicians and figures of authority do intervene to construct stereotypical and irreconcilable portraits of students and their politics, then what is the possible framework under which we can assess their relevance in South Asia? As the four topoi we have outlined tend to depict youth as actualization processes (fulfilled or not) of set postures, they tend to trivialize the heuristic mechanisms by which youth iteratively engage and interpret collectively their everyday experiences politically. Free from these four characterization “shortcuts,” we are now better equipped to understand the way by which collective political sensemaking by educated youth is produced. To that end, we analyze in the next section why students act as generational communities, standing either as localized enforcers or negotiators of South Asian political modernity.

Generational Communities in South Asia: Navigating Ideal Types

28 Emerging from this account, the two main difficulties of recovering the worldview patterns of campus-based politics are, on the one hand, their strong socio-economic and territorial variability, and on the other, the prevalence of competing fixed representations of what “studenthood” does to political engagements. In order to account for the changeability of student politics, we suggest that they could be better understood as generational communities. We understand them as cohorts of students shaping collectively the meaning they attach to their youthfulness through embedding socially located—i.e. cohort-based—interpretations of diffuse and marking socio- political turns (Mannheim [1928]1952; Percheron 1991; Jennings 2002). Moving from there, we argue that generational communities depend on the selective activation of the political potentialities of community life. We further suggest that student politics is pursued differently according to the everyday functioning of such communities, which are located somewhere in between two functional poles we identify in this section: natural communities on the one hand, and political communities on the other. In “real world” situations however, generational communities are to be found somewhere in between its natural and political avatars, as in concrete empirical terms, no pure type exists.

29 While keeping as reference point long existing and historically constituted communities, our specific understanding of the political potential of student collectives is temporal, spatial, social, aspirational and symbolic. The student years can be characterized by what Bayat (2017) calls “structural irresponsibility,” that is the relative tendency of youth to experience forms of autonomy away from familial and

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professional duties. This indicates lower time and material constraints to political participation, which is referred to as high biographical availability (McAdam 1986:70; Beyerlein and Hipp 2006). We understand the cost of student activism as the risk, money, time, and energy attached to political participation. On average, what makes this cost high—such as preparing for exams—is usually still lower than, let us say, breadwinning among the working class (Beyerlein and Bergstrand 2013). The relative spatial (and virtual) separateness of student collectives from the parental environment makes the campus a potential staging ground for consciousness raising, as developed in the literature on “free spaces” (Polletta 1999) and related ecologies (for a list, see Martelli 2020:7).7 An examination of the latent political conduciveness of dense networks of co-presence in small-scale settings such as student dorms (hostels), campus lounges and public meeting hangouts, is a prerequisite to the understanding of the way mutual influence is produced before, during and after student-led social movements (Zhao 1998). Characterized by sustained social intercourse, student communities are also bound by common future-oriented aspirations for upward social mobility. Strong capacities to aspire are grounded in rich social experiences (Appadurai 2004; Bok 2010), strengthening the confidence that participation in collective action can make a difference and bring about desired changes, hence bolstering the sense of efficacy (Klandermans 1984; Klandermans et al. 2008) of aggrieved students. The political potential of students is also symbolic. They are, in a metonymic fashion, representing for the public opinion two broader feel-good categories (the youth and the nation) and one auspicious promise (the future) (Pandey 2006). Partly because of the gender and class-cum-caste diversity of the student population in a handful of public universities (Deshpande 2016), student politics and its representatives can claim to personify a popular modality (Pandey 2016), ultimately legitimizing themselves as a national (or regional), non- elected, counter-public (Fraser 1990).

30 The structure of this section is fourfold. First, it briefly presents the empirical advantages of using communities of educated youth as our operational unit of analysis (1). This leads us to introduce the concept of generational communities; we explain how it can facilitate understandings of the way political subjectivities are collectively formed and structured within coherent spaces of sensemaking. We then move to differentiate between two ideal types of generational communities, namely natural and political ones (2). We also map out the processes of transition between natural and political generational communities and introduce a cautionary notice regarding mixed cases and the limitations inherent in classificatory endeavors (3). Lastly, the discussion expands the potential use of generational communities to explore the interface between student activism and other forms of political participation away from educational arenas. We conclude by evoking the possibility of scrutinizing generational communities to research phases of political abeyance among educated youth. We also outline some of the long-term biographical consequences of active and passive participation in such collectives (4).

Communities as Units of Sensemaking

31 Before inquiring about the way students’ political potential is actualized in practice, let us reassert why student groups can be labelled as communities, and why these are concretely generational. We consider student collectives as communities when they

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enact a physical or virtual space between members (Wellman and Leighton 1979), when they favor the development of social ties and networks connecting members (Schafer 2019), and when they permit the emergence of meaningful interactions binding members together (Kusenbach 2006). In turn, communities of educated youth display the following features. First, they make possible fresh encounters and a new flow of habits distinguishable from primary socializations and kinship ties such as family and neighborhood circles (Schutz 1976; Etzioni 2014). This is particularly true of “legitimate peripheral participants,” that is freshmen and sophomores (Lave and Wenger 1991). Student communities are therefore third spaces that are, distinguishable from both home and work (Oldenburg 1999). While several studies discuss the adjustments made by students to reduce the tension between their original social milieu and the university experience, few examine the political consequences of such self-work (Granfield 1991; Aries and Seider 2005; Reay, Crozier, and Clayton 2009; Lehmann 2009; Pasquali 2010; Naudet 2018).8

32 The insistence of particularistic features emerging out of student collectives is important as it signals a possibility of differential politics based on a distinguishable social capital (Coleman 1988) that displays at least incipient levels of the followings: social connectedness (Putnam 1995), shared beliefs and subjectivities (McAdam 1982, 2000), bonds and harmonious interests (Allen 1993), repositories of values (Townsend and Hansen 2001), common concerns (Kemmis 1992) and shared experiences (Barber 1998). In the context of higher education, that means a certain collective experience of academic and non-academic life. In theory, student communities are also what the Turners (V. Turner 1969, 1974; E. Turner 2012) have called “communitas,” that lack social structures and hierarchies specific of interstitial life moments, that is those separating from a previous social role, and preceding aggregation to a new one. Among student groups, transient state can be prolonged and in practice is not as egalitarian as assumed; yet these communities tend to be characterized by a veil of equality that level status distinctions (Oldenburg 1999).

33 Therefore, since student collectives act as communities that encroach to an extent on traditional social divides, what binds them together? This introduction suggests that they have in common attempts to self-fashion in relation to the pervasive or traumatic events that structure South Asian modernity, whether it is liberalization or ethno- nationalism. The act of biographical configuration, acute during student years is therefore inherently generational. Building on notions of generational unit (Mannheim [1928]1952) and social generation (Pilcher 1994) we understand student generations as social locations, that are an aggregation of those individuals engaged in higher education, sharing in common a socially located experience and a common exposure to formative events (Fendrich 1974; Dalton 1977; Fillieule 2013; Della Porta 2019). Thus, we indicate that the actualization of the political potential of educated youth boils down to a differential acquisition of cohort-based subjectivities and a differential forfeit of tenets of previous generations (Guha 1997). Hence, for us student generations are less age-based biological constructs than historicized cohorts (Pilcher 1994).

34 The choice of the notion of generational community contributes to solving a series of impasses in the field of youth politics involved in higher education. First, because communities structure engagements with formal electoral politics (mainly as vote- banks) while simultaneously routinizing a range of attitudes and worldviews, they help

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us operationalize the interplay between “big P” and “small p” strands of politics, at the crossroads of historical turns, party politics, students’ biographical experiences and collective exposures to historical developments. Conversely, the unpacking of generational communities enriches our understanding of how student politics mediates between the state and individual students. Second, the ‘community approach’ facilitates the understanding of geographical variation in student politics. Since communities are defined by physical or virtual boundaries, they are inherently territorial, grounding macro dynamics within the idiosyncratic realm of campus cohorts, academic circles, age-based loitering and online constituencies. The fact that communities socialize meaning-making practices helps us contextualize some of the homogenizing features of youthful modernity in South Asia—in particular conservative family upbringings, post-liberalization consumerism and mass unemployment—in light of the cultural dynamics of generational associational ties. To sum up, scrutinizing student communities tells us how, on an everyday basis, the constitutive features of South Asian politics are either reinforced or challenged locally. Generational communities, as the arenas in which one’s youth is performed, act as compasses: they prefigure change or consolidate political realities.

35 While community-based subjectivities of students are shaped by common anguishes and shared gendered aspirations for social recognition—through job-finding, marriage and motherhood—they are fashioned differently depending on a range of factors at work within such collectives. One example is the circulation of political idioms from one micro-cohort (Whittier 1997) to the other through the authoritative intervention of senior student activists who transmit their political capital to new batches of freshers (Martelli and Ari 2018). Another mechanism involves the spilling over of value-based political idioms from one group to the other under the effect of competing student organizations fighting for representation (Martelli 2020).

36 By looking at educated youth as generational communities, it becomes easier to understand how substantive political transfigurations of student attitudes tend to be irrigated by politically informed friendships, romances, peer-to-peer argumentation, student-professor exchanges and learning from charismatic youth (Koskimaki 2020). When such politics is grounded in (at least partly) insulated educational spaces, it tends to develop a character of its own. This explains why certain institutional higher education sites come to acquire the “flavor,” that is the public image and reputation of the student-run civil society they host. For instance, in Pakistan, Punjab University has historically garnered religious-based student activism (Nasr 1992; Javid 2020) while the University of Sindh hosts the ethno-nationalist aspirations of Sindhis (Levesque 2020). Because generational communities enact forms of collective belonging based on shared characteristics that are either ascriptive or voluntary (Shachar 2003; Staheli 2008), they can accommodate the various streams of student politics in South Asia, whether ethic-, grievance- or value-based (Altbach 2006; Martelli 2018a). The focus on the community enables a departure from the academic scholarship in the 1970s-1980s, which approached student politics only vis-à-vis adulthood (Durham 2004; Nisbett 2007; Jeffrey 2009), mainly as acts of indiscipline emerging from age-related psychological disturbances and angst towards parents (c.f. previous section). Neither strictly biological nor psychological, the politics among educated youth cannot be solely defined stylistically and teleologically as rebellious, revolutionary, socially deviant, entrepreneurial or dynastic.

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Natural vs Political Generational Communities

37 The accounting for the various avatars of political participation among student collectives leads us to distinguish between two types of generational communities; natural on the one hand and political on the other hand. We propose to understand natural communities as collectives in which student politics’ main outcome is to reproduce hierarchies and practices existing outside campus spaces. Student groups are, in this perspective, cohorts to be captured by representatives of political organizations and other non-student communities. Acting as captive public, university groups are then mobilized predominantly for political mileage, receiving individual (and often material) benefits in exchange for support. The broad political contour of the natural community is the limited scope of student participation, which is “mainly oriented around university issues, especially the welfare of students, administration of higher education, and distribution of patronage associated with the privatization of education” (Jeffrey 2010:131). In this context, ideologies play a secondary role in the conduct of student politics, which is determined instead by male-dominated entrepreneurs in the pursuit of status and aspirational upliftment. Advantages derived are mostly material—through various forms of brokerage—and political—through securing tickets and advancement within political parties. While brokerage fosters logics of differentiation between brokers and recipients, it also fosters cohesiveness among students through enabling access to educational resources while forging economic and social interdependencies. In natural communities, student activists often seek ways for their community to extend its social domination onto economically profitable markets such as private education. As a result, natural communities are weaved around structures such as coaching centers and corrupt administrations, prospering along profit-heavy recruitment procedures and low-value diplomas, ultimately making patronage and collusion with officials a key to social advancement. In this context, student politics appears as an instrument to invest in the public space in the hope of asserting a set of dominant identities: the man, the leader, the fixer, the caste or religious head. In natural communities permeated by economic liberalization, political self-fashioning is articulated around notions of consumption, virility and at times “muscle” power (Ruud 2010). Assertions of moral righteousness by students in these spaces are practically contradicted by their art to constantly transgress them according to the need of the hour. The study of self-presentations in natural communities is important in order to understand broader political trends at national and regional levels: the contribution of leisure, consumption and moral aspirations to communal politics in India and Pakistan, the desire of modernity in the Maoist movement in Nepal or the majoritarian impulses in the Singhalese ethnic nationalism in Sri Lanka. All-in-all, natural communities tend to enable the generational re-rooting of forms of hegemony, sometimes through the elaboration of a politically neutral vocabulary (i.e. the notion of merit in prestigious Indian Institutes of Technologies) that masks politically constituted inequalities on the lines of caste, gender, class, religion or ethnic identities. We primarily view consumerism as a facilitator of natural communities as we acknowledge demand-based economic liberalization as one of the main instruments of social reproduction in contemporary South Asia. However, we accept the idea that consumption is occasionally tied to broader transformative agendas, in particular when such consumption is subsumed within lower caste

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emancipatory politics or some streams of feminist activism. While idioms such as “ritual pollution” or “patriarchy” can be mitigated through the active display of sartorial assertiveness and goods-flaunting in the public space, such consumerist practices remain widely associated to the dominant narratives of wealth accumulation and materialist modernity at work outside campus spaces.

38 In both natural communities and what we now go on calling political communities, students are industriously claiming representations of their generation through fashioning their youthfulness—thus activating in their own way the political potential of educational arenas. That having been said, we argue that political communities are distinguishable from natural communities in their aspiration to politicize students differently. Contrary to their counterparts, political communities are characterized by their ambition to engage with—and at times generate—explicit ideational values, hence moving beyond campus-specific material demands. So even when the daily routine of student politics is articulated around access to welfare, such welfarism is tied by their proponents to a larger transformative agenda: this broader goal could be the formation of a Hindu kingdom according to ideological activists of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (All Indian Student Council, ABVP), or the abolition of class divides across South Asia for the ideological lots among student-wings of communist organizations. On a routine basis, political communities distinguish themselves by their ability to instill prefigurative debates within campus spaces, thus displaying degrees of autonomy from the larger polity. The ideational debates fueled by political competition turn select educational spaces into semi-independent public spheres, carrying the potential of acting as counter public. Because the crafting of political selves within political communities is enabled through value-based agonism, it leaves space for the participation of new voices and gives them a chance to contest established discourses. Emerging worldviews such as feminism, Dalit activism and political ecology find better potential alleys to flourish in political communities than in natural communities. Because of their integrative effects, political communities favor proximity between ideas, engendering cross-fertilization and the reformation of dominant frames in society. Contrary to natural communities which implement and reproduce dominant socio-political modalities, political communities attempt to negotiate them, influencing back regional and national collectives with the output of their political churning. To further explicate the distinction between the two student communities, we categorize below a series of student-led movements in South Asia according to the ideal types they lean towards.

Figure 2: Examples of student-led movements enacted by predominantly political or natural generational communities

39 The criterion of differentiation between natural and political communities is the degree to which public engagements of students are allocated to substantive value- oriented agendas for social transformations, both within and outside a given generational community. While the two community types host rivalries among student groups and individuals to secure political, economic or symbolic capital, commitments

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to social transformations in natural communities are strictly tied to material concerns and are aligned with dominant ideological frames and mainstream party structures infusing campus spaces. Let us take two examples of Figure 2. Jeffrey (2010), in his study of student politics in Western Uttar Pradesh notes that Jat political animators disregarded questions of national or international relevance, perpetuating nominally anti-corruption stands while encouraging it though siphoning off educational money for the construction of for-profit educational institutions. Here, commitment to social change is at best nominal, while actual politics is geared towards personal enrichment and the reproduction of Jat power in the region. In this case students tend to be reduced to a captive, natural community whose worldviews do not need to be altered to achieve political mileage. Contrary to this, Laurence (2020) shows how a campus such as Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) serves as a “laboratory for diverse forms of Muslim politics,” enabling various ideological streams from campus diffuse nationally in order to question the then hegemonic discourse on secular nationalism of the Indian National Congress party. We can see that student politics, through demanding Muslim minority rights attempt to mobilize selectively values and positions within the broader polity to forge counter-narratives and pluralize political voices outside dominant party frameworks. Here the demand requires student activists to reshape the political understanding of campus cohorts, making the university the arena of a political community.

From Natural to Political and Vice Versa

40 A set of concordant factors enable generational communities to move from natural to political and vice versa. The collective engagements of generational communities with macro political events depend in part on the political socialization they shelter. Such socialization is fostered through the circulation of political ideas and frames between micro-cohorts of activists and younger micro-cohorts of individuals who have entered university more recently. The more active and organized the early adopters of value- based political idioms, the faster it can circulate to other groups in campus and affect perceptions of the wider political scenario, hence nurturing the formation of political communities. The overall oppositional style of student politics does not only involve traditional repertoires of collective actions in South Asia (e.g. in North India, dharna or sit-ins, hartals/bandh or strike actions, juloos or marches, gherao or picketing), it also mobilizes a pamphleteer style of politics involving vituperative truth claiming. When such online and offline pamphleteering9 builds on competitive argumentation in addition to “slanders” and other emotional tropes, it favors the transition from natural communities to political communities. The move from natural to political is further accelerated when the competition for student representation is articulated around ideational idioms, which favor the formation of political spillovers and the hybridization of ideologies. Both political communities and natural communities host political self-fashioning accounting for the way activists legitimize their public work. However, because in natural communities material demands are usually disconnected from any broader inclusive agenda, biographical reconfigurations of activists there tend not to aim at the symbolic representation of the weaker sections of the population; they instead perform responsiveness towards the students. Put otherwise, the singlehanded focus of student activists on “getting things done” drives political communities towards natural communities; such an agenda is not geared towards

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larger questions of wider social representation (Martin 2019). Natural and political communities are networked entities, showing affinities to similar types of generational communities. The interaction between these communities and the wider society are bolstered by students, but are also channeled by political parties and educational businesses, by state and international development agencies, and as part of interactions with neighboring spaces. They involve a wider set of actors, comprising community entrepreneurs, students’ families and friendship, faculty, alumni, brokers, personnel of NGOs and members of caste associations. In that regard, what differentiates political communities from natural communities is their ability to act as nodal points for initiators and early political mobilizers who are able to organize student protesters, crystallize public grievances, act as a political symbol, coordinate actions and circulate repertoires of contention across university campuses. We elaborate this aspect further in the postscript of this issue, which engages with the student-triggered protests against the amendment to the access to the Indian citizenship which started in December 2019. Notwithstanding the academic limitations of commentaries on ongoing events, we outline the importance of students’ political communities in converting grievances into collective action going beyond campus spaces.

41 The proposed dichotomy is not prescriptive nor essentialist but rather contextual, historical and processual in scope. This means that neither ideology nor any university space is fated to be bound to one type of student community. Hindu nationalist politics for instance could contribute to the making of both natural communities and political communities depending on the student context in which it unfolds. It qualifies as an expression of the political communities unfolding in and around Tribhuvan University (Nepal) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (India), where such activism intends to challenge leftist politics, thus contributing to an extent to the emergence of ideologically informed and argumentative cohorts. Contrary to that, Hindu nationalism provides the hegemonic tint to the natural community in and out Banaras Hindu University (India), where dissonant narratives apart from Hindu nationalism are difficult to foment (Dubey 2017; Pandey and Srinivasan 2019). Considering the richness and multiplicity of political experiences of educated youth, no student movement in South Asia does constitute a pure type. It results that political fashioning in educational institutions navigates somewhere in between the natural and political forms of generational communities identified here. As developed earlier, the particular determination of self-making patterns in natural and political communities depends both on structural and idiosyncratic factors. Students’ exposure to social change and encompassing political events shape generational communities in common, yet the understandings and self-fashioning weaved around such impactful frames depend ultimately on the location of these student constituencies. In turn, such locations are imbued by the socio-cultural as well as educational contexts of the campus. Such contexts do not only vary according to the student composition, they are also affected by spatialized political competition, continuing cultural legacies, the strength of activists’ networks and professorial as well as administrative support. These processes fundamentally depend on everyday intergenerational transmission between micro- cohorts of students (often from seniors to juniors), which results in the selective activation of the political potential of educated youth.

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Researching Generational Communities: Internal Dynamics and External Interactions

42 Due to the variability of student politics in the region, we do not venture into developing a comprehensive comparison between South Asian generational communities and its counterparts in the Global South and in the West. For instance, we do not at this stage address the question of whether natural communities are prevalent in South Asia as compared to other world regions. However, a few key variations can be kept in mind while attempting cross-regional assessments. Outstandingly, the “youthful modernity” of student politics in South Asia continues to be characterized by its quasi-exclusive masculine composition, the pervasiveness of post-colonial nationalist narratives and the frequent references to national independence struggles. The omnipresence of vertical conservative family upbringings means that for many South Asian youth, college years introduce a significant change. There, students often encounter a horizontal space where citizens carry the potential to discuss and learn as equals, at times implementing relative levels of inter-caste and gender-fluid intercourse. If we posit the existence of a scarcity of traditional public spheres in South Asia as compared to Western counterparts, this would mean that universities, as an archetype of such spaces have a comparatively higher role to play in hosting dissonant political discourses in the region. The more recent and selective experiments of generational communities with the consumerist practices of liberalization, as well as the entrenched unemployment and economic uncertainties of youth make them more responsive to materialistic aspirations and cultures when compared to European and North American counterparts. Youth in the latter countries give increasing emphasis on “postmaterialist” priorities such as quality of life, autonomy and self-expression (Abramson and Inglehart 1995; Inglehart 2007). Nevertheless, the increasing online penetration rate in South Asia might have equalizing political effects between the Global South and the West, notably through the introduction of more personalized strands of youth political participation and decreased needs of hierarchical political coordination, although the importance of organized political parties in the conduct of South Asian student politics remains significant. Last but not least, the more recent and rapid expansion of the private high education sector in South Asia seems to have long- lasting detrimental consequences on the ability of universities in the region to host and act as political communities. Further studies could provide further insights on this hypothesized trend.

43 Three questions pertaining to the functioning of generational communities of students persist. First, in the wake of large-scale social movements involving students, how can we account for the large-scale coordination between the many generational communities and other social movement organizations and publics (Zald and Arsh 1966)? With the notable exception of Ray (1998), we do not know about the way interactions between activist collectives and their political field in South Asia affect the content and successes of their strand of politics. Generational communities need to be better located in their multi-organizational environment (Ray 1998:22), in which non- affiliated groups and even individuals play an important role in the coordination of “passive networks”10 during long-lasting phases of political mobilization. The mechanisms by which non-unionized generational communities converge across social and regional landscapes deserve urgent inquiry. A second question pertains to the

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extent to which politicized student communities provide a ground for social movements in periods of abeyance (Taylor 1989; Taylor and Dahl Crossley 2013), mainly by providing dormant points of political socialization ahead of new cycles of contention. Lastly, generational communities could help us analyze the political, cultural and biographical consequences of student activism after university years (McAdam 1999; Fillieule 2005, 2009; Giugni 2007). What happens to the political self- making of students when it is extracted from the community in which it was cultivated? This question urges us to assess the durability, the life-long transformations as well as the durable sociological consequences of political engagements during student years.

Overview of the Special Issue and Research Prospects

44 This special issue consists of eight articles covering a range of student mobilizations in South Asia, grappling with concerns such as regional identity, gender, caste, religion and political ideology. It entails accounts combining macro, meso and micro perspectives, by locating student collectives within their larger political contexts, and gradually zooming in on personal accounts of particular individuals within their educational settings. The issue opens with the pan-Indian student mobilization during colonial times and ends with an intimate look at Dalit students’ moralities. From a geographical standpoint, it explores political centers (i.e. Dhaka and New Delhi) and peripheries (i.e. Nainital and Sylhet) as well as processes that transgress national boundaries (i.e. anti-colonial struggles and global youth unrest in the 1960s).

45 The contributions of this special issue cannot be grouped into clear-cut thematic blocs. Rather we dichotomize them according to their methodological approach—either historical or ethnographic. Four articles(presented in a chronological order) are based on historical research on different time periods involving phases of intensification of student movements in South Asia. Though focusing on different contexts and time frames, these articles share a common thematic line—they are illustrative of how student activism relates to and depends on the broader political context. Particular attention is given to students’ ability to influence mainstream political processes. This special issue also contains four ethnographic accounts focusing on recent developments in the field of student political activism in India (three case studies) and Bangladesh (one case study). They provide a perspective on everyday campus life and individual experiences amounting to expressions of “mundane political agency” (Häkli and Kallio 2018).

46 We start the historical journey into student political activism in South Asia by going back to late in the colonial period. The first account of the issue explores the consolidation and disintegration of the Indian student movement in the last decades of British Raj. Tom Wilkinson explores the rise and fall of the first pan-Indian student organization—the All India Student Federation (AISF). Created in 1936 as an organization that could serve as a platform for the all Indian student movement against British rule, AISF eventually became the locus where different political and religious identities and partisan interests crystallized, resulting ultimately in the organization’s disintegration in 1950. One significant disagreement and split within the organization was along religious lines. With Hindu interests dominating AISF, Muslims felt alienated within the organization and finally revoked their support. The withdrawal of Muslim

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students from AISF was also influenced by the mobilization of Muslim students into All India Muslim Students Federation in Aligarh Muslim University, whose later developments are discussed by Gautier (2020). Another major split within the AISF emerged between Congress followers and Communists, who disagreed over India’s support for British actions in World War II and the overall trajectory of the Indian independence movement. Wilkinson’s analysis aptly shows how these rifts within the Indian student movement were influenced by the broader political processes at work at the national and international levels.

47 The second contribution takes us to Dhaka University campus in the 1960s, in the context of global youth unrest. Drawing on oral histories and written testimonies, Samantha Christiansen re-establishes the centrality and symbolic role of Dhaka University and the broader student movement in the history of Bangladesh. The account is not restricted to Dhaka University student activism and its national impact. Her central argument is that the student movement, structured around multidimensional identities manifested at different scales, local, regional and international. At the local level, students were concerned with economic stagnation in East Pakistan, and went on taking a central role in foregrounding Bangladesh’s independence. Students actively challenged the provincial governor Abdul Monem Khan and fueled the government’s efforts to suppress the movement. At the regional level, students took advantage of the Indo-Pakistani war to overthrow the regime of Ayoub Khan, thus achieving a landmark success in the history of student movements in South Asia. Meanwhile, on the international stage, students were motivated by the global student unrest against imperialism and the ideas of the New Left, which reflected in Bangladeshi newspapers. Christiansen’s article provides insight into students’ capacity to influence larger political processes. Students at Dhaka University were key players in Bangladesh’s independence movement; they shaped major political debates and led a regime change, ultimately achieving, as Christiansen puts it, “what revolutionary young people across the world desired.”

48 Focusing on a similar (though more extended) timeframe, Laurence Gautier examines Muslim politics in Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in India’s Uttar Pradesh. AMU has been a hotbed of Muslim culture and politics since its creation in 1875; taking an active role during India’s Partition. Between 1965 and 1981 student activists and various other actors launched a campaign for AMU’s minority status, attempting to increase the number of Muslims studying in the University in order to preserve its Muslim character. This initiative emerged as a broader political claim among Muslims. This was both due to the combined action of parties such as Jamiat Ulama and Jamaat-e-Islami and to the political neglect by the Congress government, which in turn strengthened feelings of marginalization among North Indian Muslims. Gautier argues that instead of reading the campaign for AMU’s minority status as a sign of crisis of the then “Nehruvian consensus,” we should instead interpret it as evidence of the emerging pluralization of Indian politics which subsequently led to the proliferation of interest and identity-based groups in the post-Emergency period. Gautier focuses on the ambivalent effects of AMU student politics on larger political processes. In a vein similar to that of Christiansen and Wilkinson, Gautier, speaks about students’ capability to infuse national debates. AMU’s campaign for minority rights, though emerging as a campus concern, transformed into a key Muslim issue, resonating among various social and interest groups far beyond the campus walls, giving an impetus to the formation of several Muslim political organizations. However, Gautier argues that the long-term

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effects of this mobilization were more ambivalent, as Muslim party politics emerging in the aftermath of the campaign was eventually fragmented by internal rivalries fanned by contentious emotional appeals. Nevertheless, the article concludes by insisting that “AMU remained a laboratory for diverse forms of Muslim politics.” It is there that “alternative voices” among Muslims could emerge; they gradually deemphasized attention on minority identity issues, stressing instead on Muslims’ socio-economic deprivations.

49 Hassan Javid’s contribution explores the current state of affairs of student politics in Pakistani Punjab. He provides a detailed account of the development of student politics in the province from independence to present day, throwing light on ups and downs, successes and failures of student political mobilizations. Javid engages with the different ideological shades of these student movements, whether leftist, Islamist or ethnic. The trajectory of Pakistani student politics—from pluralization to decline and finally rebirth—appears to be largely dependent on the changing political regimes and their acrimonious interventions against student politics. The underlying question that guides Javid’s paper is that of how student politics continue to survive under the state’s repression and the continuing official ban of student unions. With this in mind, he examines the politics of three student organizations that are currently active in Punjab —PML-N Youth Wing (PYW), Insaf Student Federation (ISF) and Democratic Students Alliance (DSA). He identifies three distinguishable political strategies—PYW operates through patronage politics hand in hand with its parent party, ISF feeds on populist sentiments, while DSA retains a longstanding idealistic and progressive radical orientation, which limits the political success of the organization. Javid argues that current student activists cannot be compared to those previous student generations that grew to maturity in highly politicized and ideologically driven university campuses. DSA is the only student group resisting this change, while the other two organizations act as “non-ideological,” “top-down creations” of the political parties, ultimately contributing to the ideological de-politization of Pakistani youth. Javid predicts that Pakistani student politics will likely develop along a similar trajectory, in which “ideologically barren” student organizations will be entangled in the electoral politics of their parent parties, while more radical and ideologically driven groups will remain under the state’s magnifying glass.

50 Jean-Thomas Martelli’s account stiches together the two methodological approaches of this special issue. Building on ethnographic and archival evidence, he engages with student political competition in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)—one of the most politically vibrant campuses in India. He is critical about academic works on student politics depicting university campuses as epitomes of resistance or as sites doomed to reproduce wider socio-political realities. Martelli focuses on the process of formation of political attitudes among students and shows how they adopt dissonant political views in the context of intense and organized representational competition, in which sets of distinctive yet inter-breeding political idioms are mobilized. Through examining how rivalries between student organizations enabled the diffusion of minoritarian politics around queer, Hindu nationalist, Dalit and environmental issues. Martelli argues that “political spillovers” and “ideological cross-fertilization” can be understood as key processes behind the formation of dissonant political views among students. This serves as an explanation of how and why Hindu right groups adopt liberal and even left leaning rhetoric, and how and why Dalit and queer agendas have mainstreamed in JNU campus. Hence, Martelli portrays the university campus not only as a socially

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constructed space that is instrumental in fostering value-oriented political capital, but also as a field where innovators and early adopters of novel and hybridized political idioms are nurtured.

51 The next article returns to Bangladesh. Most recent ethnographic evidence depicts its student politics as being largely violent, masculine, factional, pragmatic and closely related to political parties (Andersen 2013; Suykens and Islam 2015; Suykens 2018; Kuttig 2019). Mascha Schulz’s engagement with student politics in Shahjalal University of Science and Technology campus in Sylhet complements these accounts by showing that aside from evident factional realpolitik, ideological commitments also play a significant and complex role in the everyday conduct of student politics. More specifically, she explores how ideology is expressed through symbols flaunted on August 15—Bangladesh’s national mourning day—which commemorates the killing of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the charismatic leader of Awami League that spearheaded the country’s independence movement. Schulz reflects on the ambivalence of these commemorations, which are both ideologically charged and grounded in pragmatic politics: through them different political groups negotiate power relations, while the ruling party re-enforces its dominance. This leads Schulz to argue that ideology is simultaneously relevant and irrelevant to the conduct of student politics in Bangladesh.

52 Leah Koskimaki’s article takes us to the often-overlooked India’s Himalayan states through following the footsteps of two incipient upper caste student leaders in Uttarakhand’s Nainital. The article explores the everyday strategies mobilized by student leaders to fashion for themselves a “regional charisma.” Contradicting the Weberian notion of charisma as an exceptional inborn quality, she conceptualizes charisma as a characteristic that is built, cultivated and locally/regionally grounded. Koskimaki shows how student leaders in Nainital constructed their regional charisma through various means, by drawing on caste affiliations and political genealogies of Indian freedom fighters, by referring to pahari (hill) identity, simplicity and moral rectitude, and also by repeatedly demonstrating knowledge of the place. She gives a picture of student politics in Uttarakhand as being different from mainland India, less entangled in muscle politics and shaped in the image of youth innocence, selflessness and sacrifice. Student politics in this hill city is largely embedded and concerned with local aspirations and less aligned to national-scale issues and party politics.

53 Reflecting on the centrality of moral values in structuring political mobilization (Blom and Jaoul 2008), Kristina Garalytė’s article shows the emerging tensions between the Dalit movement’s ethics and divergent individual moralities among the Scheduled Caste (SC) students at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She presents a case study of a debate between two SC students, in which they argue over the moral demand of the Dalit movement to “pay back to society,” and over their differing social mobility imaginaries. The identity of SC students appears to be strongly shaped by the ethical idea of the Dalit movement; nevertheless, there are differences of opinion regarding what constitutes the legitimate means of “paying back to society.” Her underlying assumption is that different experiences lead to different moral positioning, thus creating symbolic boundaries among students. Garalytė argues that on the JNU campus, political mobilization coincides with moral socialization, and that in the context of student politics, morality and ideology are intertwined.

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54 Researchers tended to abide by the former consensus that ideology and values have peripheral significance for the conduct of student political activism in South Asia. Javid’s account concurs with this assessment by indicating that student politics in modern day Pakistan lack ideological cleavages and identifiable ideologies (except for a few more radically inclined smaller groups). This is also partly corroborated by Koskimaki (2020) and Schulz’s (2020) contributions. The latter argues that commemoration events on a Bangladeshi university campus, though being ideological at their core, are also “a privileged site for renegotiation of power relations and factional affiliations.” Yet four ethnographic contributions demonstrate that ideological and value-based student activism pertain not merely to the glorious past of the student movements during the various independence movements in South Asia (Christiansen 2020; Gautier 2020; Garalytė 2020; Martelli 2020). These authors show that political idioms and values emerge as a core compass of present-day students’ political fashioning. They matter more when students compete over various social issues, when they commemorate landmark historical events, when they frame their identities and self-present as charismatic. The articles presented in this issue of SAMAJ do not essentialize ideological commitments, but instead problematize them by showing that ideologies are not merely reproduced but are also appropriated, negotiated and contested.

55 The eight articles of this issue pave the way for new scholarship on a wide range of practices of student politics in South Asia. From a regional perspective, new contributions on Nepal, Sri Lanka and Maldives would further enrich our understanding of generational communities. Additional emphasis on the way sacrificial students-cum-militants renegotiate their selves when entering mainstream parliamentary party politics could be derived from the post-civil war Nepali case (Ramirez 2002; Lecompte-Tilouine 2006; Zharkevich 2009; Snellinger 2010; Hirslund 2012, 2018). Emphasis on borderland and ethnic-based forms of student activism in South Asia, in particular in Pakistan’s Baluchistan, Sindh and Azad Kashmir (Nelson 2011; Javid 2020) could complement this approach. For instance, scholarship on India’s North Eastern states (Bora 1992; Sinha 1995; Baruah 2002; Deka 2013) could benefit from exploring perspectives from within these groups. The complex interaction between communal agendas at the center, everyday political practices of constituents and the proliferation of ethno-religious student movements (Ahmad 2009) should receive urgent attention as majoritarianism triumphs in many regions of South Asia. Unfortunately, glimpses into student politics from organizations such as Islami Jamiat- e Tuleba (the student wing of Jama’at-e Islami) or the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP is the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) are found only in passing mentions as part of authoritative accounts on their paternal (or fraternal) organizations in Pakistan (Gayer 2007; Iqtidar 2011) and India (Jaffrelot 1996; Hansen 1999). Future research agendas on student politics need to better understand how such politics functions in private institutions, since this educational model is becoming the new normal in South Asia.

56 As part of this endeavor, further attention on how politics in private education and training centers mold representations of masculinity among educated youth is timely (Ray 2019). Such attention can be further facilitated by moving beyond the exclusive study of organized politics, which tends to obfuscate non-partisan expressions of the political. Such broadening scope shall include political coordination and self-

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expressions online, which is permitted by the diffusion and mass-use of social media, affordable smartphones and data packs (Agrawal 2018; Tenhunen 2018; Doron and Jeffrey 2013). With more and more student activism turning into “clicktivism” (Pathania 2013) on platforms that are increasingly targeted by political parties and so- called trolls, analyses could aim at comprehending how more voluntary and virtual generational communities, particularly among marginalized groups, emerge (Zaslavsky 2019). Last but not least, the complex question of “what happens after” student politics should not be avoided. In South Asia at large, we do not know whether students’ engagements with politics make a durable predictor for life-long civic participation, or whether they merely constitute a fleeting life-stage—ultimately engendering minimal longstanding biographical consequences for student leaders, cadres and bystanders. As relatively few student activists enter full-time politics (Offerlé 1996), ethnographies ought to dive into the moral and strategic adjustments that both disengagement and professionalization engender. Trajectories of democratic participation in South Asia can be then fully uncovered in a diachronic fashion, by following agents’ self-making after their student years as they renegotiate their political credentials away from the fold of the generational community.

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Zhao, Dingxin. 1998. “Ecologies of Social Movements: Student Mobilization during the 1989 Prodemocracy Movement in Beijing.” American Journal of Sociology 103(6):1493–529.

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NOTES

1. Rohith Chakravarti Vemula was an Indian sociology research student at the University of Hyderabad. Repeatedly penalized by the administration and rival student groups for his involvement in Dalit student politics in campus, he committed suicide on January 17; 2016 (Henry 2018; Sukumar 2016). 2. South Asia is the world region with the largest number of youths, with nearly half of its 1.9 billion population below the age of 24 (Word Youth Report 2018). One fourth of South Asian

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children are on track to complete secondary education; this proportion is estimated to grow to nearly half of the children in the region by 2030 (GBCE Report 2019). South Asia’s gross enrolment ratio in tertiary education is growing exponentially (from 7 percent in 1998 to 24 percent in 2018), but apart from Sub-Saharan Africa (9 percent), it still ranks below its world counterparts (37 percent). Important discrepancies exist within the region; Pakistan lags (9 percent) as compared to Maldives (31 percent), India (28 percent), Bangladesh (21 percent), Sri Lanka (20 percent), Bhutan (2018) and Nepa (12 percent) (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2018). Similar discrepancies exist in terms of gender representation, even if nearly forty percent of the academic staff in South Asia is female. As an order of magnitude, one in eight males in Bangladesh has attained the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, and one in a hundred men in Pakistan has completed a PhD (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2018). 3. Admittedly, biographical availability varies significantly according to students’ social background; it depends also on the type of studies they are engaged in. In general, those from humble social backgrounds as well as those pursing private vocational courses tend to experience more financial constraints. This is evident as loans for higher education have grown exponentially in the past two decades (Pushkar 2017). However, due to the lack of available evidence, it is not entirely clear what kind of relationships exist between student debts and political participation in South Asia, as debts increase costs of political participation, but also increase one’s economic grievances. 4. The establishment of JNU in 1969 as a flagship postgraduate university in the social sciences first reflected the ambitions of the socialist left at the center structured around the alliance between the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Indian National Congress (INC). After the state of Emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (1975–1977), the Union reflected more clearly the regional domination of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) in West Bengal and Kerala (1977–2004). Finally, in the last decade, it has been promoting the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) CPI(ML), a formerly anti-parliamentary Bihari-centric organization converted to electoral democracy in the early 1990s. 5. During the Kiss of Love campaign, Kerala and Indian youth used social media platforms such as Facebook to spread images and videos of kissing performances in public. This was used as a way to protest against the moral policing spread by Hindu Right groups. The Pinjra Tod (Break the cage) protest was initiated by female students in various Delhi universities, demanding fewer constraining regulations in university student halls and the right to access safely male- dominated public spaces. The Why Loiter campaign initiated by three feminist activists in Mumbai is attempting to reclaim public spaces for women. Advocating for leisurely and gender-blind access to the city, the Meet to Sleep staged performances defying sexual harassment threats by calling women to nap in public parks. Lastly, the Happy to Bleed campaign sought to challenge the prevalent menstrual taboos in India through flaunting sanitary pads in public spaces. 6. For instance, examples of such documents in India are: “Student Front: Policy And Tasks,” adopted by the Central Committee of the CPI(M) (The Marxist January-March 2007), “Urban Perspective Plan 2004 of the CPI(Maoist)” (cf. Chakravarti 2009:322–48) and the “Resolution on The Tasks and Orientation of the Student-Youth Movement,” adopted by the Ninth Congress of the CPI(ML) (Liberation May 2013). 7. Students usually maintain close relations of kinship with their families. However, individuals residing on campus tend to gain more autonomy vis-à-vis their guardians and childhood friends since their integration to their new educational setting is higher than those living outside university premises. 8. Because university spaces are inclusionary in scope—as they depend on the exclusion of non- eligible members (Staeheli 2008) —they require what Gieryn (1983) calls boundary work, that is some demarcation between desirable and undesirable group attributes. Often, this perimeter is defined negatively through answering the question “who we are not” (Lamont and Molnár 2002)

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and might involve occurrences of social control (Etzioni 2014). Student collectives shall thus, at least superficially, abide by inclusive goals even if the actuality of the community is marked by internal divisions (Kukathas 1996). Such inclusive aspirations are generally associated with the sharing of ethical norms (Rose 2000), shared affectual relationships and a sense of mutual responsibility (Etzioni 2014). 9. For an example, c.f. the pamphlets part of the “Pamphlet Repository for Changing Activism” (PaRChA), an online platform created by Martelli (2019a). They are available here: www.topol.hypotheses.org/495 (accessed 9 December 2019). 10. In line with Bayat (2017:22), passive networks are understood as “instantaneous communications among atomized individuals that are established by the tacit recognition of their commonalities and that are mediated directly through the gaze in public space, or indirectly through mass media.”

INDEX

Keywords: student politics, youth, university, generation, community

AUTHORS

JEAN-THOMAS MARTELLI Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), Politics and Society Division, New Delhi

KRISTINA GARALYTĖ Assistant Professor, Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies at Vilnius University

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Student Politics in British India and Beyond: The Rise and Fragmentation of the All India Student Federation (AISF), 1936– 1950

Tom Wilkinson

In these days of historical battle, let every university become a mighty fortress of struggle for the people. Let every student, wherever he may be, become a fearless fighter for the cause of his people. Forward to battle! Lead on, Youth of the World!1

The All India Student Federation represented the most far reaching attempt to create a national student movement during India’s colonial period.2 Between its establishment in 1936 and the Federation’s resolution to abandon its revolutionary approach in 1950, the AISF’s organizational capacity represented a dramatic indication of student power. The student movement acquired a new significance in India’s freedom struggle and for the colonial and post-colonial state during this period. By the beginning of the Second World War, the AISF boasted one thousand affiliated organizations and eighty- thousand student members.3 Its national character was differentiated, multi-layered, and reflected regional specificities.

1 Theories derived from the political and social sciences have dominated the study of Indian students.4 There is only a modest field of scholarship concerned with the history of students in India. This literature offers historical accounts of the features of Indian higher education and narratives of resistance against the British Raj (Altback 1968; Hazary 1987). Thirty years after the last scholarly intervention into this field, this historical snapshot into student politics will bring to light a largely forgotten attempt to consolidate the disparate student organizations of colonial India.

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2 This history of the AISF also gives historiographical insights into three other schools of Indian history. Firstly, there has been a recent scholarly focus on paramilitary and youth volunteer movements in colonial India, although the student has been overlooked in these histories.5 This paper will argue that the trends of youth militancy and ideologies of social service converged in the Indian student movement. Secondly, I will explore the valuable role of students in the final phase of the independence movement and during the political struggles of the early post-colonial period.6 This movement became an arena for the competing efforts of adults and youths to mobilize students, especially by the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Congress Socialist Party (CSP).7 Thirdly, historians of the Second World War will, I hope, find the divergent mobilizations of students for and against the war effort insightful for understanding the social history of WWII and the Indian home front.8

3 This paper has drawn on three categories of materials. The principal source of materials for this paper has come from the student organization’s official documents, pamphlets and their highly insightful weekly journal.9 These materials offer the narratives of AISF student leaders and student activists and reveal their shifting relationship with various political parties. The second category consists of government surveillance reports, located in the National Archives of India, that provide summaries of developments in the student movement and of the communist movement. It was useful for this researcher that the colonial and the post-colonial state considered left- wing student movements a prime object of suspicion and left detailed accounts of their activities.10 A third (somewhat heterogeneous) category comprises a range of sources this author located to further analyze the unfolding of the events. These included newspapers, letters and autobiographies.

The Struggle for Power in the AISF and Youth Identities in India, 1936-1941

4 The establishment of the AISF represented a far-reaching attempt to consolidate the existing student organizations and their diverse political activities at the national level. 11 Rajimwale’s (2001) interviews with student leaders reveal that this moment of student unity sought to offset an attempt by the British to establish a state-sanctioned student umbrella organization. There had been previous attempts at the establishment of an Indian student movement but never had annual conferences been successively convened and a constitutional framework established.12 At the first conference of the AISF, in Lucknow 1936, Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurated the proceedings while Mohammed Ali Jinnah presided (Joshi 1972:35). Jawaharlal Nehru issued a stark warning to the inaugural AISF conference, “When you are trying to build up a student’s federation you cannot afford to make it narrow and shut out persons holding different views.”13 Within only two years, however, the national student movement had begun to fragment along political and religious lines. This fragmentation of the AISF can be explained through an examination of the different ideological perspectives, political networks and religious identities that prevailed amongst the students.14

5 The establishment of the AISF gave rise to a wave of nationwide student activities between 1937 and 1939. The initiative of provincial student leaders together with the support of adult political leaders brought about the setting up of seven All India Student Provincial Federations (AISPF) to coordinate national campaigns during this

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period. The campaign to support the Andaman hunger strikers, particularly in Bengal but also across the country, is the first notable example of coordinated countrywide student action. Moreover, groups of students organized informal networks within the AISF to support the campaigns of political parties in the provincial legislature elections of 1937. The most prominent groups to emerge were the communists and congress socialist factions. The communist students worked closely and aligned with the larger CPS group during these initial years. Both strongly anti-colonial and socialistic in character, fluidity distinguished the membership between the two factions at the student level in the years following the formation of the AISF. It became an arena that fostered political cooperation and contained competition amongst students.

6 The student movement, however, splintered along the lines of religious identity shortly after its establishment. At the first conference of the AISF, whilst presiding over the proceedings alongside Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah dubbed the Congress “a Hindu Body.” He referred to Muslims as a “separate entity” during his address to the students. The leader of the Muslim League went onto encourage the Muslim members to organize themselves separately to the Hindu members. The widening rift between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League became apparent to the conference delegates. It was the last time Nehru and Jinnah would share a platform together.

7 The student movement increasingly became a political space where students negotiated questions of religious identity through performative language and clothing. Muslim students voiced concern about the failure to include adjournments to offer Prayers and voiced concern about the singing of Vande Mataram.15 Muslim students were encouraged to wear black sherwanis (long coat-like garment) and Jinnah caps to demonstrate their support for the Muslim League. Like those congress supporters fashioning Gandhi caps, the clothing of students projected their exclusive political identities to other students. The AISF promoted a “Muslim-Hindu Student Unity” campaign that sought to quell the rising of, what they called, “communal politics.” Figure 1. represents the AISF’s poster celebrating its acclaimed ability to unify different social groups through anti-British protest on Independence Day. However, the Muslim student leaders spurned a campaign that equated the struggle for minority rights as communal politics.

8 Militant students associated with the Hindu Mahasabha and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) increasingly held protests within the AISF conferences and often triggered cycles of student protests or violence.16 The rise of these anti-Muslim student movements triggered Muslim students to leave the AISF. It served to antagonize this group during a period that their social identity had become contested and fragile. Despite the AISF leadership’s rejection of Hindu nationalist politics and their campaigns for unity (see figure 1), Muslim students stressed their general sense of frustration with the national student movement. They created a discourse that represented themselves as an object of suspicion in a Hindu-dominated student movement and called the AISF the “baby of the congress” (Zuberi 1949:19). One student leader, Mukhtar Zaman, recollected his experiences of the AISF, “the right-wing Hindus dominating the congress were driving the Muslims into the corner and were not prepared to tolerate them…except on their own terms” (Zaman 1976:20).

9 The AISF lost a large part of its Muslim support at the moment that a group of students from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) established The All India Muslim Student

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Federation (AIMSF) in 1937. The draft resolution submitted at the AMU Student Union outlined their ambition to create a common platform for Muslim Students, and “to bring about closer social contact, better cultural, political, economic and religious understanding and a deeper sense of common relationship” (Zaman 1976:211). Thereafter, the AIMSF discouraged participation of Muslim students in AISF activities. It campaigned for separate electorates in university elections and for reserved seats in the student assemblies.17 These Muslim students also made strategic alliances with the AISF (communist) during the Second World War and after the CPI endorsed the creation of Pakistan. The Punjab Muslim Students Federation and the All Bengal Muslim Students Association benefited from the political space vacated by the Congress post-1942 and won over important pockets of support. These students developed a capacity for organization and mobilization along the lines of religious identity, that allowed them to establish a position of strength in anticipation of the post-World War II order.

10 Ideological and partisan disagreements between the communist and the congress student leaders resulted in the fragmentation of the AISF into two rival groups. The restrictions imposed by Mahatma Gandhi on student strikes during his individual satyagraha (non-violent resistance) campaign in 1940 became the central disagreement. The Congress-leaning AISF General-Secretary, M. L. Shah, supported his demand. AISF student strikes, therefore, could only proceed if the authorities closed the institutions, students decided to give up their studies entirely or they had Gandhi’s personal permission. The communist group, on the other hand, supported the escalation of strikes to curtail Britain’s war effort and supported an increasingly radical leftist agenda.

11 The communist and congress student factions also disagreed strongly about the AISF’s early position on the Second World War. The congress group generally sought to differentiate between the allied and the axis powers. Many supported the notion of assisting the British war effort on certain terms. Those Congress-leaning students supporting elements of the “August Offer” of 1940 were ridiculed by communist students as attempting to “establish a [Indian] government of national betrayal” (Chandra et al 1989:105). The communist group vehemently denounced the “imperialists war.” They equated British colonial rule with Germany’s fascism and rejected any cooperation with the British government between 1939 and the summer of 1941.18

12 The communist student leaders substituted their strategy of cooperation for one of control throughout the year 1939.19 Communist students launched a largely underground recruitment drive, organized auxiliary cells and a propaganda campaign amongst the eighty-thousand student members of the AISF. The Bombay leadership of the CPI, encouraged by The Communist International (Comintern), issued instructions to the student leadership to gain influence over the student movement.20 The CPI- leadership adopted similar strategies with the national peasant movements and labor movement: The All Indian Kisan Sabha and The All Indian Trade Union Congress.

13 The communist student leaders successfully expanded and institutionalized their power in the AISF. It was reported by one state official in 1940, “that the communist influence among students has spread beyond all recognition compared with the pre- war period and out of all proportion to the numerical strength of the Communist

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Party.” He attributed their success to “the comparative apathy of the non-communists as contrasted with the zeal and better organization of communist workers.”21

14 The communist student leaders commenced a power struggle against their congress socialist rivals at the AISF Conference in Nagpur on December 25, 1940. The extent to which the communist group planned the split is unclear. The division between the CPI and CPS aligned factions arose nominally over the question of obedience to Gandhi and the issue of student strikes. The Communist faction, led by Muqimuddin Farooqui, passed a motion rejecting the Gandhian approach,

He [Mahatma Gandhi] charged us with indiscipline and has warned us that we hinder the national cause by acting on our own and frittering away our energy on ineffective and thoughtless demonstrations…We the Indian students are in the vanguard of the world student movement. 22

The Nagpur split symbolized the strained relationship between Gandhi and the bulk of Indian students. The overwhelming majority of the regional delegates at the AISF conference supported the motion that directly condemned Gandhi’s approach (Bannerjee 1946:24). This occurred despite Jawaharlal Nehru and Jai Prakash Narayan’s appeal to students to obey his instructions about student strikes. Both had been widely considered to be radical Congress politicians and generally popular with Indian youths. The political authority of Gandhi amongst students had reached the lowest point since he took leadership of the Congress twenty years earlier. The newly elected General Secretary of the AISF, Muqimuddin Farooqui, subsequently refused Gandhi’s summons to his Wardha ashram to discuss the splitting of the national student movement. The Indian national movement was characterized by an often-overlooked intergenerational political tension and support for the congress movement became increasingly age differentiated during the late 1930s. After all, student hood is a transitionary stage, lasting three or four years, and this generation of students had not experienced the earlier mass movements.

15 The congress group, led by M. L. Shah, held a rival conference in a different venue to protest at the rejection of Gandhi’s approach. They inadvertently handed over the official conference pandal (and the organizational structures) to the rival communist group. Those Congress-leaning students whose political identity was linked with Gandhi created an alternative political movement tantamount to a “rump” in student politics. Both groups had been attempting to institutionalize their respective positions within the organizational structures during the initial years of WWII. The communists successfully turned their influence into control over the direction and organs of the AISF at the Nagpur conference.

16 As political differences between the moderate (usually congress) and radical (usually communist) students widened, Indian youths increasingly understood their partisanship in terms of essence rather than degree. Both AISF groups claimed to be the sole representative organization of the Indian students. The communists referred to the congress group as the “unofficial” student movement. This group officially became the National Congress Student Organisation in 1945. Its constitution held, “The AISC is an organization of genuine nationalist students who have given their allegiance to Gandhiji and the Congress.”23 This inception of new spaces of youth politics was prompted by the power configuration of political parties. The fragmentation of the AISF set in motion a process whereby student movements would be organized along party lines in early post-colonial India.

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17 The student leaders of the AISF developed an increasingly close relationship with the youthful CPI leaders after the congress students departed in December 1940. Young men in their thirties rising through the ranks of the communist organization, such as the younger associate of Bhagat Singh and the General Secretary of the CPI after independence, Ajoy Ghosh, and B. T Ranadive, fostered close collaboration with the communist-leaning AISF leadership. Their militant approach, their support for the Soviet Union and their general youthfulness had much appeal in the student movement. The AISF consequently became a vital entry point into the public sphere because the organization remained outlawed until 1942.

18 The AISF’s provocative resolution to fight against the British Raj during the Second World War represented a vital alignment of policy with the outlawed CPI. After the Nagpur split in December 1940, in the absence of the congress students, the communist group passed a resolution claiming, “the duty of all the students…is to drive the imperialist oppressors from our [Indian] soil.”24 The AISF’s outright denunciation of the British war constituted a radicalization of the national student movements position. Within one year, however, the AISF (communist) substituted their revolutionary project for unconditional support for fighting Nazi Germany.

19 Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 revealed the close partnership between the AISF, the CPI, and Moscow. At the AISF Conference, in December 1941 in Patna, in a dramatic reversal of policy, the AISF declared its support for the British war effort. It held, “the war must be waged in defense of the land of socialism and for the purpose of crushing Hitler’s fascism.”25 As the “imperialist’s war” morphed into the “people’s war” with the participation of the Soviet Union, many members felt perplexed and it lost considerable support amongst the students.26 A great number joined the AISF (congress) in anticipation of mass action against the British. The rigid alignment in policy suggests strong coordination between the two communist organizations in India, and that their loyalty to Moscow trumped their commitment to fighting British colonialism, although the gap of a few months that occurred between the CPI’s support for the war and AISF’s decision to fully support the war effort indicates the student leaders resisted pressure to avoid the embarrassing turnaround. 27

Activism, Agitation and the Everyday Experiences of Students during the Second World War

20 The AISF (communist) and AISF (congress) launched divergent mobilizations during WWII. One of activism to support the war effort and one of agitation against colonial rule. The communist group’s new position stressed the urgency of civil defense against the potential Japanese invasion and rejected agitation against the British. Thereafter, the CPI and the colonial state attempted to harness the energies of students for the purposes of the war effort and for social service. The congress students, on the other hand, assumed positions of leadership in the freedom struggle after the outbreak of the Quit India movement of 1942. As the colonial state rapidly arrested the leaders of the INC, students and youths launched a far reaching, intense and often violent struggle against the British. This section will explore these mobilizations at the experiential level and examine the range of penal tactics employed to check the political resistance of students.

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21 The communist leaning AISF became an important instrument for the British war effort and the student acquired a novel significance for the colonial state. The AISF established Student Patriotic Propaganda Squads to bolster support for the British war effort, against Nazism, and to propagate the threat of a Japanese invasion. Their policy held Indian Independence both unfeasible and undesirable for the duration of the war. They engaged in prabhat pheris (early morning rounds), organized slogan-shouting, street corner meetings, and torch light processions to spread the pro-Soviet and British message. 28The AISF also established Student Defence Committees on university campuses to encourage students to join civil defense efforts during their exam season and vacations.

22 The central government authorized the training of students in arson prevention, anti- panic and evacuation, and in Air Raid Precautions (ARP). ARP constituted the primary activity in the student’s civil defense campaign. Undeterred by inadequate arrangements to protect subjects from Japanese bombing, student wardens in eastern India and the larger cities set about drilling with firefighting equipment and setting up shelters. Recruitment posters and magazines held the ideal form of the Air Raid Warden to be a young man. The Student proclaimed, “By virtue of our youth, our education, our organization and sense of discipline…we the students are called upon to shoulder a special responsibility in building our Air Raid Precautions.”29 Underlying this representation was the idea that Indian students were distinctly passionate and more willing to sacrifice for India’s defense.

23 The authorities recruited former communist dissidents for liaison work between the army and the people.30 The army trained student units in matters of civil defense, specifically for patrol duty, evacuations and air raid work, and organized limited “guerrilla training camps.” The colonial state was aware of the security risks of putting communist students on a war footing. Instructions were given to military officers who had dealings with these left-wing youths to be conscious of their communist sympathies.31 Nevertheless, as Japanese troops approached the borders of India throughout 1942, the colonial state opted to strengthen relationships with those organizations who pursued a policy of cooperation during the war. It recognized the potentiality of this leftist student movement to agitate against the Japanese in the event of an invasion. 32

24 The student movement sought to mobilize students for relief work during the Bengal famine between 1942 and 1944. The Peoples Food Committee collected cash, food and clothes from across the country, and sent relief delegations to the affected areas. Through propaganda campaigns they sought to promote awareness about the scale of the famine and to promote student solidarity. Figure 3 is an AISF poster depicting a woman and her baby, the personification of Bengal, lying on the land of Bengal with a menacing Japanese invader portrayed as a hog lurking in the background. The campaign urges Indians to “Unite…To Feed the People and to Save the Nation.” Mother Bengal, it implies, can only be saved from the horrors of invasion and famine through the unity of Indians (for the British war effort). Figure 2 represents an emotive sketch of a starving student from Chittagong and reveals the terrible effect of the famine on Bengali students.

25 The AISF and the All Indian Muslim Student Federation established the Joint Relief Board to dispatch squads of medical aid to the affected areas (see figure 4). Indeed, as the INC went underground post-1942, such opportunities for new combinations of

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student politics arose between the groups. This student relief and civil defense work were largely concentrated in Bengal. For this reason, the AISF called for a return of “the old and glorious Seva Samiti tradition of service.”33 There has been much focus on the volunteer movements in India, yet the latently political social service of the student movements has been forgotten in these histories.34

26 On August 8, 1942 the All-India Congress Committee’s endorsement of the “Quit India Resolution” triggered an alternative mobilization of Indian students against the British. The following day, Gandhi issued his instruction: “Do or Die. We shall either free India or die in the attempt” ([1942]1997:181). He said, “If the students want to join the struggle only to go back to their studies after a while, I would not invite them to it…In all fights for freedom, the world over, the students have made very large contributions” ([1942]1997:186). Gandhi requested students to profess to their university academics their loyalty to Congress and, if determined enough, leave their studies.

27 Student leaders, having limited communication with the jailed congress leadership, took the initiative to escalate the militant nature of Congress’s underground struggle. Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy of India, believed that students, had “deliberately seized control and exceeded the instructions of the congress…What matters now is that youth is in command and has been putting into existence a revolutionary programme.”35Recognizing the increased possibility of a congress-led struggle and disillusioned by the AISF (communist) support for the British, students had been joining the congress group in larger numbers. Student leaders harnessed this growing (yet unofficial) organizational network of the Congress-leaning AISF group.

28 A wide range of anti-British activity intermingled violent and non-violent protest, especially throughout August and September 1942.36 Narratives of these AISF (congress) struggles are sadly missing because journals and pamphlets ceased to be published at the moment the students went underground. The non-violent protest generally included the boycotting of colleges and almost daily mass processions or sit-ins on university campuses. The violent protests included acts of sabotage at railway stations, telegraph offices, and clashes with the police.37 These clashes escalated in a dialectical way: that is, the state’s attempt to exact reprisals were quickly met with increased student violence.38 This culture of student-state violence intersected between local campus networks, the political structures of the AISF or Congress, and the coercive apparatus of the state.

29 The most militant year of the student movement was 1942. The youthful groundswell of anti-British activity represented an unprecedented exhibition of student politicization. It is estimated that ten percent of the student population of India was involved in the day-to-day organizational work of the anti-colonial struggle (Altbach 1968:256). This included a swelling of women students that challenged the political norms of respectability in India. The scale of the protest succeeded in closing most of India’s universities throughout 1942. University attendance in Bombay, for example, dropped to less than twenty percent in September 1942 (Khan 2015:181). A great many students no doubt pursued less obvious forms of intransigence or “everyday resistance” throughout the Quit India movement that targeted imperial authority. These acts of popular sedition included reading anti-imperial student propaganda, observing processions or boycotting the university timetable. In the year of 1942, however, the

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limited coordination and lack of a unified program amongst the students became especially apparent.

30 The colonial government responded to this widespread tendency amongst students to politically agitate with a range of penal tactics. Fearing the dangerous possibilities of the student movement, the student became a convergence point for the colonial state’s coercive network.39 The imperial strategies towards students, rarely coordinated or cohesive, oscillated between the employment of state violence and sanctions using the educational state. The violent repression aimed at student agitation included arrest, imprisonment, tear gas and lathi-charges. Elements within the state were inclined to limit the excesses of the violent response against young people because it often served to spur further cycles of protest.

31 The Intelligence Bureau routinely labeled these students “political agitators.”40 The student movement, neither militaristic or uniformed, however, occupied a grey area of the law. They were not outlawed like many other youth organizations had been for the duration of the war. The authorities utilized the Seditious Meetings Act and Criminal Law Amendment Act to crack down on elements within the organization. Under the Defence of India Act in 1939, the colonial state introduced additional provisions that allowed for the interrogation of communist student leaders who were detained on the outbreak of war. Students could receive these punishments on the orders of the local District Magistrates without any right of appeal although these processes, quasi- judicial in nature, were unsymmetrical across India. Universities often resisted on the grounds of the severity of the punishment.

32 The state aimed to prevent large-scale protests through their control of the educational state and aspects of everyday student life. Students that engaged in political activity could be disqualified from sitting their exams or dismissed from their place of study at college or university. The scale of 1942 rendered these sanctions redundant. Moreover, the colonial state had a record of threatening to reduce the government grants of universities that failed to sanction their politically active students or even closing the universities in the event of political agitation. Banaras Hindu University became the target of such threats because of proclaimed excessive political activities by its students.41 These efforts to reduce the boundaries of the political in India by punishing an entire group ran contrary to the self-proclaimed colonial philosophy of governing individuals.

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Figure 1.

This AISF Student Unity campaign poster depicts a moment of unity that occurred in the Bengal Province on Independence Day 1945 where the AISF, the All India Muslim Student Federation, The National Congress Student Organisation, and the women students of the AISF came together for a protest. The specific location is unknown. The Student: February 1945

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Figure 2

A sketch of a starving student from Chittagong during the Bengal famine. The Student: March 1943

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Figure 3

“To Feed the People and Save the Nation,” a slogan of the AISF’s Peoples Food Committee campaign to collect cash, food and clothes from across the country. The Student: October 1943

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Figure 4

This poster represents the coming together of the Bengal Provincial Students Federation and the All- Bengal Muslim student League to form the Student Joint Relief Board, the headline read “Bengal Student’s Federation and Muslim League—Unity Achieved” The Student: February 1944

Figure 5.

Four young women, probably students, shouting slogans during the Quit India movement, August 1942. Courtesy of GandhiServe

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The AISF, the Transition to Independence and the Post-Colonial State, 1946-1950

33 In a dramatic reversal of categorization, after WWII the colonial government’s much- needed ally became the post-colonial government’s feared adversary. The National Congress Student Organisation, established in 1945, committed to the idea of supporting the transitioning to political freedom. The communist-led AISF, on the other hand, became the object of the state’s coercive techniques during an intense period of student agitation and industrial strife. In the post-colonial period, the communist AISF constructed and propagated a novel anti-imperial and anti- government discourse, and the women’s activist networks increasingly mobilized their own political campaigns separate to the male students. As the post-colonial elite constructed the discourse of the “undisciplined student,” the state’s repertoire of control enlarged throughout the shift from British rule to independence.

34 During the final two years of colonial rule, the leadership of the CPI and the AISF became more radical and the relationship between the two organizations tightened.42 The growth in AISF militancy is linked to the dramatic increase in support for armed revolution that occurred in the Indian communist movement. The increasingly militant leadership provoked a radicalization of various political struggles after the Second World War. Two notable examples include the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 1946 and the Telangana Rebellion between 1946 and 1951.43 In December 1947, the radical B. T. Ranadive replaced the more moderate P.C. Joshi as General Secretary of the CPI. The CPI’s official position became one of armed struggle against the independent Indian state. The focus here is on the AISF student campaigns although this was closely linked to the large upsurge in union strike activities that followed the Second World War and the Nehruvian state’s crackdown that followed.44

35 The AISF’s militant activity increased together with the Indian state’s deployment of coercive techniques during the transition to independence. Many of the provincial governments banned the CPI making little attempt to differentiate the student movement from the political party. In Autumn 1948, Bombay police officers raided the AISF headquarters and the student leaders were arrested (although released shortly after).45 The Bombay Province imposed a ban on the AISF weekly newspaper The Student and their other publications printed by the New Age Printing Press. The authorities prohibited the convening of the national AISF conference. It had been an annual event since the Nehru-Jinnah inception in 1936. The surveillance techniques of intercepting telegrams, letters and circulars and spying on student processions and public meetings continued seemingly unabated. The transition to independence witnessed a powerful continuity in the state-student interaction, and the coercive functions of the surveillance network altered little.46

36 Police violence targeted at the student movement prompted distinct outrage in newspaper articles. The Indian youth had been central to the nationalist discourse on imagining the future nation state. On December 31, 1948, the national newspaper, The Free Press Journal asked, “Is the Bombay public to believe that the student delegation had to be lathi charged, tear-gassed, and fired at for the peace of the city and the security of the students themselves?”47 Police violence against students was often depicted as less justifiable than against other social groups. This clash occurred after

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the AISF attempted to convene their conference illegally. The National Congress Student Organisation, on the other hand, generally eschewed protest in favor of activity that promoted the congress governments. For this the AISF designated the NCSO as “shameless agents of the bourgeois government and its police” in 1949.48

37 The Government of India ordered that passports not be granted or be confiscated from communist youths in their attempt to curtail their involvement with the communist world. Moraji Desai, the Chief Minister of Bombay, revealed his government’s policy aptly, “I am not going to allow anyone to go out of the country to make propaganda against the government.”49 Communist students could not enter India either. The visas of foreign students it considered “dangerous,” especially those from the USSR, were rejected. 50

38 The women’s student movement developed a widespread organizational capacity during the years following independence. In the year 1948, for example, the students of Delhi’s women’s university, Indraprastha College, went on strike to demand the reinstatement of teachers who had been dismissed. The women students in Guwahati, Tezpur and Sylhet also came out onto the streets to support the women of Delhi. The Meerut women students led processions to support the strike action in the Modi Mills. In Madras, student activists collected money for the female workers participating in the mill strikes. After an attack on the women students in Lucknow in 1948, Aligarh Muslim women, “hitherto kept in purdah and under medieval feudal restrictions,” came out to demonstrate.51 The AISF conference declared “In every major struggle, the girl students stood shoulder to shoulder with boys, faced tear gas bombs and bullets.” The AISF created political awareness among women students and ensured their participation in left-wing struggles in the years following independence.

39 These women activists, challenging the norms of respectability in India, faced discrimination in the male-dominated AISF. The Student, for instance, claimed the women students attending the national conference did so in their “holiday mood.” It was claimed they spent the sessions visiting relatives, drinking cold coffee, or taking manicures whilst the male students would be “half starving” in the conference hall. These accounts reveal the women student was subjectivized as gossiping, family oriented and unenthusiastic in contrast to the debating, country oriented and enthusiastic male student.52 These discursive pronouncements, however unfavorable, give glimpses into the political spaces of female youth and of their laudable acts of resistance against the male-dominated student movement. A great many of these young women may have taken personal risks, perhaps by disobeying their families, to join left wing student politics. It is, however, difficult to decipher the attitudes of the women youth because although they appear in the historical documents of the AISF, their voices are rarely heard.53

40 The communist AISF constructed and propagated novel anti-state discourses after independence. The narrative shifted from one of supporting independence to one about the failure of India’s democracy and economy. The ideas of the freedom struggle, the AISF Annual Conference 1949 declared, “are being belied and expectations are being shattered.”54 As hundreds of communists jailed by India’s first government for trade union activities went on hunger strikes, the AISF launched a campaign to support their comrades and protest about their conditions under which they were incarcerated. The communist prisoners were not, however, classified as “political prisoners” in jails like the congressmen had been by the British. The definition of “political prisoner” had

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been settled during the establishment of the post-colonial nation state. The CPI and the AISF were not freedom fighters in independent India. Moreover, the AISF propaganda sought to locate the struggle of the Indian student during India’s economic downturn. It highlighted the rising costs of stationery and college fees in addition to the high youth unemployment that distinguished the years following 1947. The conference noted, “with education for girls still looked at as a luxury, girl students are generally the first victims of the rising cost of living and increasing fees.”

41 Deeply rooted in anti-imperial ideology, the AISF turned its energies to supporting the independence struggles in Southeast Asia. They launched nationwide campaigns to protest the French and Dutch attempts to reassert colonialism in Vietnam and Indonesia after 1945. As AISF students protested outside the Dutch embassy, the ambassador repeatedly complained to the Indian government that the police were failing to provide security to the building. These protests culminated in a group of AISF students commandeering the Netherlands’ Coat of Arms from the embassy doorway.55 The emergence of this post-colonial pan-Asian collective student identity and solidarity can be understood as an anti-imperial internationalism that improvised a distinctly future-oriented politics where the youth was an embodiment of the horizon of future possibilities (Goswami 2012:1). The central role of the student in the independence movements in Southeast Asia gave new meaning to this life stage in these colonial and post-colonial nations. It came to embody the universalist aspirations of nationalism in the collective political imagination of other struggles. As The Student recorded in 1949, “today the progressive youth of every country looks at the heroism of the youth of the Asian countries with admiration.”56

42 Underlying the shift from colonial rule to independence was the rise of a discourse on the indiscipline of students and its alleged implications for politics in independent India. Politicians and state officials collectively framed the Indian student as “rowdy” and “undisciplined” as leftist students continued to pursue radical politics. Chakrabarty (2007) held that efforts to discipline young citizens ran against the history of what constituted the political in colonial India. Jawaharlal Nehru explained in a letter to his Chief Ministers in 1954 that “unrest and turbulence has characterized student activities in different parts of the country in recent years.” He claimed, “the indiscipline amongst students, the fall in standards and the general deterioration in universities is largely due to party factions and political intrigues which disfigure academic life.”57 The CPI-dominated AISF no doubt qualified as such a menace in their capacity as a leading national student movement. Indian youth had been a social force to be mobilized against the colonial state during the freedom struggle. After independence, the congress political elite rhetorical approach to this social group depicted the militant tactics of the AISF as fundamentally unsuitable for an independent and democratic country.

Conclusion

43 Between 1948 and 1950, the membership of the CPI fell from around ninety thousand to around nine thousand and the AISF’s membership also diminished substantially.58 The CPI committed itself to participate in the forthcoming general elections and to operate within the democratic boundaries of the Republic of India after the ousting of General Secretary B. T Randative in 1950. It was by this year that the AISF had been reduced to a

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rump of communist youths. The lack of mass appeal of its left-wing adventurism coupled with the government’s crackdown on its activities had pushed the organization to the fringes of campus politics. The AISF no longer functioned as a truly national movement nor published its pamphlets or journal. Ten years earlier, at the start of WWII, it had been a mass movement claiming eighty-thousand student members and represented an indication of dramatic student power at the national level. This article has given a historical snapshot into the Indian student movement by exploring this rise and decline of the AISF between its establishment in 1936 and its disappearance in 1950.

44 The initiative of provincial student leaders together with the support of adult political leaders brought about the inception of the AISF in 1936. This moment of national unity was quickly dissipated by the fragmentation that occurred along the lines of religious and political identities. As political parties sought to harness the energies of youth, the AISF shattered into conflicting organizations that created divergent pathways of youth. I have argued partisanship intensified amongst students in India. Their identity increasingly coalesced around political and religious identity. The “other” belonged to the alternative struggle. The fallout from the attempt to consolidate the existing student movements initiated the most militant period of the student movement during 1942 and between 1945 and 1950. The AISF arena gave a space for students to play a larger role in political life in India and the organization represented a vital shift in the importance of student politics in India.

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NOTES

1. Communist Party of India Archives. May 1942. The Student, The AISF Newspaper. (Hereafter, referred to as The Student: month year). 2. I am grateful to Taylor Sherman, Radhika Singha and Anil Rajimwale for their supportive enquiry and comments on versions of this essay. I am sincerely thankful to the editors of this special issue and the anonymous readers of SAMAJ for offering comments. 3. The Student: December 1943. 4. Addressing the most pronounced trends: For the marginalisation of youth see (Jeffrey 2010): on effect of India’s liberalisations on youth see (Gooptu 2013); on youth and electoral politics see (Kumar 2014); and there is also a growing exploration of campus politics, see (Martelli 2017; Garalyte 2016) 5. See (Watt 2005; Roy and Zachariah 2013; Raza and Roy 2015). 6. See (Hazary 1987; Pandey 2002) 7. For literature on communist youth, see (See (Cornell 1982; Chattopadhyay 2011; Cornell et al. 2012) 8. See (Singh 2014; Khan 2015) 9. These documents can be found at Ajoy Bhavan, the Communist Party of India Archives, and at P.C. Joshi Archives, Jawaharlal Nehru University. 10. The student and youth loomed large in the minds of the colonial official because of their role in anti-colonial politics. Roy and Zachariah (2013) uncover the state’s (disproportionate) fear of losing control of youths and students, and the repressive reaction to leftist students throughout the 1920s and the early 1930s. Maclean (2015) foregrounds the important role of violent youth activism in provoking colonial responses and introducing urgency into the project of constitutional reform. The injection of youth radicalised by nationalist colleges into the nationalist struggle (s) increased after the events of 1919 and continued until the 1940s.

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11. The constitution of the AISF established that any person, between the age of 14 and 30, studying in a university institution that subscribed to the aims of the ASIF could join the national student movement (pending payment of two annas per year). The Provincial Federations elected delegates onto the All Indian Students Council and to attend the All Indian Student’s Conference. The working committee was the executive authority, led by the General Secretary, that had responsibility for putting into effect the policy and programme laid down by the AISC and the Conference. See, The Constitution of the All India Students Federation (As amended at the Indian Students Conference at Calcutta 1939), Ajoy Bhavan. 12. There had been a previous, short lived, attempt to create an Indian student organisation, called the All Indian College Student Conference (AICSC). Established in Nagpur in December 1920, its creation represented the first coalescing of regional Indian student movements. The Bombay Chronicle recorded, “The Nagpur Conference is thus the first step forward of Indian college students as a whole into the field of politics.” (Author unknown, The Bombay Chronicle: November 20, 1920. The momentum of the non-cooperation movement gave impetus to their successive conferences, often held alongside the Indian National Congress’s annual conferences, although by the mid-1920s the student organisation had lost momentum and cease to exist. For the AICSC, See (Rajimwale 2005) 13. The Student: December (2nd edition) 1944. 14. For a critique of factions as a form of “traditional” patron-client relation, see Hardiman (1989). 15. See the reports of the Dacca Student riots 1943 for a comprehensive narrative: The Student:February 1943 16. It was not until 1949, however, that the RSS-aligned Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) came into existence. 17. The Student: January 1943 18. Central Committee.1941.“War and the World Situation.” 1941. Report of the 6th AISF Conference: Delhi. January. 19. In another blow to the AISF’s wholeness, the All India Students Bloc was formed in 1939 by Subhas Chandra Bose after his resignation from the Presidency of the Congress. Unlike the AISF or the AIMSF, however, this never became a national organisation. The Forward Bloc supporters generally remained in the AISF (communist) until the Quit India movement of 1942 triggered the majority to join the AISF (congress). 20. The Comintern instructed the CPI to focus their efforts on educated youth and gain control of their student movements; and it deemed this course of action to be “peculiarly necessary and significant.” The Indian student was designated to be central to the revolutionary vanguard. Their educational background, and their perceived propensity to intellectual change, made them targets of young communist workers. Indeed, during the militant “BTR” period of the CPI 1948-1950, the earlier attempts by the CPI to focus their energies on students were held to have displaced the centrality of class to the communist ideology (Rajimwale 2001:404). See: Monthly Surveys outlining Communist Activities of the CPI, January 1941, Home Department Political, HD/ 7/1/41, National Archives of India (hereafter, HDP and NAI) 21. DIB’s note on Communism in India—A Survey of Recent Developments, November 1939, HDP, 7/7/39, NAI 22. Monthly Surveys outlining Communist Activities of the CPI, January 1941, HDP, HD/7/1/41, NAI. Italics added for emphasis. 23. All India Student Congress Bombay Students Activities in the Freedom Struggle. August 22 1946. All India Congress Committee, 22/46, The Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (hereafter, NMML) 24. Monthly Surveys outlining Communist Activities of the CPI, January 1941, HDP, HD/7/1/41, NAI 25. The Student (Conference Number) February 1942

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26. Monthly surveys outlining Communist Activities of the Communist Party of India, August 1940 27. Like the ferocious debates that occurred over student strikes despite the CPI-CPS cooperation pact (the “United Front Policy”), student conflicts regarding support for the war effort did not always align directly with the political parties. Student-level conflicts often had a life of their own. Student political groupings in the AISF expressed their own ideological agendas and interests. 28. The Student: May and June 1942 29. The Student: (National Defence Number) June 1942 30. Proposed Use of Military of the A.I.S.F, 1943, HDP, 69/43 NAI 31. Proposed Use of Military of the A.I.S.F, 1943, HDP, 69/43 NAI. 32. Meeting of the National Defence Council, 1942, HDP, 15/9/42 NAI 33. The Student: (National Defence Number) May/June 1942 34. See (Watt 2005; Raza and Roy 2015). 35. Secret Telegram from Viceroy Linlithgow to Secretary of State for India Amery, August 22, 1942, Quit India Collective, 6664, NMML. Italics added for effect. 36. Secret Telegram from Viceroy Linlithgow to Secretary of State for India Amery, August 22, 1942, Quit India Collective, 6664, NMML. Moreover, the Forward Blocists had remained closer to the AISF (communist) but after August 1942 they also joined the M.L shah-led AISF (Congress). 37. For Quit India see (Hutchins 1973; Singh 2014; Khan 2015) 38. See Miscellaneous Reports on Student Activities, 1941, HDP, 246/1941 NAI 39. See (Sherman 2010:3). 40. Meeting of the National Defence Council, 1942, HDP, 15/9/42 NAI 41. Proposal to Withhold the Government Grant to the BHU in view of Political Activities of its Students, 1933, HDP, 141/33 42. P.C. Joshi Archives. 1949. “Report of the AISF secretariat at the 12th Conference.” Calcutta: Jawaharlal Nehru University. July 23-27. 43. Firstly, the CPI in Bombay “fanned the flames” of the naval mutiny, the subsequent civilian rioting, and solicited wider rebellion. Secondly, the CPI encouraged an armed “socialist revolution” in Telangana after the Nizam of Hyderabad had been overthrown in September 1948 by Indian troops (See Spence 2015). 44. The Congress leaders about to take state power sought to demobilise and control the labour unions to quell the upsurge in strikes. The government enacted tough labour laws (such as the Industrial Disputes Act of 1947) that undermined collective bargaining. They also devising a split in the union movement, with the Congress launching its own rival union federation to face down the increasingly CPI-led AITUC. See (Chibber 2006) 45. The Student, April 1948 46. Scholars have examined the surveillance of Indian student revolutionaries in the UK, and London’s significance as the most liberal centre of anti-colonial student agitation within the Empire, although the spying networked aimed at Indian students and in postcolonial India has been largely overlooked (Popplewell 2008:56–76; Schaffel 2012). 47. Free Press Journal, Daily Indian Newspaper, January 1, 1949 48. P.C. Joshi Archives. 1949.“Report of the AISF secretariat.” 12th Conference Calcutta: Jawaharlal Nehru University. July 23-27. In the same year an important fragmentation of the student moment occurred along political and religious lines. A student movement aligned to the RSS, The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, was established in 1949 to promote Hindu nationalist politics on campuses. 49. The Student, October, 1948. 50. The Student, October, 1948.

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51. P.C. Joshi Archives. 1949.“Report of the AISF secretariat.” 12th Conference Calcutta: Jawaharlal Nehru University. July 23-27. 52. The Student, January 1943 53. For discussion on the girl-activist see (Taft 2011) 54. P.C. Joshi Archives. 1949.“Report of the AISF secretariat.” 12th Conference Calcutta: Jawaharlal Nehru University. July 23-27. 55. Indian student protest at Dutch aggression in Indonesian, 1949, Department for External Affairs, 40–FEA, NAI 56. The Student, August 1949 57. Letter from Jawaharlal Nehru to his Chief Ministers. August 28 1954, Foreword in (Kabir 1956: 4) 58. See (Rajimwale 2005)

ABSTRACTS

This article will examine the rise and fragmentation of the All India Student Federation (AISF), 1936–1950. The AISF initially represented a successful attempt at consolidating the existing student organizations in colonial India and a dramatic indication of student power at the national level. This student movement became an arena for the negotiation of political and religious youth identities during the final decade of the British Raj. Indian students and their student leaders responded to wider political change, especially the power configuration of political parties, with a search for distinct political spaces for youth. The struggle for control and secessions from the organization, however, brought about its fragmentation. During WWII, student and adult political leaders competed to mobilize the splintered student movements for the purposes of civil defense, social service and for the Quit India movement. I will also argue these AISF groups became the convergence point for the colonial and early-post colonial state’s coercive network.

INDEX

Keywords: Indian student politics, youth identity, student mobilization, state-student interaction, Second World War

AUTHOR

TOM WILKINSON Tom Wilkinson is a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics.

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A Campus in Context: East Pakistan’s “Mass Upsurge” at Local, Regional, and International Scales

Samantha Christiansen

1 Throughout the 1960s, reportage of student activism on campuses across the world was regularly seen in newspapers, on televisions, and even in worried government reports. Indeed, in 1968, the United States Central Intelligence Agency composed a two-volume report on student activism, domestic and international, which was entitled, simply “Restless Youth” (1968). Given the widespread occurrence of student revolt across the world, historical understanding of the nuance and specific context of the movements risks being overshadowed were reduced into a formulaic model. This article will focus on the case study of East Pakistani student activism at Dhaka University in the late 1960s with attention to both the local particularities and an understanding of larger regional and global contexts. Focusing on the period of 1964–1969, I will demonstrate that students on Dhaka University engaged with different contexts and concerns—local, regional, and international—through their activities as student political activists. Through this varied scale of identity mobilization, student activism at Dhaka University became contextualized within a larger network of spaces and movements in the 1960s (Christiansen and Scarlett 2013; Marwick 1998; Zolov 1999).

Places and Spaces for Movement at Dhaka University

2 As a place of theoretical departure, the notions of scale and place, with regard to social movements and with regard to their usage this article, warrant some brief discussion. The common placement of Dhaka University student mobilizations in a nationalist historical narrative of Bangladesh has created a strong framework through which the history of student movements in the nation are linked with state-level politics. In particular, with all of the focus on the nation, as students become intertwined with the story of 1971’s Liberation War, the level of analysis rarely reaches that of the acutely local level of the campus community itself or extends beyond the borders of the

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Eastern wing of divided Pakistan. While Dhaka University as a symbolic place occupies a distinct historical identity for the nation and continues to function as a site of historical commemoration and ongoing contentious political demonstration, there is little consideration of how the campus as a place connected students with other scales of student movements, regionally and internationally, in both real and imagined terms.

3 The ways in which social movement participants interact with, contest, and manipulate space during mobilization and action is a rich field of inquiry, and a great deal of it owes credit to the groundbreaking considerations of space elucidated by Henri Lefebvre (1974). Lefebvre’s contention that in order to understand society, we must consider it in the context of the spaces it produces, material and mental, re-oriented spatial analysis and offered an important bridge between historical, social and geographic analysis. Building off of Lefebvre’s ideas of the social production of space, social geographers such as John Agnew argued for a distinction of “place” as an analytic tool (1987). Agnew describes “place” as consisting of “three major elements: locale, the settings in which social relations are constituted (these can be informal or institutional); location, the geographical area encompassing the settings for social interaction as defined by social and economic processes operating at a wider scale; and a sense of place, the local “structure of feeling” (p. 28). Place, then, refers to the ways that social activity is thought of geographically, and how that process of thinking shapes the activity within the space. Importantly though, as pointed out by Byron A. Miller (2000), place should not be associated/considered necessarily with/as being local. Place can operate on a variety of geographic scales, and can be imagined into varying levels of geographic scale.

4 With regard to the idea of geographic scale and social movements, Alberto Mellucci and others have demonstrated that collective identities in social movements can operate in different degrees of space (1989). On one hand, movement participants are mobilized by local concerns and work within local power structures, but on the other hand, movements apply larger-scale analysis and participants conceive of their identity in relation to larger structural frameworks, such as capitalism or modernity. I argue that considering the case of student movements in the 1960s at Dhaka University, geographic scale operates consistently with Mellucci’s description of fluidity. For this article, my intention is to combine Mellucci’s notions of fluidity and social movement identity with Miller’s theory of place operating on multiple levels to demonstrate Dhaka University student activism as simultaneously linked to a very specific local context and a broader sense of regional and international collective identity. Using oral history interviews conducted in Dhaka, as well as collected testimony from various secondary sources, this article focuses on the Mass Upsurge campaign as a case study for illustrating that various scales are not in competition or necessarily distinct in the movement participants’ understanding and recollection of the movement in totality. Indeed, we see the local, regional, and international dimensions as intertwined into a complex and mutually constitutive set of goals and accomplishments. Dhaka University students were concerned with specific campus and local issues, yet they also saw the campus as one of many campuses; a global network of sites of contention and power dealing with much larger scale issues such as the emergence of the New Left, imperialism, and global youth cultural expression. Notably, in all of the scales, students’ relationship to the place of Dhaka University figures into the collective identity of the movement.

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5 In the late sixties, at the local level, students at Dhaka University articulated a frustration with the economic and political disparity between the Eastern and Western wings of Pakistan. Students became major supporters of the Awami League and its Six Points Platform, and major political figures, most notably Sheikh Mujibar Rahman, nurtured a close relationship with the campus and students. The local scale was also deeply connected to regional concerns, as the 1965 war between India and Pakistan highlighted the precarious reality of East Pakistan’s military security. The Indo-Pak War had enraged students in West Pakistan was well, who mobilized around disapproval of the Tashkent Agreement which had ended the war. The shared anger over the war gave students in both wings a common cause, one in opposition to the Ayub Khan regime, although the specific grievances with the regime were different. The regional dynamics of Mass Upsurge, the dual wing campaign that ultimately toppled Ayub’s rule, was an important level of interaction for the students. Finally, at the international scale, students’ position in society, defined as “students,” connected them ideologically, and at times in person, to a larger narrative of student unrest taking place around the world. The campaign in Pakistan was seen as one of many similar campaigns, and connections were made to student uprisings outside of Pakistan both by students at Dhaka University and other parts of the world (Ali 2005).

Local Context: Politics and Parties in East Pakistan

6 The East Pakistan local political context was in a period of fragmentation both at the campus level and more broadly. Politically in East Pakistan, the two parties that dominated were the Leftist party of the National Awami League (NAP) and the more centrist Awami League, now under the clear leadership of Sheikh Mujibar Rahman. Among the students both were highly influential.

7 The NAP, however, was divided between a pro-Soviet faction and a pro-Maoist faction. The splits in the party had a significant impact on the Dhaka University campus as well; two major groups formed within the Left oriented students, referred to as the Motia group (the pro-Soviet faction under the leadership of Motia Chowdury) and the Menon group (the pro-Chinese bloc under the leadership Rashed Khan Menon). The two groups were not hostile in their interactions, but the split illustrates a way in which international context played out at student level.

8 Also acutely relevant at the local scale was the state’s shifting strategy toward managing the contentious student population of Dhaka University. In 1962, Ayub Khan had appointed a new provincial governor to East Pakistan, Abdul Monem Khan. Monem Khan was enormously unpopular, particularly among students. He believed that Dhaka University’s politicized students presented a threat to state stability and he directed a concentrated campaign to undermine the political power that the place represented. Within months of his appointment, he replaced the vice-chancellor with a more cooperative figure and orchestrated the firing of several known dissident professors (Rahman 1995:23; Umar 2000:120–3). In a speech given in December 1963, Monem Khan chastised students for being “distracted” by politics, arguing that:

The first and foremost responsibility of students is to devote themselves to their studies. By and large the student community is aware of its responsibilities. But there are always those who for their narrow and limited

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purpose take every opportunity to encourage strikes and disorder in educational institutions. (Kitamura 2000:118).

The argument that students as a community should not be a politicized unit is a line of reasoning Monem Khan maintained throughout his governorship, and one that he mentioned in every single annual address to the province from 1963 until 1968 (Kitamura 2000:119). His continued insistence on the point, however, also indicates his inability to gain any real ground on the problem.

9 In an effort to undermine the campus political structure, Monem Khan created a student group of his own, the National Students’ Federation (NSF) (Hannan 1987:272). Despite Monem Khan’s position that students ought to avoid political activity, the NSF organized rallies and demonstrations in support of government policies, and created chaos and havoc at other groups’ events. Kabil, a student activist that attended Dhaka University at the time recalls:

The NSF were hooligans. They violently disrupted processions and they made it impossible to meet. Once I remember, they sat under the Amtolla (a tree on campus where the Left groups regularly met) for the whole evening just so that other groups could not convene there (Personal interview 2008).1

Similarly, in his memoir of his days on campus, Dr. Nurul Nabi (2010) describes the NSF confrontations, recalling:

The party was comprised of opportunistic students from elitist families. The NSF recruits were the sons of members of the Convention Muslim League Party and bureaucrats. With the direct support of the government, the NSF’s job was to harass and frighten the activists … from participating in anti- government activities…One day after class, I was walking to the hall along the bank of the pond. As I walked I saw a couple of NSF thugs taking turns beating up another student. …Another incident of NSF bullying occurred one evening after dinner…Suddenly we heard pandemonium coming from the corridor outside. We came out of our dorm to see what was going on. We saw a number of NSF thugs with daggers and sticks in hand, screaming in the hallway, hurling abusive words toward Chatro League followers and frantically hunting for their rooms…Before we could collect our thoughts, we heard violent kicks at our door. They were screaming at us and threatened to shoot the door down if we didn’t open it…They rushed in and asked, point blank, who among us was a Chatro League activist…one of the attackers and a student from the Biochemistry department recognized me…he told them to leave us alone and luckily they did (pp. 102–4).

The NSF’s focus on rooting out and terrorizing student activists belies the government’s anxiety at the effectiveness of the organizations on campus.

10 The NSF was successful in many of its attempts to infiltrate the space of the campus, but it could not fully disrupt it. In a show of solidarity, in 1964, the Dhaka University convocation was boycotted by all of the student groups on campus (with the obvious exception of the NSF). Umar (2006) describes the event:

Governor Monem Khan was the ex-officio chancellor of the Dhaka University and he was to preside over the convocation to be held in Curzon Hall…on the appointed day, 22 March, when the Governor took the chair…the students, and with them teachers (those wearing ceremonial gowns), stood up and left the specially erected dais. This resulted in a comic situation in which the chancellor, vice-chancellor and other university authorities remained sitting

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in their chairs with nobody before them, under the huge shamiana (decorative tent) with chairs turned upside down! (p.112).

The event was widely covered in the press, since they had all been there for the ceremony, and it was a major embarrassment to the administration. Umar (2006) points out: “The newspaper reports and photographs of the failed convocation ceremony caused considerable satisfaction in the opposition circles and it helped the anti- government mobilization considerably” (p. 112). It was also an important statement about the campus as a place of non-cooperation with Monem Khan and the regime he represented. He may have been officially the chancellor (the governor is the chancellor of all higher educational institutions, and the administrative head of the school is the vice-chancellor) but the limits of the government’s power in that space were clearly demonstrated. Students at Dhaka University, while fragmented into multiple political groups, were largely united when it came time to demonstrate their ability to mobilize as a campus community.

Regional Discontent and Solidarity: Ayub’s Miscalculations at Home and Abroad

11 The regional context of South Asian politics in the sixties is another important scale in which Dhaka University student mobilizations of the 1960s engaged. In January 1965, Ayub Khan was sworn in as President of Pakistan under a cloud of discontent. What followed over the course of the next year was a series of miscalculations that ultimately destabilized the entire regime and positioned students in both wings of his nation against him. The election had not taken place with full adult suffrage, and had been contested between Ayub Khan as the government’s candidate and Ms. Fatima Jinnah as a united opposition candidate. Even though he claimed victory in the elections, the majority of the population in both East Pakistan and West Pakistan had not been given franchise, and thus, the legitimacy of the regime was seen no differently than prior to the elections. Just a few months later, Pakistan became embroiled in the messy Indo- Pakistani War of 1965.

12 The war with India, also often referred to as the Second Kashmir War, revolved around the disputed territory of the Kashmir region. The dispute was a continuation of the unresolved border agreement of the 1947 Partition, and in 1965 the conflict took a sudden and swift turn in terms of military and industrial force on both sides. First a series of skirmishes in April, and then in a highly deadly period of three weeks of all- out battle in September, the conflict drew international concern for its explosive potential. In West Pakistan, the war effort was initially more popular, as the border was part of the Western province and there were stronger anti-Indian sentiments in that wing. In East Pakistan, however, the issue of Kashmir resonated far less meaningfully. Patricia Walton Hill, (n.d.) an American who lived in East Pakistan during the 1960s observed in her memoir the lack of interest felt by many East Pakistanis regarding the war over Kashmir. She quotes a conversation about it she had with a Bengali on the street who told her:

Kashmir! Government make a lot of noise, make trouble with India about Kashmir…What do Bengalis care about Kashmir? They have more Muslims in West Bengal in India than in Kashmir… When trouble with India, is hard for Bengalis… West Bengal has so many things we need here—fruit and

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vegetables all year, and good cloth, but we can never get them now (n.d.: 108).

The war was not only unnecessary to the East Pakistanis, it also disrupted the delicate regional balance of local trade and security. Thus, rather than stoking nationalist pride, as Ayub hoped the war would do and which public appeals for support drew upon, the war deepened the resentment in the Eastern province.

13 The war was also a military strategic failure on the part of Pakistan. First, Ayub had been convinced that the population in key areas of the Kashmir region would rise up with Pakistani troops in resistance to Indian occupation; that support had failed to materialize on the ground, leaving the Pakistani troops unsupported and with poor quality intelligence. The conflict also proved that militarily Indian forces were able to advance far more effectively than Pakistani troops on both land and by air, a reality of the ongoing conflict that Pakistan’s population was not prepared to face. It ended in a cease-fire, mediated in Tashkent by the Soviet Union, at the bequest of the United Nations; at the time of the cease-fire, Indian troops were poised to take Lahore and a Pakistani defeat was imminent. As many scholars argue, the mutual cease-fire was the best-case scenario for Pakistan who had virtually lost the war already (Schofield 2003; Ziring 1992; Vaish 2011).

14 Yet the agreement at Tashkent was not seen by the population of Pakistan as a success in any way. The agreement drove a wedge between Ayub and his close ally, Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto, a young and rising star in the West Pakistan political scene, was expected to follow Ayub’s political legacy in the Presidency. He was however, intensely critical of the agreement and of the lack of intervention by Western allies, particularly the United States, in the face of such a humiliating defeat. Lawrence Ziring (1992) describes the mood of the post-Tashkent homecoming:

News of the agreement in Tashkent shocked the Pakistanis, who had expected something quite different. Virtually everyone believed the talks would fail, and preparations were underway to welcome Ayub back as a hero of the people. But when news was relayed in the evening over Radio Pakistan there was only surprise and dismay…When the President finally returned to Rawalpindi there were no celebrations, no press conferences, and no high- level meetings. Ayub did not even seem inclined to explain why he chose to sign the agreement and went into immediate seclusion (p. 67–8).

Even in East Pakistan, where the war had been unpopular all along, there was widespread dissatisfaction with the entire affair. Ayub’s miscalculations in 1965 made it a difficult year for his regime, but he had also set into motion two movements, one in each wing of his nation, both spearheaded by students, that would eventually end his rule altogether. This regional geographic and political context of South Asian conflict is another scale at which Dhaka University students in the 1960s mobilized and which was intertwined within the movement on campus.

15 In both East and West Pakistan, students played pivotal roles in the movements that developed in the war’s aftermath. In fact, although there was limited physical contact between the two student mobilizations, the shared rhetoric of the need for democracy in Pakistan created a unique bond between students in the two provincial movements. Although technically part of one nation, and working to overthrow the same government that ruled them both, the movements operated in relative independence of each other. That said, there was still a shared identity between the students, as

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“students of Pakistan,” and a relationship that was different than the shared identity with a larger, imagined global youth community. Thus, the shared campaign of the two wings (physical and in solidarity) represents another scale of the political activity of Dhaka University students.

16 In West Pakistan, students took to the streets in protest just 48 hours after Ayub’s return. Riots and demonstrations, led by students but adding others as they progressed, brought major urban cities to a standstill, particularly Lahore. The Pakistan Times reported:

Rioting began sometime after noon. The police ordered a halt to the marchers converging on the city, many of whom were joined by veiled women who carried children said to be the dependents of men killed in the war…All attempts to stop the students were answered with increased resistance and rowdiness. Soon the brickbatting began and the police were ordered to counterattack using their tear gas canisters. The battle raged for several hours…the disorder spread around the areas surrounding the city colleges where the police, on the defensive, resorted to shooting. An official government announcement stated that the first victim was a policeman and that the struggle grew as a result (1966).

The riots grew over the next several days and the student unrest, tapping into older grievances, changed messages from focused complaints that the government had “sold Kashmir” to larger claims of a need for greater democracy in the government. This escalation was a source of concern for the government scrambling to contain the unrest, and officials worried that the unrest would spread too far into other segments of society (Ziring 1992:71). In an effort to quell the movement quickly, the government took a conciliatory tone with students, responding to demands by releasing arrested students and allowing campuses to open back up. Yet there was already in motion a fundamental shift in the nature of the relationship between students in West Pakistan and the government. Ziring (1992) describes: “The students had no confidence in the Ayub regime, and all government acts were interpreted as tactics aimed at neutralizing student activism. Conflict, not cooperation, became the norm” (p. 74). A cable sent to the United States Department of State on February 7, 1966 describes:

Pres. Ayub is in political trouble as a consequence of his new foreign policy orientation expressed most recently in the conciliatory Tashkent declaration…East Paks much less aroused about Tashkent than West wing. Fortunately opposition groups divided and, for many, Tashkent less an issue per se than tempting opportunity to embarrass govt. Such attempts make impression on students but not average Pakistani…Most East Pak opposition leaders wish to attack Ayub for authoritative practices and undemocratic emergency restrictions, and there may be some sentiment for promoting East Pak autonomy except for foreign, defense, and monetary affairs (Khan 1999:146).

The assessment is correct on several points: East Pakistanis were less concerned about the terms of Tashkent than Western citizens were; opposition groups were highly divided and scattered; students were among the vanguard in finding pleasure in embarrassing the government. Yet the assessment ultimately misses the mark on the extent to which students represented a different set of interests than the broader population. Rather than a generalized, possible move for autonomy, there was by this point in time a quite well developed sense in East Pakistan that autonomy might be the

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only option for the abused eastern province—but that rhetoric was deeply rooted in and emanating from students, not apart from them. Further, it was not politicians manipulating students, but rather, politicians responding to the power bloc students represented and informed by students’ analysis. Mozzamel Hoque (1993) points out:

Seen in retrospect, the policies of the period from 1960 to 1970 were dominated by three main issues: (i) political parity, (ii) economic rights and (iii) cultural autonomy. All three of them owed their genesis to ideas propounded by Dhaka University students and intelligentsia. The University’s role had become so pivotal that it is impossible to understand any one of the issues or the scores of ancillary issues of the time without reference to it (p. 37).

Indeed, just two days prior to the assessment cable, on February 5, 1966, Sheikh Mujibar Rahman proclaimed the Six Point Program, demanding regional autonomy based on a confederation between the two wings. The Six Point Program was actually the outgrowth of the Two Economy Theory, which had its roots at Dhaka University. In March of 1965, Chatro League, the student group affiliated with the Awami League, published a pamphlet entitled “Pakistaner Anchalik Baishamya” (Pakistan’s Regional Disparity) written by a Dhaka university student, Abul Kalam Azad. The pamphlet enumerated vast differences in expenditure, imports and exports, both in foreign terms and inter-zonal trade terms. The pamphlet argued that if national unity meant colonization of East Bengal, then national unity was not possible. It called on students to join Chatro League in resisting the unfair exploitation of their brothers and sisters. The Two Economy Theory was the product of several professors in the Dhaka University Economics department, who published papers and commentaries in local newspapers arguing that the economic exploitation of the Eastern provinces amounted to colonialism, and advocating for a confederated economic system between the wings to replace the federalized system in place (Chakravarty 1978:134–35). The Six Point Program was presented in the form of a pamphlet called “Amader Baachar Dabi”, or “Our Right to Live.” It argued for the same economic autonomy advocated in the Two Economy theory, but it was more specific in calls for separate taxation, financial systems, and foreign trade agreements, and advocated for paramilitary troops for the eastern province. The only aspects the two wings should share were defense and foreign affairs.

17 Students in East Pakistan enthusiastically supported the Six Point Program. While some students affiliated with further Left groups did argue that the plan was not radical enough and advocated for a more revolutionary platform, Chatro League and their followers responded with strong support (as would be expected given their association with the Awami League). They launched a week long program of action culminating with Ekushe celebrations on February 21. Here, students made important connections between the legacy of the Bhasha Andolan and the new calls for regional autonomy. They articulated their cause as “Bengali linguistic nationalism” and explicitly framed Bengali identity as defined by shared language. Indeed, the pamphlets and speeches made at the event directly stated that the first battles for autonomy had been fought by the Language Martyrs (Humayun and Khalid 1996).

18 The connection of the Six Points to the Bhasha Andolan was important in several ways. First, it imbued a populism into the Six Points movement that implied support more dispersed than party allegiance. Second, it connected the Six Points Program to the

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campus of Dhaka University and to the legacy of student mobilization. Finally, it tapped into an emotionally familiar trope in the resentment between the wings by reminding East Pakistanis about the Central government’s disrespect for their mother tongue and stoking feelings of regional pride and for martyrdom. This final aspect was particularly important, as the Awami League gained a strong advantage in popular appeal by tapping into regional grievance, while the NAP, already struggling with its own internal divisions, failed to articulate a platform that resonated as emotionally with the population. Kabil, the same student quoted earlier, recalls, “The problem with the Left was that it was always about Pakistan. They were so interested in revolution for Pakistan that they missed what was happening in their own home” (Personal interview 2008). Umar (2006) amplifies this point, and speculates that the rise in popularity of the Awami League following the Six Points was as much a failure of the far Left to read the East Pakistani political disposition as it was a success of the Awami League to frame discontent in regionalist terms. He argues:

…the situation in East Pakistan was such that…people were just not used to looking for the real and basic reasons for their exploitation and repression. They were not politically educated, even by the Left, to develop such an outlook. They were thus getting more and more impatient to fight the enemy in whatever manner possible and those whom they identified as their enemy were those who ethnically, linguistically, and culturally were alien to them and inhabited a land a thousand miles away from East Pakistan (p. 114).

Kabil and Umar both recognize the period as one in which the Awami League shifted in position to become the major political force, but the Left, particularly on the campus, did still command a sizable following.

19 Students also emphasized that regional autonomy did not mean that they were not still connected with their comrades in West Pakistan. Indeed, in the program of the NAP, conditions of workers in West Pakistan are addressed with as much attention as the Eastern disparity, and the program directly calls for an end to repression in Baluchistan, a region in West Pakistan that was making similar claims of regional discrimination as East Bengal (Bukhari 2010). Thus, while this limited their ability to capitalize on Eastern wing resentment, it did create a platform of solidarity with student movements in the Western wing that were an important link in the overall campaign to unseat Ayub.

20 As Mujib and his Six Point Program gained momentum in the Eastern wing, the government scrambled to contain it. The frequency of arrests increased dramatically, and the number of “rioters” being held without due process became a point of mobilization in of itself. Mujib continued to travel around the Eastern province promoting the Six Points and in May 1966 the government arrested and detained Mujib following a political rally. After almost two years without charges, the government announced suddenly in 1968 that Mujib and 34 other political figures were being charged with conspiring with India to destabilize Pakistan through a secession movement. The charges were intended to deal a crushing blow to both Mujib and the entire autonomy movement. From the perspective of the government, conspiring with India, or even being accused of such, was political death. Kamruddin Ahmed (1975) explains:

The government thought that the people will rise against Sheikh Mujibur Rahman when they would learn about the conspiracy with India…The

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government expected that before the end of the trial the people would demand capital punishment for the accused persons. Zafar, the then Law Minister, told the writer those days that it would be difficult for the government to save his family from mob fury (p. 206).

Things did not go as planned for the government however, and the Agartala Conspiracy Case, as the case came to be known, was a political boon for Mujib, the Awami League, and the cause of East Pakistan autonomy.

21 In an Airgram sent to the US Department of State, the reaction of students to Mujib’s charge is depicted:

In the quiet pre-dawn hours of a morning in early January, army troops armed with submachine guns and rifles removed a slight manacled man from the Dacca Central jail where he had been locked up for almost two years. Word of his removal passed the city the “bazaar telegraph”—“The Army has taken Mujib”—but no one knew where. Several law students met at a room at Dacca U.’s Iqbal Hall and asked themselves what they could do about the army’s seizing Mujib. The old means of protest—mass meetings and demonstrations—seemed somehow inadequate; but no one could suggest alternate tactics and some of the boys were afraid…Bewilderment, frustration, and fear again beset the young educated Bengal, and hatred of the Rawalpindi establishment was germinating in still more Bengali breasts. (Khan 1999:248).

The cable also warns that “if Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is dragged into a public trial for obvious political reasons without a convincing case against him he could be enshrined as a martyr to the cause of Bengal autonomy” (Khan 1999:248). The assessment was quite correct; instead of destabilizing the autonomy movement in the East, it gave the scattered political scene new focus and consolidated the disparate set of grievances into a single shared symbolic cause of Mujib’s unfair arrest.

22 Nurun Nabi (2010) recalled:

The Agartala Conspiracy Case made the student community and particularly the Chatra League, more rebellious and resilient in their cause. Most of the Awami League leaders were behind bars and it was the student leaders who filled this void and kept the movement alive and vigorous. Three student parties, namely the Chatra League, Chatra Union (Menon Group), Chatra Union (Motia Group) joined hands and intensified the anti-government movement…even a faction of the NSF was inspired to detach itself and join the anti-government movement. By November 1968, the movement had turned into a full-fledged student revolution (p. 117).

The case did indeed bring the campus together. Just as in previous moments of crisis, leaders from the major groups came together and formed an All-Party Student Committee of Action (SCA) and formulated an 11-point program of action. Remarkably, even the pro-government creation NSF fell apart as the majority of the group defected to join the anti-government campaign. The conversion of these students was, on at least some level, testament to the transformative capacity of the oppositional culture on the campus (Nabi 2010).

23 The Eleven Points, which expanded on Mujib’s Six Points, represented an important convergence of not only the issues of the East Pakistan students, but demands of West Pakistan as well. The demands also captured the ethos of the student idealism, with

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local specific grievances alongside larger more socialist-inspired demands. The Eleven Points of the SCA were:

(1)14 Specific demands relating to education, including the rejection of several University Ordinances; (2) Restoration of democracy and universal adult franchise; (3) autonomy for East Pakistan along the lines of the Six Point; (4)establishment of a subfederation in West Pakistan, giving full autonomy to Baluchistan, the North West Frontier Province and Sind; (5)nationalization of all banks, insurance companies and big industry; (6) reduction of taxes on agriculturalists; (7) payment of proper wages to laborers; (8) the introduction of flood control in East Pakistan; (9) lifting of the state of emergency, public safety acts and other repressive measures; (10) formation of an independent foreign policy, including withdrawal from CENTO and SEATO pacts; (11) release of all political prisoners and students and the dropping of all political cases including the Agartala Conspiracy Case (Humayun and Khalid 1996:362–7).

The Eleven Points expanded the appeal of the movement to a wider audience than the Six Points had, and, importantly, opened the movement up to West Pakistan solidarity and participation. Tofail Ahmad, who was Chairman of the SCA recalls:

We were the 10 leaders of the students and we came together to make the program in the spirit of the students, and of the people. We worked tirelessly to spread the movement—we were in touch with some leaders, but not following orders. We were accountable to the students—I was elected as VP of DUCSU by the whole student body. During the Eleven Points formation we were truly a representative body of the students and the desires of the people (Personal interview 2010).

Tofail Ahmad had a close working relationship with Mujib, and this undoubtedly facilitated a closer relationship between the students at large and Mujib. Ahmad recalls his personal relationship with Mujib, as well the connection of Mujib to the students:

He was like a father to me. We looked to him for guidance but his manner was not like a stern figure. We were united in our conviction to free him from the unjust imprisonment of the Agartala Conspiracy. It was a complete fabrication. It showed the people the true colors of the Ayub Khan government (Personal interview 2010).

The Agartala Conspiracy Case had provoked precisely the opposite of the government’s intent. The movement was more powerful than ever, and it was spearheaded by the most radical elements of political society: the students. It had also emboldened a regional alliance of demands from students that was an unanticipated scale of resistance. Thus, with regard to movement scale for Dhaka University students in the sixties, localized issues were still critically important, but they were informed and contextualized by broader regional issues such as the Indo-Pak War of 1965 and the national issue of Ayub’s perceived anti-democratic rule; these connections brought their identity as students at Dhaka University into conversation and solidarity with students at other Pakistani campuses.

1968: Mass Upsurge and “The Angry Young World”

24 In 1968, of course, students were causing headaches for government leaders far beyond Pakistan’s national borders and regional scale. While newspapers were under strict

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censorship and were limited in their ability to run stories about the activities of anti- government activity in Pakistan, they were free to report on the activities of students elsewhere, and they did so in high volume. In fact, in the Pakistan Observer for the year of 1968, student uprisings dominate the coverage, occupying as much attention as the Vietnam War. There was also a weekly column reporting on student political uprisings entitled “The Angry Young World” which ran articles on a variety of uprisings. The sense from reading these dailies was of a world being turned upside by youth revolt; thus, even though the papers did not have any stories regarding student activity in Pakistan, they fomented a spirit of youth political agency through reportage on other arenas, and created an international scale into which students at Dhaka University could place themselves. These newspaper stories provided the linkage of Dhaka University students with the larger “imagined community” of the youth in the Global Sixties (Anderson 1991; Zolov 1999). Of particular interest was the rising young star in the British New Left, Tariq Ali. In an article entitled “Britain’s Student Revolt Goes International” the international spirit of “1968” is personified by Ali:

Britain’s Rudi Dutshke is a Pakistani 24-year-old Oxford student Tariq Ali whose energetic face, with its black mustache, is today the very face of student agitation in Britain…The mission that Tariq Ali has set himself and that of his followers is to make heard, as loudly as possible, the protest of a whole youth against the actual state of the world…For the first time in history, Britain today has an internationalist youth. However limited its action may be currently, it is opening a new era (d’Etchevers 1968).

Articles such as these connected Pakistani students directly to the global uprising of youth political activity in 1968. They also made Tariq Ali a powerfully exciting figure, and students were eager to make contact. As he wrote in his memoir:

The student movement in Pakistan (which then included Bangladesh) was in its fourth month of struggle and the revolt had extended to every town in the country. The Student Action Committee from Rawalpindi and Dhaka were pressing me to return. I was determined to see it all for myself (Ali 2005:319)

Ali (2005) made arrangements to visit each wing, and after his visit to West Pakistan, where he was well received, he was certain that, “The entire country seemed to be crying out for change, but before I could accurately estimate the possibilities I had to visit East Pakistan” (p. 323). Ali’s experience in Dhaka depicts clearly the fluidity of identity in the period. On one hand he was an international figure, on another he was a West Pakistani, and yet he found common ground while simultaneously recognizing the local specificity, explaining:

I was only in Dhaka for a few days, but it became very clear that this was a different world. Linguistically, culturally and politically it was a separate nation. Its oppression made it difficult not to become a separate state. And yet, I felt more at ease, intellectually and politically, in Dhaka than in Rawalpindi. The political culture was far more advanced. I spoke at a large student meeting underneath the famous Amtala tree on the Dhaka University campus (2005:323).

Ali’s speech was important on multiple levels. As a figure, he represented an important blurring of the distinctions between East and West Pakistan, as well as international identity. His visit and his support for the East Pakistan movement represented the

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mutually constitutive relationships between the scales that the mobilization existed within.

25 Protest against the Ayub regime extended through the diaspora community as well, as students in London overtook and occupied the Pakistan High Commission building. The London Times reported:

More than 100 Pakistani students took over the Pakistan High Commission Building…after a stormy protest meeting at which students condemned the Ayub regime. They occupied two floors of the building…Demonstrators lined the balcony chanting and waving placards saying: ‘This building is occupied’ and ‘Ayub Out.’ (Ali 2005:244–45).

Students were united at local, regional and even international scales with a sense of political agency and power.

26 The final blow to the Ayub regime actually began in West Pakistan. Over the course of the years 1967 and 1968, Bhutto had completely distanced himself from Ayub and launched a new political party. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) had gained considerable following with the students in the West. Bhutto had even visited East Pakistan in 1967, although his visit was not as successful at garnering support there as he hoped. Bhutto was an outspoken critic of Sheikh Mujib (in fact the two men had made no secret of their mutual dislike of each other) and at the time of Bhutto’s visit, Mujib’s incarceration had already elevated him to a status of martyr (Khan 1999:235–8). When Bhutto was arrested in West Pakistan in November 1968, West Pakistani students responded with force. Riots broke out in Rawalpindi, Peshawar, and Karachi, along with small demonstration on other campuses. Students attacked government offices and demanded, by force, the release of Bhutto and Ayub’s resignation. The riots gained international attention as they grew and students attacked foreign offices and institutions. (Kitamura 2000:128–31).

27 In Dhaka, the students responded to the uprisings in the West by escalating the Eleven Point Campaign. The leaders of SAC met at Modhur Canteen and devised a plan to bring the Ayub regime to its knees. Tofail Ahmed recalls the moments just before the group launched a series of strikes in January 1969 that would come to be called Mass Upsurge, “It was no longer just autonomy. We needed total governmental structural change.” (Personal interview 2010). The group decided that they would call for a General Strike on January 5, 1969. The call for the strike was heeded by all of the major political parties. In response to the unity of the SAC, the political parties formed the Democratic Action Committee as a united platform to free all political prisoners and to suspend the Ayub Khan government.

28 The days following the January 5th general strike were filled with constant agitation in Dhaka. The Guardian newspaper, commenting on the situation, even called Tofail Ahmed, the Chairman of SAC and VP of DUCSU, the “virtual governor” of Dhaka (Kamol 2010:12). The processions were growing larger and larger each day, and the city was no longer functioning. Demonstrations against the regime were reaching into numbers for 40,000 to 50,000 in attendance (Umar 2006:154–63). On January 20th the movement took a deadly turn. A massive procession of students had begun to march from the Amtolla to the General Secretariat. Police opened fire and attacked the students. Nabi (2010) recalls:

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The police confronted the protesters. A student leader of Chatra Union named Asad was at the forefront of the procession. A police officer approached Asad and brandished his gun at point blank range. He fired. Asad’s lifeless body fell to the street. We couldn’t believe what we had just seen. Anger filled our blood as we charged to the site. The police, overwhelmed, retreated. Asad’s body was recovered and brought to the college (p. 122).

The brutal assassination of Asad uz Zamman, a History student at Dhaka University and a well-known political activist on campus, had a profound mobilizing effect on the movement. The student community was affected deeply and personally by the death of such a popular and prominent member of the campus. A gruesome image of his dead body just after being shot, with blood pouring from the back of him was printed on the cover of virtually every newspaper the next morning, and SAC declared three days of mourning on his behalf.

29 Students gathered the morning after the death and raised Asad’s bloodied shirt onto a pole. Thousands of students gathered in mourning for their fallen comrade. Tofail Ahmad recalls, “At that day, we took an oath that Asad’s death would not be in vain. He was one of us—not just a Bengali—a student of Dhaka University, truly one of us. We felt a sadness deep in our bellies” (Personal interview 2010). Asad was declared a martyr by the students. A well circulated poem for the martyred Asad, captures the mood of the students, Like bunches of blood-red Oleander, Like flaming clouds at sunset Asad’s shirt flutters In the gusty wind, in the limitless blue. To the brother’s spotless shirt His sister had sown With the fine gold thread Of her heart’s desire Buttons which shone like stars; How often had his ageing mother, With such tender care, Hung that shirt out to dry In her sunny courtyard. Now that self-same shirt Has deserted the mother’s courtyard, Adorned by bright sunlight And the soft shadow Cast by the pomegranate tree, Now it flutters On the city’s main street, On top of the belching factory chimneys, In every nook and corner Of the echoing avenues, How it flutters With no respite In the sun-scorched stretches Of our parched hearts, At every muster of conscious people Uniting in a common purpose. Our weakness, our cowardice The stain of our guilt and shame-

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All are hidden from the public gaze By this pitiful piece of torn raiment Asad’s shirt has become Our pulsating hearts’ rebellious banner. (Hashim 2007:14). The day after the three-day mourning period, a gathering occurred just off the Dhaka University grounds that exceeded 100,000 demonstrators from a wide swath of society. Protesters carried placards with Asad’s image, as well as the images of the Language Martyrs from the Bhasha Andolan. During a march protesting Asad’s murder, police again opened fire, killing more demonstrators (Hannan 1991:371).

30 By the end of January, the government had virtually no control of the Eastern province and the students in West Pakistan, following the direction of Bhutto, were rioting again. In an article in a weekly news magazine Holiday, in February 1969, Badruddin Umar commented, “…the students have emerged as a powerful political factor not because it is an accident, but because they are performing a historical task in the development of our society” (p. 6). He chastised the political parties for their inability to show the same unity and sophistication as the students demonstrated in the Eleven Point Program, arguing, “It is precisely because the students have announced a programme which is very much in conformity with the thinking of the ordinary people —the peasants, the workers, the middle class, the students…that the people have rallied around their eleven point program” (1969:6). The movement had taken on dimensions that were beyond the demands of the Six Points, thanks to the students, and it had become imbued with a sense of power that Ayub could not ignore.

31 Ayub announced, on February 21, 1969 that he would not run for office in the next election. The date of the announcement, February 21, as the day the largest student movement success in the nation’s history, the Bhasha Andolan, celebrated annually, was certainly not an accident. He devised a plan for constitutional reforms and planned for roundtable talks to discuss the reforms with major political leaders. He also released the prisoners of the Agartala Conspiracy Case, including Mujib. On February 24, 1969, Sheikh Mujib went before a crowd of over 100,000 people at the race course grounds near Dhaka University, and embraced Tofail Ahmed, thanking the students for their work and dedication. At this event, Ahmed placed a garland of flowers around Mujib’s neck and gave him the title “Bangabandhu” (friend of Bengal). This title stayed with Mujib throughout his life, and is still used as an affectionate and honorific term for Mujib (Hussain 2011).

32 The roundtable talks fell apart, and finally, after months of chaos and disorder, Ayub conceded defeat and stepped down from power in March 1969. He handed over power to an interim military administration, headed by General Yahya Khan. Yahya declared Martial Law, but also declared that national elections would be held within a year. The Mass Upsurge movement had shaken the Pakistani state to its core and the students of Dhaka University felt an empowerment that was on scales both geographically and in terms of community that was unprecedented. In terms of the Global Sixties, students in Pakistan had achieved what revolutionary young people across the world desired: they had literally brought down the ruling regime.

Conclusion

33 Student activism in the late 1960s at Dhaka University cannot be contained in a narrative of nationalism nor of internationalism, and as such, serves as a valuable

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example elucidating the overlapping scales at which movement identity functioned simultaneously. While certainly at times, as demonstrated in the discussion of the local context, students were addressing specific and unique circumstances tied to their most immediate location (the campus), at other times, as demonstrated in the regional and international contexts, that same campus served as a place where students enacted and articulated their actions as part of larger frameworks of understanding. Thus the campus itself, as a place, also did not function within a singular scale symbolically for students. Overall, as scholars continue to seek understanding of the student activism of the 1960s as a pattern of “Restless Youth” occurring across the world, the case study of Dhaka University provides a useful example of the importance of considering various scales of context (local, regional, international) as interdependent and mutually constitutive in the actions and imaginations of movement participants as they define both themselves and the places they claim as their own.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahmad, Kamruddin. 1975. A Socio-Political History of Bengal and the Birth of Bangladesh. Dhaka: Zahiruddin Mahmud Inside Library.

Ali, Tariq. 2005. Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties. London: Verso.

Agnew, John. 1987.Place and Politics. Boston: Allen and Unwin.

Anderson, Benedict R. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Central Intelligence Agency of United States of America, 1968. “Restless Youth.” Retrieved on November 18, 2019 (https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0002987248.pdf)

Chakravarty, S.K. 1978. The Evolution of Politics in Bangladesh 1948–1978. New Delhi: Associated Publishing House.

Christiansen, Samantha and Zachary Scarlett, eds. 2013. The Third World and the Global 1960s. New York: Berghahn. d’Etchevers, Jaqueline. 1968. “Britain’s Student Revolt Goes International.” The Pakistan Observer, May 5, p. A12.

Franda, Marcus. 1971. Radical Politics in West Bengal. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hanan, Mohammed. 1987. Bangladesher Chatro Andoloner Itihash. Vol. 2: 1953–1969. Dhaka: Owarshi Prokashani.

Haque, Mozammel. 1993. “The Role of Dacca University in the Evolution of Muslim Politics in

Bengal” Journal of Research Society 30(2):27–54.

Hill, Patricia Walton. n.d. In the Moon Bazaar. Unpublished memoir from the personal collection of Christopher V. Hill, Colorado Springs, CO.

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Humayan S. and Tanweer Khalid. 1996. “Student Politics and the Bengali Nationalist Movement.” Journal of Pakistan Historical Society 44(3):273–87.

Husain, Syed Shahid. 2011. What was Once East Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press.

Kamol, Ershad. 2010. “The Tragedy of Student Politics.” The Star Weekend Magazine. February 12. Retrieved November 18, 2019 (http://archive.thedailystar.net/magazine/2010/02/02/ cover.htm).

Khan, Roedad, ed. 1999. The American Papers: Secret and Confidential India-Pakistan-Bangladesh Documents 1965–1973. Karachi: Oxford University Press.

Kitamura, Yuto. 2000. “The Student Movements in Bangladesh: The Role of Students and Student Organizations at Dacca University during the Independence Movements between 1947–1971.” PhD dissertation, Education Department, University of California.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1974. Production de l‘espace. Paris: Anthropos.

Mellucci, Alberto. 1989. Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Miller, Byron A. 2000. Geography and Social Movements: Comparing Antinuclear Activism in the Boston Area. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Nuran, Nabi. 2010. Bullets of ’71: A Freedom Fighter’s Story. Bloomington: Authorhouse.

Rahman, Shamshul. 2007. “Asader Shirt.” Translated by Syed Najmuddin Hashim in A Few Poems by Shamshur Rahman. Dhaka: Dhaka University Press.

Schofield, Victoria. 2003. Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War. New York: I.B.Tauris.

Umar, Badruddin, 1969. “The Eleven Pointers” Holiday. February 9, p. 6.

Umar, Badruddin. 2006. The Emergence of Bangladesh. Volume 2: The Rise of Bengali Nationalism (1958– 1971). New York: Oxford University Press.

Vaish, Varun. 2011. “Negotiating the India Pakistan Conflict in Relation to Kashmir.” International Journal on World Peace (3):53–80.

Van Schendel, Willem. 2009. A History of Bangladesh. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Ziring, Lawrence. 1992. Bangladesh from Mujib to Ershad, An Interpretive Study. Karachi: Oxford University Press.

Zolov, Eric. 1999. Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

NOTES

1. The oral histories referenced in this article were conducted over an initial period of three years in various locations in Bangladesh with the financial support of the American Institute for Bangladesh Studies and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, as well as the support of Dhaka University, Independent University Bangladesh and the Bangladesh Liberation War Museum. With the exception of cases in which participants specifically requested their real name be used, I have used pseudonyms for interviewees given some of the politically sensitive opinions they have shared.

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ABSTRACTS

This article considers student activism at Dhaka University in the 1960s as a case study for considering student politics at multiple scales: local, regional, and international. In addition to providing a historical narrative of Dhaka’s engagement in the Mass upsurge campaign that led to the end of the Ayub Kahn regime, it also considers the ways this movement was informed by a sense of student power that extended beyond national borders.

INDEX

Keywords: Dhaka, Pakistan, students, social movements, Global Sixties

AUTHOR

SAMANTHA CHRISTIANSEN Samantha Christiansen received her PhD in World History from Northeastern University and is Assistant Professor of South Asian History at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

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Crisis of the “Nehruvian Consensus” or Pluralization of Indian Politics? Aligarh Muslim University and the Demand for Minority Status

Laurence Gautier

1 Away from Aligarh’s bustling old city, across the railway track which divides the city into “two adjacent towns” (Mann 1992:28), lies the sprawling campus of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). Bab-e-Syed, a grand gate made of sandstone and marble, acts as the visible frontier between the outside world and the venerable institution. Inside, the sherwanis that some students wear and the cusped arches and domes of older buildings give the campus a distinct mahaul (atmosphere) that further marks it out from the rest of the city.

2 Although AMU occupies a separate, somehow peripheral space in Aligarh city, it remains for many a central symbol of Muslims’ tahzeeb (culture) and socio-political status in India. From the very outset, Aligarh’s founders projected their college—then known as the Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental College—as an all-India Muslim institution. Sir Syed1 and his colleagues claimed to serve the interests of all Indian Muslims, even though in practice they mostly addressed North Indian ashraf2 elites. After independence, many Aligarhians continued to see their alma mater as a source of pride for the community. To them, it epitomized Sir Syed’s efforts to uplift Muslims and to preserve the legacy of the glorious Mughal past. By contrast, many outsiders regarded the institution with suspicion. Due to students and teachers’ widespread support to Muslim League in the 1940s, AMU became a lieu de mémoire (memorial site) of partition and a symbol of so-called Muslim separatism (Brass 200. In either case, AMU was more than an educational institution. To its supporters and detractors alike, it appeared as a symbol of Muslims’ position in India before and after independence.

3 AMU therefore occupies a very special position in the Indian public sphere. It is simultaneously a central university, under control of the central government, and the Muslim institution par excellence, supposed to serve and represent the Muslim

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community. As such, it draws the attention of a wide range of actors, much beyond the campus’s premises—government, politicians and religious organizations—for whom AMU constitutes a privileged platform to address the community. At the same time, AMU is no mere symbol to be easily appropriated by outsiders. As a university, it is a place of vibrant debates among students, teachers and administrators, who need not share the same vision of the University’s role and character.

4 In this article, I explore the dual nature of AMU as a Muslim symbol and as a site of contentious politics. I focus in particular on the campaign for AMU’s minority status (1965–1981) and its impact on Indian politics in the post-Nehruvian period. What started in 1965 as an internal university dispute soon transformed into a central Muslim issue. The campaign revived AMU’s role as a key site of Indian Muslim politics, as the minority status question crystallized mounting resentment against the government and provided a common platform to heterogeneous forces—students, teachers, as well as Muslim organizations—who all claimed to serve Muslim interests.

5 Historian Mushirul Hasan regards the campaign for Aligarh’s minority status as a symptom of the “sectarian passions” which eroded, from the 1960s onwards, the Nehruvian “consensus” based on the idea of a secular, composite and democratic India (1997:258–61, 276). Like him, other scholars interpret the post-Nehruvian period as one of “crisis,” epitomized by the Emergency, the rise of communal violence and finally the coming to power of the Hindu right in the 1990s. Sunil Khilnani, for instance, contrasts Nehru’s supposed achievements—the establishment of a strong state and a stable social order—with the rise of political competition and the emergence of group-based demands in the latter period. He argues that this political competition encouraged politicians to resort, increasingly, to identity politics in order to mobilize their electorates. For him, this process of identity creation was dangerous as it often led to conflict rather than competition, thereby corrupting democratic principles (Khilnani 1997).

6 Yet one need not interpret the emergence of new political formations representing group-based interests simply as a source of sectarianism. Jaffrelot (2003) has argued persuasively that the political mobilization of the lower castes from the 1960s onwards marked the beginning of a “silent revolution,” which allowed the progressive transfer of power from a small upper-caste minority to much larger subaltern groups. Just as revisionist historians have emphasized the contingent character of partition thereby challenging a teleological interpretation of the late colonial period through partition’s lens, it seems important to stop reading the post-Nehruvian period merely as a period of crisis, or as part of a sequence, leading inevitably to the explosion of communal violence and to the rise of Hindutva in the 1990s (Jalal 1994). Instead, one might read it as a period of pluralization of Indian political life, marked by the formation of political groups defending group-based interests.

7 With this goal in mind, in this article I highlight the role of university politics, particularly at AMU, in the emergence of contentious voices challenging the so-called “Nehruvian consensus” from the 1960s onwards. I argue that the Aligarh campaign played a key role in re-shaping the contours of Muslim politics after independence; it contributed to the re-emergence of the demand for Muslim minority rights, largely delegitimized after partition; it provided a platform for an increasingly assertive Muslim leadership which claimed to represent the so-called “Muslim community”; it constituted a laboratory for issue-based coalitions, which, in the absence of a strong

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Muslim political party, became a dominant feature of Muslim politics, especially in North India. By putting forward the demand for minority status,3 the Aligarh campaign challenged Congress’s “hegemonic” discourse on secular nationalism (Bajpai 2011:168). As such, it participated in the larger pluralization of Indian politics in the 1960s, marked by the erosion of Congress’s dominance, much before the post-Emergency crisis.4

From a University Controversy to a Muslim Issue

8 How did the question of AMU’s minority status first arise? In Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India, Hilal Ahmed (2014) insists on the fact that there is no monolithic Muslim politics, nor set packages of Muslim issues. He shows how specific objects—in his case, Indo-Islamic monuments—can be transformed into Muslim issues and appropriated to justify the existence of a single Muslim community. In a similar way, in the first part of this article, I will show how a university matter—a controversy over quotas for internal students—became a Muslim minority issue.

9 After partition, Nehru and his Education Minister, Maulana Azad, decided to grant AMU the central university status. I have argued elsewhere that this decision reflected Nehru and Azad’s efforts to transform the erstwhile “arsenal of Muslim India” (Abbas 2012:68)5 into a symbol and an instrument of national integration (Gautier 2016). Despite AMU’s association with the Muslim League in the 1940s, after partition, Nehru and Azad did not seek to punish the institution. Instead, they aimed to clear its Muslim League legacy so that it could become a national institution. To fulfil this objective, Nehru and Azad appointed Zakir Husain, known for his commitment to Congress’s one-nation policy, at the head of the institution. In Husain’s words, Aligarh’s new objective was to “revive hope and faith” among the “despondent Muslim masses scattered all over the country.” (NAI, ME, File 41–90/50-D.3, 1950). By transforming AMU into a national institution, symbolic of composite India, Nehru, Azad and Husain hoped to rally Muslim citizens battered by partition to “an integrated nationhood in a secular democratic state” (NAI, ME, 41–90/50-D.3, 1950).

10 Large sections of the student and teacher body supported this national re-orientation, especially those associated with the Left. Others, however, feared that such reforms, combined with government interference, would erode Aligarh’s Muslim character. This was the case of Hameed-ud-Din Khan ([1966]2006), a professor of Persian, who argued that a “considerable number” of progressives had been “imported” from other universities “as an antidote to any lingering Muslim League infection” in AMU’s body (p. 92). Khan added: “Some non-Muslims of known anti-Muslim bias were also brought in and installed as Heads of Departments” (p.93). To him, this recruitment policy reflected the government’s attempts to carry out the shuddhi (Hindu purification) of the institution, therefore threatening the Muslim character of the University.

11 The majoritarian policies of the Uttar Pradesh (UP) government heightened these apprehensions. Their imposition of Hindi as the sole official state language and their efforts to reform the Muslim Personal Law appeared to many UP Muslims as an attempt to impose a uniform Hindu culture (Hasan 1997; Brass 1974). These anti-Muslim moves contributed to a volatile atmosphere on campus. In 1961, a dispute between Hindu and Muslim students sparked the worst communal riots in Aligarh since Independence. State authorities quickly laid the blame on AMU students, ignoring the role played by

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the RSS and the Jana Sangh (Brass 2011:176–80; Pandit 2014:110–22). The government’s biased reaction reinforced among large sections of Aligarh’s Muslim population the feeling that state authorities were either unable or unwilling to protect them and to treat them fairly.

12 In response, many Muslim residents chose to vote during the 1962 elections for the Dalit-based Republican Party of India, instead of Congress. AMU faculty played a decisive role in this Dalit-Muslim alliance. Abdul Bashir Khan, AMU’s Proctor, and Ravind Khwaja, who taught medicine at the University, joined hands with B.P. Maurya, the local leader of the Republican Party of India (RPI),6 himself a Law professor at AMU, to beat Congress in the Assembly and Lok Sabha elections (Jaffrelot 2003:106–07; Duncan 1979:275–93). Although this Dalit-Muslim alliance did not last long, it had an enduring impact. First, it put an end to Congress’s power in Aligarh’s district. Second, it showed that Congress could no longer take Muslim voters for granted. If neglected, they could ally with another minority—in this case the Scheduled Castes—to challenge the party’s dominance, thereby opening the way to a pluralization of political forces in the former Congress “heartland” (Kudaisya 2006).

13 It is in this climate of mounting tensions between Congress and UP Muslims, palpable at AMU, that the question of Aligarh’s minority status arose. What was to become a major Muslim issue first started as an internal controversy over a university matter— student quotas. This controversy reflected internal debates over AMU’s Muslim character as well as students’ concerns over their professional future. Indeed, for many University members, the composition of AMU’s student population constituted a more essential element of Aligarh’s Muslim character than its curriculum. These students and teachers considered that AMU’s resources should remain in the hands of Muslims and should primarily benefit Muslim students (AMU 1961:116, 139).

14 This concern over access to AMU’s resources became particularly acute at a time when the high levels of graduate unemployment generated widespread anxiety among students. Graduate unemployment had been a long-standing problem, which was not restricted to Muslim students. Already in 1935, the Sapru Committee had expressed concerns about the “alarming” extent of unemployment among University graduates (India 1944:28). In 1966, once again, the Kothari Commission stressed the “large rate of under-employment or unemployment, particularly among the educated” (India 1966:2).

15 In some ways, thus, the situation of students at Aligarh was comparable to that of students in other universities. Yet, at AMU, it crystallized among students a strong sense of being discriminated against as Muslims. Badruddin Tyabji (1994), AMU’s Vice- Chancellor in the early 1960s, himself believed that there was a “prejudice that prevailed in employment circles against students who had passed out from Aligarh,” a prejudice derived, he argued, from AMU’s reputation “as a hotbed of Muslim reaction...more or less linked with Pakistan” (p.146). To address students’ apprehensions, he proposed to raise the proportion of internal students7 from 50% to 75% in the Engineering and Medical Colleges, two of the most sought-after departments at AMU where about half of the students were non-Muslims (Tyabji 1958:3). Given the fact that most of AMU’s internal students were Muslim, this measure would help secure a higher proportion of Muslim students in these departments without resorting to religion-based quotas8 deemed more controversial. 9 Through this measure, Tyabji (1994) thus hoped to address two problems at once: to provide his students with

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promising job prospects and to reassure those who feared that AMU may lose its Muslim character (pp.165–6).

16 Unsurprisingly, the decision of his successor, Ali Yavar Jung, to bring internal quotas back to 50% had exactly the opposite effect. The announcement of this decision in April 1965 sparked a series of protests, one of which degenerated into a violent attack against the Vice-Chancellor. Violent protests were not completely unusual in Indian universities.10 State administrators usually interpreted them as symptoms of students’ indiscipline (India 1960; Kabir 1955). Yet, in AMU’s case, the Education Minister M.C. Chagla, quickly lent an ideological dimension to the incident. He projected students’ agitation as a battle between communal and secular forces (NMML, 80, 1965).11 A few days after the attack, he demanded the closure of the University and the adoption of an ordinance which reinforced the control of the government over the institution. According to him, these “drastic measures” were required to “eliminate a small, fanatic, obscurantist and reactionary section in the University” who threatened the national and secular character of the institution (Chagla 1974:380). Chagla’s drastic measures, far from settling the issue, sparked a new series of protests inside the University. The government deployed the police on campus and several students and members of the administrative bodies, said to have encouraged the agitation, were arrested.12 In response, members of the Students’ Union formed an Action Committee to lead the protests against quota reforms and against the government’s ordinance (NMML, 90, 1965).13

17 This campaign, which now involved students as well as teachers and staff members, revived earlier political and factional divisions between “reformists,” who, like the Vice-Chancellor, supported the re-orientation of the University, and “conservatives,” keen to preserve AMU’s Muslim character. Thus, while Jung (1983) warned his colleagues against the “creation of citadels or pockets of communal exclusivism” (pp. 229–30).14 The Pro-Vice-Chancellor argued that Aligarh’s mission was primarily to train Muslim students in accordance to “Islamic culture” (Islami tahzeeb) and “traditions” (Islami rivayat) (Khan 1969:459–60). As a result, the agitation against the reform of internal quotas—which was primarily a student issue—soon transformed into a battle over the character of the University. For rival factions inside the institution, it became a fight either between secular and communal forces, or between supporters and opponents of Aligarh’s Muslim character.

18 The university agitation reached a new dimension when Muslim organizations joined the protestors’ ranks. The agitation started barely one year after the establishment of Majlis-e-Mushawarat, a new coalition of Muslim religious and political organizations which aimed to represent Muslim interests at pan-Indian level. The formation of this association represented a significant shift in Muslim politics. After partition, large numbers of Muslims preferred to contain the markers of their difference to avoid further stigmatization and violence (Sherman 2015). In UP, leaders of the Muslim League, deemed responsible for Muslim separatism, decided to dissolve their organization, thereby “dismantling the former Muslim heartland” (Kudaisya 2006:359– 66). Meanwhile, Congress Muslim leaders, particularly Maulana Azad, urged Indian Muslims to turn away from communal organizations to join Congress.

19 It is only in the early 1960s that some Muslim groups or individuals began to set up distinct platforms to represent Muslim interests. These initiatives responded in large measure to the resurgence of communal violence in different parts of India. In

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February 1961, the eruption of communal riots in Jabalpur marked a turning point after a decade of relative calm (Graff and Galonnier 2013:10). Syed Mahmud ([1964] 1974), long-serving secretary of the Congress party and a close friend of Nehru, called an all- India Muslim convention to urge the government to implement a “just” political system that would acknowledge the “rightful” position of Muslim citizens (Pp. 326–9).15 Three years later, after a new wave of communal riots, Muslim organizations with widely divergent views came together to establish the Majlis-e-Mushawarat.

20 The formation of this body marked a rapprochement between Jamiat Ulama, Congress’s ally,16 with its former arch-rival, the Muslim League. It also allowed Jamaat-e-Islami, 17 until then a marginal organization opposed to secular democratic principles, to gain greater visibility and legitimacy thanks to their alliance with more mainstream bodies (Quraishi 1971; Ahmad 2010:198–200). Together, these otherwise very different groups aimed to form a common platform able to defend Muslim interests, thus pointing to government’s failure, or even unwillingness, to protect its Muslim citizens.

21 Majlis leaders soon joined the Aligarh agitation. They transformed the university issue into a Muslim issue, of relevance to all Muslim citizens, much beyond the campus premises. In July 1965, they organized a day of prayer to advertize their position on AMU. A resolution was read out in mosques all over North India. Majlis urged their audience to send telegrams to the President, the Prime Minister and the Home Minister in order to press their demand for the withdrawal of the government’s ordinance (NMML, 81, 1965).18 Around the same time, they organized, along with Aligarh’s “Old Boys” (alumni), a well-publicized convention in Lucknow to protest against the government’s ordinance (NMML, 90 and 81, 1965).19 These events met with a widespread echo in the Hindi, English and Urdu press, in UP as well as in other parts of India. Newspapers based not only in Delhi, Lucknow and Patna, but also in Calcutta, Kerala, Hyderabad and Bombay, published reports on Majlis’s meetings and on the AMU Action Committee.20 The campaign thus revived AMU’s value as a Muslim symbol, anchored in UP, yet resonating in other parts of India. As such, it provided Majlis leaders with a privileged platform to project themselves as all-India Muslim leaders.

22 While the students’ agitation had started as a purely internal controversy over the reduction of internal quotas, Majlis members gave a new orientation to the Aligarh campaign. At the Lucknow Convention of August 1965, they argued that the control of Aligarh’s administration should rest exclusively in Muslim hands. To justify this, they invoked the constitutional right of religious minorities to “establish and administer the educational institutions of their choice” (NMML, 90, 1965).21 Here, then, was the demand for minority status articulated clearly for the first time. Beyond students’ demand to secure a high proportion of seats for Muslim students, Majlis members aimed to secure, through this minority status, an overall Muslim control of the institution.

23 This invocation of Muslims’ minority rights represented a significant breach in Congress’s “hegemonic” discourse on secular nationalism. After partition, this discourse, which prioritized national unity, had largely delegitimized religious groups’ minority demands, cast as communal. This can explain why in the 1950s large-scale campaigns for the recognition of Urdu were framed in terms of linguistic minority rights, not in terms of Muslim rights (Brass 1974). By contrast, in 1965, Majlis’s convention clearly projected the demand for AMU’s minority status as a Muslim demand. In so doing, Majlis’s leaders distanced themselves from the dominant rhetoric

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on national unity to project Muslims as a minority group, in need of special rights and protection.

24 Majlis further insisted on the religious character of AMU, an element which was absent from students’ earlier demands. In June 1965, they adopted a resolution which stated that “special facilities should be continued for the religio-moral instruction of students, as well as for the teaching of theology, Islamic Studies, Arabic, Persian and Urdu.” They added: “special facilities should be provided for the performance of religious duties” and the University “should be saved from the anti-God elements which are today dominating its affairs” (Wright 1966a).22 These demands and formulations reflected Jamaat-e-Islami’s powerful influence inside Majlis-e-Mushawarat (NMML, 90, 1965).23 For Jamaat members, the main objective was not simply to gain greater control over the institution. They aimed to transform the University, earlier denounced as a “slaughter-house” (Ahmad 2010:124–5), into an institution faithful to their conception of Islam. The AMU campaign thus provided them with an opportunity to advance their own conception of Muslim identity, framed primarily in religious terms, as well as their own conception of AMU’s Muslim character, defined in a combative fashion so as to exclude “anti-God” elements from the Muslim institution.

25 Jamaat-e-Islami’s forceful intervention in the Aligarh campaign prompted Jamiat Ulama, Congress’s long-term ally, often considered as Muslims’ main representative body after partition, to play a more assertive stance vis-à-vis the government. In June 1965, soon after the beginning of the Aligarh agitation, the organization filed a case against the government’s ordinance. The Jamaat-led Majlis denounced this independent initiative. In response, Jamiat Ulama accused its “enviers,” i.e. the Jamaat, of sowing division among Muslims. According to a pamphlet published by Jamiat Ulama: “The enviers (haasiden) of the Jamiat Ulema and the divisive elements (tafriqa anasir) will try to ignite (bhadkana) [fears among] innocent-minded (sadah loh) Muslims” and “spread anxiety” (bad dili phelana) while speaking in the name of “the unity of the millat” (community) (Qasmi 1965:14).

26 Jamiat Ulama members projected themselves as the sole true representatives of Muslim interests, “[leading] alone the battle to protect the fundamental rights (bunyadi huquq) of Muslims in India after the revolution (inqilab) of 1947 and [putting] their lives at stake to protect Muslims from the catastrophic (qayamat khaiz) effects of partition” (Qasmi 1965:4). Paradoxically, these bitter rivalries reinforced the notion of an all-India Muslim community. Even as they attacked each other, Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamiat Ulema members did so to claim leadership over a single Muslim community. Through their competing publications, pamphlets and speeches, they gave wider currency to the notion of an all-India Muslim community, with shared rights and interests.

27 The Aligarh campaign therefore crystallized the rise of a Muslim politics centered around the defense of minority rights, which had been largely delegitimized after partition. It encouraged the emergence of a more assertive Muslim leadership at a time when Muslim organizations sought to establish a structure independent of government to represent the interests of the community. Despite a few dissonant voices within the University (NMML, 90, 1965),24 the campaign garnered widespread support within and outside campus. In fact, it seems that the government’s repeated refusals to grant Aligarh minority status added momentum to the campaign. The failure of the new AMU Act (1972) to recognize AMU’s minority status thus sparked a new upsurge of students’ mobilization in 1972–1973.25 Again, from 1977 to 1981, Janata’s and then Congress’s

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constantly delayed promises to grant AMU the minority status kept students and other campaigners on tenterhooks.26 For many Muslims, Aligarh had become the symbol of their fight against state discrimination and for the recognition of their rights as a minority.

28 The demand for Aligarh’s minority status directly challenged Congress’s discourse on secular nationalism, which prioritized national unity over group rights. As Partha Chatterjee and Aditya Nigam have suggested, the secular nationalist discourse remained dominant until the 1980s in civil society, i.e. in the sphere of modern civil institutions, but it did not have the same hegemonic position in political society, i.e. in the “domain of daily negotiations” between the population and the state,27 even before the Emergency. At AMU, the actors of the minority status campaign found in the language of minority rights the legitimizing framework to express their grievances, demand access to educational resources and seek protection from an unreliable state, deeply suspect of majoritarianism. In so doing, they contributed to reinforcing the idea that Muslim citizens were minority citizens, whose rights and interests were mediated by their belonging to a single Muslim community.

The Role of Student Politics in the Pluralization of Indian Politics

29 This reconfiguration of Muslim politics, visible at AMU, should be seen as part of a larger pluralization of Indian politics in the post-Nehruvian era. What characterized this period, beside the rise of oppositional parties, was the emergence of non-party actors, who played an important part in the erosion of the so-called “Nehruvian consensus.” As sites of “contentious politics” (Tilly and Tarrow 2015), universities like AMU participated in this evolution: they facilitated the emergence of counter- narratives as well as alternative sources of representation. At AMU, the campaign for Aligarh’s minority status crystallized the rise of the minority rights counter-narrative. But in the absence of a strong Muslim political party, it also served as a laboratory for alternative forms of mobilization—student politics and issue-based coalitions.

30 First, the campaign allowed AMU students to emerge as a significant political force within and beyond the premises of the University campus. AMU students embraced vigorously the idea that they had a special responsibility in the defense of Muslims’ rights and interests. As members of this iconic institution, Aligarh students were, according to former Aligarh Muslim University Students’ Union President (AMUSU) Ali Amir, “answerable for their thoughts and actions in front of the whole millat and in front of the whole world” (AMUSU 1982:3–4).

31 During the campaign, students established enduring, if sometimes tense, connections with Muslim organizations and political parties. One former student, Iftikhar Alam Khan, recalls that the building of the Old Boys’ Association28 on campus served as a meeting point between students and other members of the Action Committee. The Old Boys’ Association organized meetings for the defense of AMU status to which they invited students as well as campaigners from outside the University (I. A. Khan personal communication, March 18, 2015).

32 Relations based on mutual help sometimes flourished with specific Muslim leaders. Ali Amir thus recalls that:

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Faridi sahab [Dr. A.J. Faridi, leader of the Muslim Majlis in UP] was supported by the Students’ Union leaders… [They] went to his constituencies. [They] provided support to his candidates, all of them. In return, he argued, “[they] only had one demand for him – the support with the minority character movement” (A. Amir, personal communication. March 13, 2014).

Akhtarul Wasey, another student leader, further speaks of a “joint venture” between students and other supporters of the minority status:

The Students’ Union, the Students’ Action Committee, and Old Boys… at that time there was no difference, almost all differences were melted down…All Muslim groups and anti-Congress groups were supporting [students] (Wasey, personal communication, November 7, 2013).

Arif Mohammad Khan, who presided over the Students’ Union in 1973–1974, presents a slightly different picture, underlining a degree of distance between students and Muslim outfits. He recalls that “the Action Committee was there but since it was packed with Muslim political outfits…[he] kept a distance from Muslim organizations” (A. M. Khan, personal communication, March 21, 2015). Similarly, at the end of the minority status campaign in 1982, the out-going president of the Students’ Union, Shakeel Ahmed Tamanna, urged his fellow students to stay away from the “net of external and internal politicians” (beruni aur andruni siasatdanon ke jaal) whose “limited objective” (mahdud maqsad) was to “exploit” students (AMUSU 1982:5). However, the very fact that he had to warn his fellow students against the politicians’ “exploitation” of students suggests that such connections did or could exist between students and politicians.

33 The Aligarh campaign allowed certain student leaders active in the protest movement to acquire significant political capital outside University circles. Their status as AMU student leaders made them enviable allies for Muslim religious and political organizations. Despite his own reluctance towards “Muslim outfits,” Arif Mohammad Khan recalls that these groups repeatedly tried to reach out to him while he was at the head of the Students’ Union. According to him, “they were very keen that [he] join them.” He adds: “why they needed me? …Because that helped them if I come there as President of the Students’ Union, that helped them with the Muslim masses, and that was their constituency” (A. M. Khan, personal communication, March 21, 2015).

34 This capacity to mobilize within and beyond the University could attract the attention of non-Muslim organizations too. In 1974, Jayaprakash Narayan asked Arif Mohammad Khan to join the Central Coordination Committee of his movement as one of its two student representatives. Khan then joined Congress after the Emergency, won a parliamentary election in Kanpur in 1980 and later occupied ministerial positions under Congress and Janata governments, becoming Union Cabinet Minister for Energy in 1989. At the time of the discussions on the new AMU bill (1980–81), he acted as an unofficial intermediary between University members and government authorities to help find a compromise between both parties (A. M. Khan, personal communication, March 21, 2015). Even if his links with the student leadership may have later weakened, 29 the fact that he had once led AMU’s Students’ Union provided him with privileged access to a larger political platform.

35 Another student leader to emerge during the Aligarh campaign was Javed Habib, who became President of the Students’ Union in 1978, at a time when the Janata Party had just come to power. As president, he organized several demonstrations in Aligarh and

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in New Delhi to put pressure on the new government to adopt a new AMU bill (Times of India 1978b). Habib remained deeply involved in the affairs of the University even after he withdrew from the Students’ Union. He continued to intervene in public affairs, notably after the Aligarh riots in 1980 (Times of India 1980), and acted as an intermediary between students and Muslim organizations such as the Majlis-e- Mushawarat (Srivastava 1981). Unlike Arif Mohammad Khan, he never joined a formal political party. Like Khan, though, he used his past experience and connections as a student leader to continue to play an active role in Muslim politics. In the late 1980s, for instance, he became a leading spokesman of the All India Babri Masjid Action Committee, established in 1988 to protect the religious status of the disputed mosque (Ansari 2012).

36 These student activists emerged around the time of Emergency, when students played a major part in the agitations against the Congress government. Indeed, many student leaders who participated in the anti-Emergency movement went on to become senior political figures, either in the BJP (e.g. Vijay Goel, Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj) or in left-wing opposition parties (e.g. Sitaram Yechury, CPI(M)) (Clibbens 2014:301). This intensification of student politics in the 1970s was part of a wider phenomenon which went beyond the scope of the Emergency. We can think of the role of student politics in the emergence of feminist groups such as the Progressive Organization of Women in Hyderabad or of Marxist influences in universities like JNU from the 1960s onwards (Kumar 1999; Lalita 2008; Batabyal 2014). At AMU, few students took direct part in the anti-Emergency movement. Yet, as mentioned above, the years just before (1972–1974) and after the Emergency (1977–1981) corresponded to some of the most intense phases of student mobilization in favor of minority status.

37 As the case of AMU suggests, the intensification of student politics did not necessarily depend on the spread of radical ideas but rather on the pluralization of Indian politics. This pluralization contributed to the development of universities as political sites, and vice versa. On the one hand, the burgeoning discontent against the ruling Congress was a powerful driver behind student mobilization. Ali Amir thus recalls that “anti- Congress opposition always took place in Students’ Union’, even more so after the Emergency” (A. Amir, personal communication, March 13, 2014).30 On the other hand, increasing political competition encouraged parties and political leaders to turn towards students for support.31 This was the case, for instance, when Jayaprakash Narayan recruited Arif Mohammad Khan as a student representative for his movement, and also when members of the AMU Action Committee encouraged student leaders to join forces with them in the campaign for the minority status.

38 As a result of these increased connections between students and political, social and religious organizations, AMU student politics acquired a greater significance outside the campus premises. Thanks to their capacity to mobilize during the Aligarh campaign, AMU student leaders emerged as potential interlocutors for Muslim organizations as well as government authorities.

The Emergence of Issue-based Coalitions

39 Beyond the student body, the demand for Aligarh’s minority status served as a rallying cry for individuals and organizations representing a variety of religious or political positions. As such, the Aligarh campaign epitomized the emergence of a new form of

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Muslim politics, structured around issue-based coalitions, such as the AMU Action Committee or the Majlis-e-Mushawarat. Even as Muslim citizens continued to vote for parties which did not have a specific Muslim character, the growing distrust of large sections of the Muslim population towards Congress opened up a space for this form of Muslim politics to develop outside party structures.

40 What characterized these issue-based platforms? A loose network of individuals and heterogeneous groups which were not continuously active, but could be re-activated for campaigns on specific issues. This was the case of Majlis-e-Mushawarat, which sprung into existence as a collective response to communal riots in the 1960s and gained momentum thanks to the Aligarh campaign. Similarly, the AMU Action Committee, started as a student body and then quickly expanded to include alumni as well as politicians and members of Muslim organizations of different shades and hues. After the decline of Majlis-e-Mushawarat, this loose coalition acted as the main coordinating body for the AMU campaign. In March 1973, its members organized a large-scale convention with no less than 600 delegates to demand “radical changes” in the AMU Act. The Committee gathered behind it an eclectic group, ranging from jurists, like Basheer Ahmed Sayeed, former member of AMU’s Court and Madras High Court Judge, to religious leaders, like Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi (Ali Miyan), the reputed head of Nadwatul Ulama, and seasoned politicians: it was none other than Sheikh Abdullah, the former Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, who inaugurated the 1973 convention (Sayeed 1983:90). Again, in 1978, the Action Committee brought together an impressive number of religious and political figures along with student representatives: in addition to the individuals mentioned in the table below, “other dignitaries from UP, Bihar, West Bengal, Delhi, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and other states” also participated in the meeting (Radiance 1979). The demand for minority status provided these actors, from widely divergent political and ideological backgrounds, with a common objective. By coordinating the actions of different religious and political organizations, the Action Committee thus provided structure to a movement supposed to represent a cohesive community.

Table 1: List of dignitaries who took part in the AMU Action Committee Meet (April 22, 1978, Delhi) (Source: Radiance 1979).

Name Title

Mufti Atiqur Rahman President, Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat

Mohammad Zulfiqarullah President, Muslim Majlis; Union Minister of State for Finance

Mohammad Masood Khan Minister for Housing and Rehabilitation, U.P.

Sulaiman Sikander Vice-President, Majlis-e-Tameer-e-Millat

Manzoor Alam President, Muslim League, Rajasthan

Iqbal Hussain Khan President, Muslim Majlis, U.P.

Abdul Azeem Khan Representative, Jamaat-e-Islami Hind

S.M. Arif Honorary Secretary, AMU Students’ Union

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41 In the subsequent decades, similar issue-based platforms emerged, following in the footsteps of Majlis and the Action Committee. One can think of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and the Babri Masjid Action Committee (1986) (AIMPLB 1972)32. These platforms, old and new, built upon overlapping networks of individuals and organizations. For instance, in the 1960s, Mufti Atiqur Rahman, one of Majlis’s leading figures and an important actor of the Action Committee, was simultaneously associated with Jamiat Ulama and AMU’s Court as well as with two of the most famous Islamic educational institutions in India, Deoband and Nadwatul Ulama. Similarly, in the 1970s and 1980s, many individuals who became pivotal figures of the AIMPLB had earlier played a leading role in Majlis-e-Mushawarat and in the Aligarh campaign. This was the case, once again, of Mufti Atiqur Rahman, as well as Syed Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, the head of Nadwatul Ulama. Network-oriented studies of social movements have shown that social movements not only draw strength from existing networks, they also produce new ties of solidarity, which can then come into use for subsequent mobilizations (Diani 1997). In much the same way, the ties that Majlis-e-Mushawarat and the AMU Action Committee had created in the 1960s facilitated the formation of new issue-based platforms which, like them, took up the mission of representing Muslim interests.

42 Issue-based coalitions thus became a prominent feature of Muslim politics in the post- Nehruvian period, especially in North India, where Majlis, AIMPLB and of course the AMU Action Committee all started. They offered Muslims a model of mobilization outside party structures. In a context where large sections of the Muslim population expressed growing distrust towards Congress, these coalitions allowed heterogeneous Muslim groups to stand together outside the governing party to demand recognition for religious minority rights. At the same time, they presented an alternative to the formation of a Muslim political party. Unlike in South India, where parties such as the Indian Union Muslim League and the MIM appeared to be legitimate political actors,33 in North India, the former heartland of Muslim League, memories of partition hampered the formation of a new Muslim party (Kudaisya 2006). In this context, issue- based coalitions, which repeatedly invoked the Constitution to safeguard Muslims’ minority rights, provided Muslims with another, more legitimate framework to defend their interests as a separate group. They formed part of a larger trend—the rise of non- party actors defending group rights and interests. One can think of student, caste- based or women’s movements which all flourished in the post-Nehruvian period (Nigam 2006). Along with these non-party actors, Muslim coalitions put to test Congress’s “hegemonic” discourse on national unity, thereby contributing to the pluralization of Indian politics.

43 However, the strength of issue-based coalitions, i.e. their flexible and catch-all character, was also their main weakness. These loose coalitions were often characterized by a weak ideological cohesion and marred by internal rivalries. These prevented the formation of strong ties of mutual trust and solidarity (Diani 1997), which would have allowed coalition actors to build a stable structure of Muslim representation. The fast decline of Majlis-e-Mushawarat is a good case in point: from the beginning, the rivalries between Jamaat-e-Islami and the Jamiat Ulema, visible during the Aligarh campaign, deeply affected the cohesion of the new association and its capacity to act in the name of all Indian Muslims (Quraishi 1971).

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44 These coalitions eventually proved to have limited political clout. During the Aligarh campaign, members of Majlis-e-Mushawarat tried to take advantage of the growing competition between Congress and its rivals to press their demands for minority status. In the run-up to the 1971 elections, Majlis leader A.J. Faridi negotiated with Congress MPs the promise that AMU would become a minority institution in exchange for Muslim support.34 Meanwhile, Jamiat Ulema published pamphlets warning the government that “there will be great disappointment, frustration and dissatisfaction among the members of the minority and in the country” if the government were to ignore this demand (Madani 1972:5). Yet, Congress and later the Janata-led government repeatedly failed to keep their promise, despite the ongoing mobilization of students and Muslim organizations. It was only in 1981, after the Emergency and after the first defeat of Congress at the national level, that Parliament adopted an Act which satisfied the campaign’s supporters. This long delay shows the limited capacity of Muslim organizations to exert influence over political parties, despite their pressure tactics. These coalitions further failed to build a stable Muslim constituency of their own. A.J. Faridi’s attempts, in 1969, to transform Majlis’s UP branch into a political party, met with limited success. Muslim Majlis won but a couple of seats in the state elections, that too on independent tickets (Khan 1980). Issue-based platforms such as Majlis or the AMU Action Committee therefore emerged as an alternative to both Congress and to Muslim party politics, but as a weak alternative, only able to mobilize punctually, on issues with a strong emotional appeal.

Conclusion

45 The Aligarh campaign, which took off soon after Nehru’s death, played a key role in the reconfiguration of Muslim politics in the post-Nehruvian period. By bringing together a wide range of actors—students, religious organizations and Muslim politicians, in the defense of a common cause—the recognition of AMU’s minority status, it crystallized the resurgence of the demand for minority rights and facilitated the formation of issue- based coalitions speaking in the name of Muslim interests.

46 This form of Muslim minority politics needs not be regarded primarily as a symptom of sectarian tendencies let loose by the erosion of the Nehruvian consensus. Movements such as the campaign for Aligarh’s minority status arose largely as a response to Congress’s failure, after independence, to ensure that Muslims would be treated as full- fledged citizens in the new nation-state. By putting emphasis on Muslims’ group rights, these minority politics contributed, more largely, to the pluralization of Indian politics as they questioned, along with low-caste movements or other “infra-nationalisms,” Congress’s hegemonic discourse on national unity (Nigam 2006:86).

47 However, the emergence of these “little selves” could also facilitate the growth of majoritarian tendencies (Nigam 2006). Indeed, the rise of the Hindu right in the 1980s both fueled the calls for Muslims’ protection and fed itself upon this type of minority politics: the increased emphasis on minority identity lent credence to their majoritarian rhetoric, which portrayed Muslims as the internal other.

48 This may explain why, in parallel to issue-based platforms defending minority rights, alternative voices emerged among Muslims, which either challenged or ignored this type of minority politics. One may think of radical student movements like SIMI or of the Pasmanda movement in the 1990s, which shared a deep dissatisfaction with the

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established Muslim leadership, too narrowly focused on minority issues.35 Similarly, in the post-Babri Masjid period, some scholars and educationists urged their co- religionists to turn away from “emotional” issues to focus instead on education in order to address Muslims’ “real” issues, i.e. socio-economic backwardness (Gautier 2016:161– 214).

49 There again, universities, especially AMU, appeared as privileged sites for the emergence of alternative strategies. SIMI first emerged at Aligarh during the Emergency as students associated with Jamaat-e-Islami aspired to emancipate themselves from their elders (Ahmad 2005:2010). In the 1990s, a few students formed the Forum for Democratic Rights with the aim of reorienting Muslims’ attention towards socio-economic uplift. According to Mohammad Sajjad, a former member of this group, their objective was to promote a “new brand of Muslim politics” within a “secular democratic order” (Sajjad 2014). Meanwhile, some of AMU’s key administrative figures, like Vice-Chancellor Syed Hamid, tried to revive a new Aligarh movement which would focus on backward Muslims’ socio-economic uplift rather than religious and cultural issues (Gautier 2016:173–4, 207). Thus, even after the end of the campaign for the minority status, AMU remained a laboratory for diverse forms of Muslim politics, with an aim to reach out to the Muslim community, much beyond the University’s premises.

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Mahmud, Syed. 1974. A Nationalist Muslim and Indian Politics. Being the Selected Correspondence of the late Dr. Syed Mahmud edited by V. Datta and B.E. Cleghorn. Delhi: Macmillan.

Mann, Elizabeth. 1992. Boundaries and Identities: Muslims, Work and Status in Aligarh. New Delhi: Sage Publications.

National Archives of India, Ministry of Education, 1950. File: 41–90/50-D.3. Letter from Zakir Husain to Rajendra Prasad, July 19, 1950.

Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, M. C. Chagla Papers. Files 80, 81 and 90.

Nigam, Aditya. 2006. The Insurrection of Little Selves. The Crisis of Secular-Nationalism in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Noorani, Abdul Ghafoor. 2003. The Muslims of India. A Documentary Record. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Pandit, Aishwarya. 2014. “From United Provinces to Uttar Pradesh. Heartland Politics 1947– 1970.” PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge.

Qasmi, Muhammad Vaheeduddin. 1965. Ordinance Muslim University Aligarh ke Khilaf Writ Petition ka Mukhtasar Tazkarah. Aligarh: Jamiat Ulema.

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Quraishi, Zaheer Masood. 1971. “Emergence and Eclipse of Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat.” Economic and Political Weekly 6(25):1229–34.

Radiance. 1979. “AMU Action Committee Meet.” April 29, p.22.

Saikia, Yasmin and M. Raisur Rahman. 2019. The Cambridge Companion to Sayyid Ahmad Khan. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press.

Sajjad, Mohammad. N.d. “AMU in the 1990s: Some Aspects of Student Politics - F.D.R. (1994–99).” Aligarh movement. Retrieved January 18, 2019 (http://aligarhmovement.com/forum/ AMU_in_the_1990s_Some_Aspects_of_Student_Politics_F.D.R._1994–99).

Sajjad, Mohammad. 2014. Muslim Politics in Bihar. Changing Contours. New Delhi: Routledge.

Sayeed, Basheer Ahmed. 1983. My Life, a Struggle. Madras: Academy of Islamic Research.

Sherman, Taylor. 2015. Muslim Belonging in Secular India. Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Srivastava, R. C. 1981. “Millat’s Hold on AMU Strong.” Times of India, August 21, p.18.

Tilly, Charles. and Sidney Tarrow. 2015. Contentious Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Times of India. 1973. “AMU Closure Pre-Planned, says MP.” April 13, p.9.

Times of India. 1978a. “‘Back Janata’ Plea by AMU Staff, Students.” November 3, p.14.

Times of India. 1978b. “Restore Nature of AMU: Sheikh.” May 14, p.4.

Times of India. 1980. “AMU Students Court Arrest near PM’s House.” September 23, p.7.

Tyabji, Badruddin. 1958. “Vice-Chancellor’s statement.” Muslim University Gazette, August 8.

Tyabji, Badruddin. 1994. More Memoirs of an Egoist. New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications.

Wasey, Akhtarul. 1972. “Aligarh University.” Times of India, May 3, p.6.

Wright, Theodore. 1966a. “Muslim Education in India at the Crossroads: The Case of Aligarh.” Pacific Affairs 39(1/2):50–63.

Wright, Theodore. 1966b. “The Muslim League in South India since Independence. A Study in Minority Group Political Strategies.” The American Political Science Review 60(3):579–99.

NOTES

1. Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), also known as Sir Syed, was one of the most prominent Muslim modernist reformers of British India. He was a prolific scholar as well as an institution- builder who established a number of educational, scientific and literary institutions including, most famously, the Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental College (1877), which later became Aligarh Muslim University (1920). See Lelyveld 1978; and Saikia and Rahman 2019. 2. In South Asia, this term designates Muslim families who claimed foreign descent, whether Arab, Turkish, Persian or Afghan. These families usually benefit from a higher social status than descendants of Indian converts. 3. Article 30 of the Constitution grants religious and linguistic minorities the right to "establish and administer educational institutions of their choice." The managing bodies of minority institutions benefit from greater autonomy: they are not subjected to the same rules as other state-controlled institutions (e.g. they need not implement "backward" quotas) and they can adopt institution-specific regulations (e.g. religious instruction, minority quotas for admission).

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4. To defend these arguments, I rely on a range of sources produced by different sections of AMU: official university publications, such as the Muslim University Gazette, Vice-Chancellors’ writings, as well as speeches from Students’ Union representatives. I also conducted semi-structured interviews with former students, many of whom participated in student politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The private papers of Education Minister M.C. Chagla have proven to be a very rich source to explore the relations between the government and University members as well as the role of "outsiders," especially religious organizations such as Majlis-e-Mushawarat. I have also used some of these religious organizations’ pamphlets as well newspaper articles in the English and Urdu press to get as comprehensive as possible a picture of the Aligarh agitation inside and outside the University. 5. This is an expression attributed to Jinnah. 6. The Republican Party of India was established in 1957, shortly after Ambedkar’s death. The party bore the stamp of his influence: instead of focusing on Scheduled Castes alone, the RPI was to build alliances with the other "downtrodden masses of India," including Scheduled Tribes and other Backward Classes’ (Jaffrelot 2003, p.106–7). 7. Internal students were students who had already joined AMU, either at high school or college level. 8. To increase internal quotas was nothing revolutionary. In 1961, the Chatterji Committee, appointed by the government, had already recommended similar measures to ensure that "the bulk of the overall student population of the University should come from the Muslim community…without fixation of any communal quotas" (AMU 1961, p.140). 9. For the Chatterji Committee, communal quotas were "open to grave objection for it would have been contrary to the liberal ideals which must inspire a temple of learning such as a university." Like the University Education Commission (1948), it endorsed the idea that these quotas represented a "danger of disunion" for the country, which ran counter to universities’ role to promote national unity (AMU 1961, p.114–5). 10. In 1958, for instance, the authorities of Benaras Hindu University closed the university following demonstrations and fights between what Altbach (1968) describes as "warring factions." In 1963, students at Allahabad University further used physical threat to force the Vice-Chancellor to re-admit some students (Di Bona 1969). 11. M.C. Chagla to Syed Mahmud. May 20, 1965 in NMML. 12. For instance, Basheer Ahmed Sayeed, member of the University Court, was arrested. He was accused of being one of the main architects of the incident (Khalilullah to M.C. Chagla. August 13, 1965 in NMML, 80). In his letter to Chagla, dated August 17, 1965, Basheer Ahmed Sayeed denied these charges and argued that he had tried to appease the students. According to him, students affiliated with the Jan Sangh, the Jamiat and with communists played the leading role in the agitation against the Vice-Chancellor (NMML, 80). 13. “Aligarh boys’ plea for pardon.” 1965. Patriot, August 7 in NMML. 14. “Vice-Chancellor’s address to Staff Association,” August 29, 1965 in Jung. 15. “Presidential Address at the All India Muslim Convention,” June 10, 1961, in Mahmud. 16. Jamiat Ulama, a religious organization which was established in 1919, played a key role in the anti-colonial protests during the Khilafat movement, side by side with Congress. In 1947, a majority – not all – of its members opposed partition and the Muslim League, hence its "nationalist" tag. After independence, Congress maintained close ties with the organisation, which they regarded as a representative of Muslims’ voices in India. 17. Jamaat-e-Islami was founded in 1941 by Maulana Maududi to transform post-colonial India into an Islamic state. After partition, the Islamist organization split into two Pakistani and Indian branches. The latter one, Jamaat-e-Islami-e-Hind, progressively gave up its isolationist strategy to join democratic politics. 18. 1965. Dawat, July 24, p.3, in NMML.

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19. “Convention leader pleads for Muslim management.” 1965. Hindustan Times, August 4; “Aligarh old boys to have panel for ‘peaceful action’.” 1965. Hindustan Times, August 9, p.1; 1965. Dawat, July 20, in NMML. 20. In M.C. Chagla’s papers on the AMU campaign, we can find press clippings from the Urdu press in Delhi (Havat, a communist weekly, Al Jamiat and Dawat, published respectively by the Jamiat Ulama and the Jamaat-e-Islami, Pratap, a pro Jan Sangh newspaper, Savera and Daur-e- Jadeed), from Lucknow (Qaumi Awaz), Kanpur (Siasat), Ptna (Sangam, Sada-e-Aam), but also from Hyderabad (Rahnuma-e-Deccan), Calcutta (Azad Hind, Rozana Hind), Bombay (Hindustan, Inquilab) and Calicut (Chandrika). In addition, one finds press clippings from the English press based in Delhi (Hindustan Times, Patriot, Hindustan Standard, Link, Indian Express) and Bombay (Times of India, Blitz). 21. “Aligarh Old Boys to Have Panel for ‘Peaceful Action.’” 1965. Hindustan Times, August, 9 in NMML. 22. Radiance. 1965. June 20, p.4, cited in Wright 1966a. 23. In an article entitled “Running of Aligarh Varsity Exclusively by Muslims Demanded,” a journalist shows the identity of demands between Majlis’s memorandum and a resolution adopted by Jamaat-e-Islami (1965. Times of India, July 11 in NMML). 24. Some students, teachers, and alumni distanced themselves from the AMU campaign. During the Lucknow Convention, several alumni denounced the attempts of Jamaat-i-Islami to take over "their" convention and to impose a "communal" line upon the movement. Some alumni directly challenged Jamaat’s main demands. For instance, S.M. Tonki, an Old Boy of Gandhian persuasion, tried in vain to amend the resolution that demanded an exclusively Muslim control of the University. Together with other Old Boys, he signed a statement of dissent denouncing the "unfortunate alliance" of some veterans of the nationalist movement (they were referring here to Syed Mahmud) with the "reactionary, narrow-minded and sectarian elements" of the Jamaat- e-Islami. “Threats on Aligarh.” 1965. Patriot, August 9 in NMML. 25. Akhtarul Wasey recalls that the University was closed several times in 1972–73 due to students’ mobilization against the "Black Act." He himself was arrested, along with a few politicians, like A.J. Faridi, who supported the protests (A. Wasey, personal communication, November 7, 2013). See also press reports such as Wasey 1972 and Times of India 1972b. 26. See the regular articles published in Times of India and Radiance during that period. 27. Nigam (2006, p.320–3) adopts here Partha Chatterjee’s famous distinction between "civil" and "political" society. 28. This was the name of AMU alumni’s association. 29. This is what Salman Khurshid suggests (2015, p.170–1). 30. See also the joint statement published in November 1978 by a group of students and teachers to support Janata Party’s “secular and democratic forces” against Indira Gandhi’s “authoritarianism and fascism” (Times of India 1978a). 31. Patrick Clibbens points out that the recruitment strategies of left and right-wing opposition parties relied in large measure on “channeling the enthusiasms of the young,” particularly of the “burgeoning” urban youth, more inclined towards “radical” ideas (2014, p.194–5). 32. On the AIMPLB, see Jones 2010. On the BMAC, see Ahmed 2014, p.229–30. 33. On the Muslim League in Kerala, see Wright 1966b. On the Majlis-i-Ittehadul-Muslimeen in Hyderabad, see Alam 1993. 34. Cyclostyled document dated 4 July 1972 distributed by Dr. A.J. Faridi. Excerpts reproduced in Noorani 2003, p.360–1. 35. For Ahmad, the formation of SIMI epitomized the emergence of a new "Islamist class," ready to challenge the authority of elders (2010). For a critique of Muslim minority politics by a SIMI supporter, see Ali 1982. On the Pasmanda movement as a call to the "democratization" of Indian Muslims, see for instance Alam 2003.

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ABSTRACTS

This article focuses on the campaign for AMU’s minority status (1965–1981), at the intersection of student politics and Muslim politics. What started in 1965 as an internal university dispute on student quotas soon transformed into a central Muslim issue. The campaign crystallized mounting resentment against the government and provided a common platform to heterogeneous forces–students, teachers, as well as Muslim organizations of different shades and hues–who all claimed to serve Muslim interests. This campaign thus played a key role in the reconfiguration of Muslim politics in the 1960s. It contributed to the re-emergence of the demand for Muslim minority rights, largely delegitimized after partition. It provided a platform for an increasingly assertive Muslim leadership which claimed to represent the Muslim community. Finally, it constituted a laboratory for issue-based coalitions, which, in the absence of a strong Muslim political party, became a dominant feature of Muslim politics, especially in North India. These changes must be read in the wider context of the post-Nehruvian period. The campaign participated in the emergence of counter-narratives, which questioned Congress’s “hegemonic” discourse on secular nationalism. Through student mobilization and issue-based coalitions, it also facilitated the emergence of contentious voices outside party structures. As such, the campaign participated in the larger pluralization of Indian politics, marked by the erosion of Congress’s dominance, much before the post-Emergency crisis.

INDEX

Keywords: Muslims, minority rights, student politics, post-Nehruvian politics, Aligarh Muslim University.

AUTHOR

LAURENCE GAUTIER Assistant Professor at the Jindal School of Liberal Arts, O.P. Jindal Global University, as well as Associate Researcher at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (Delhi). She completed her PhD thesis on “The role of Muslim universities in the redefinition of Indian Muslim Universities after partition (1947–1990s)” at the University of Cambridge (2016).

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Patronage, Populism, and Protest: Student Politics in Pakistani Punjab

Hassan Javid

1 On October 5, 2015, a small group of activists belonging to the left-wing Democratic Students Alliance (DSA) gathered at the Liberty Market roundabout in Lahore to stage a protest demanding an end to Pakistan’s ban on student unions. The ban, reintroduced in 1993 by the Supreme Court, but originally imposed in 1984 by the dictatorial government of General Zia-ul-Haq, made it illegal for student organizations to be involved in, or connected to, mainstream electoral politics.1 Just over two years after the DSA’s protest, clashes erupted in Punjab University between members of the Islami Jamiat-i-Talaba (IJT), a right-wing Islamist student organization historically linked to the Jamaat-i-Islami, and those of the Pashtun Students Union (PSU). The fighting on January 21 2018, which involved dozens of students and left a good percentage of them injured, was a repeat of an incident in March 2017 when similar clashes left 16 students wounded. In news reports covering both incidents, the animosity between the IJT and the PSU was attributed to conflicts over influence and turf, with the latter allegedly striking back against the well-entrenched position of the former at Punjab University.

2 While the DSA, IJT, and PSU are all products of very different political circumstances and alignments, what is interesting about the events listed above is the fact that these organizations exist in the first place. Despite the ban, with its emphasis on ending the involvement of university students in politics, student groups have continued to exist and engage with each other, as well as with political parties. Moreover, while many of the student organizations at the forefront of student activism in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s have gradually faded away into obscurity and irrelevance,2 they have been replaced by new formations such as: the Insaf Students Federation (ISF), affiliated with the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI); and the Pakistan Muslim League, Nawaz’s Youth Wing (henceforth referred to as PYW). Both organizations explicitly seek to bring students and other young people into the fold of formal political parties.

3 The existence and emergence of groups like the DSA, ISF, and PYW raises interesting questions about the contemporary state of politics in Pakistan, and also problematizes a widespread view of youth politics that suggests that the bans on student unions

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imposed in 1984 and 1993 has either facilitated the dominance of Islamist outfits like the IJT (Nasr 1993; Nelson 2011) or has shaped a generation of students characterized by political apathy and disinterest (Rehman and Naqvi 2013; Lall 2014). In addition to explaining the genesis of these three student/youth organizations, this paper seeks to examine the precise ways in which these groups engage with politics in the formally democratic dispensation that has existed in Pakistan since 2008 while arguing that student politics in Punjab currently follows three different, but not mutually exclusive, templates. Seen through this lens, the PYW epitomizes a model of patronage politics geared towards augmenting young voter support through schemes and programs; the ISF, to acquire electoral power, mobilizes around populist appeals geared towards attracting adherents away from mainstream parties; and the DSA utilizes radical ideological appeals to generate support to protest the political and economic status quo. The paper traces how these three distinct organizational and activist strategies emerge from the interplay between the structural imperatives and individual orientations defining student bodies within the framework of Pakistani politics. It also examines the implications of student groups’ capacities for producing or reinforcing particular patterns of political engagement. In particular, the paper suggests that the mechanisms through which groups like the PYW and ISF have emerged reinforces the depoliticization of Pakistan’s students, fostering a form of student politics that, paradoxically, functions without students. In shifting the focus away from the experiences of students themselves, and towards the institutional mechanisms through which they have been co-opted by mainstream political actors, this paper draws attention to how student activism has been contoured by the broader context and political opportunity structure in Pakistan.

4 Throughout this paper, it is argued that the trajectory taken by mainstream student politics in recent decades is one characterized by systematic “depoliticization.” What this means is that in addition to being limited in terms of the types of organizations they can participate in, students in Pakistan have increasingly been subjected to restrictions on the types of politics they can engage in and the range of issues around which they can mobilize. Thus, for example, while students can form student societies related to extracurricular activities, and sometimes use these for political discussions and debate (a tactic used effectively by the DSA), they are not allowed to form student “unions” and are often barred from hosting and even participating in events with an overtly political focus. Indeed, as is clear from some instances described below, students and even faculty attempting to do so have been subject to censorship and even harassment by the state. At the same time, particularly since the 1980s, official patronage extended to Islamist student organizations amidst a broader ban on student politics, coupled with a narrative suggesting student politics is inherently violent and dangerous, has meant that the space for mobilizing students has shrunk in ideological and organizational terms. An entire generation of students has come of age without exposure to the kind of politics that defined the student experience from the 1950s to the 1970s. Indeed, when contemporary student politics in Pakistan is referred to as “depoliticized,” it is in contrast with an earlier, more radical tradition of political engagement. As this paper argues, it is the erosion of this tradition that has created the space for the kind of top-down, centralized, and non-ideological forms of student politics adopted by the mainstream parties.

5 The paper’s focus on Punjab is rooted in how the province has borne witness to some of the country’s most competitive electoral contests in recent years (particularly between

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the PML-N and the PTI), which have spilled over into the realm of student politics. Punjab has also been the main region within which the DSA has operated since its inception. However, the templates for student politics described in this paper arguably have broader applicability in Pakistan; the “youth”/student wings of the PTI and PML- N follow similar models of organization across the country and, as argued by this paper, have emerged out of broader processes shaping the form and nature of student politics in the country since the 1980s. Similarly, even the Pakistan People’s Party, aligned with the once-powerful People’s Student Federation, has been subject to the same pressures and constraints as its political rivals with comparable effects on student politics in Sindh. As discussed below, however, there are some exceptions to this general tendency towards depoliticization and cooptation; in addition to the DSA, student organizations built around ethnic identity (in, for example, Balochistan) and Islam are arguably oriented around more explicitly ideological and political axes than their mainstream. However, they remain relatively limited in their size and reach (with the IJT being an exception to the rule) and are themselves products of broader political circumstances informed by Pakistan’s history of ethnic and religious tensions. While these organizations are not analyzed in any detail in this paper, their dynamics, particularly in an ostensibly “democratic” Pakistan, could be a fruitful subject for future research.

6 The paper begins with a brief overview of the literature on, and history of, student politics in Pakistan, emphasizing how the focus has tended to be on the ideological clash between left and right-wing organizations, as well as associated ethnic groups, during periods of authoritarian rule, with comparatively less attention being paid to student politics within the framework of Pakistan’s democratic governance. This is followed by accounts of each of the three student organizations covered in this paper— the PYW, the ISF, and the DSA—illustrating the differences between them as well as the varying roles they play as vehicles for the recruitment and mobilization of voters, the articulation of issues and grievances, and networks for the acquisition and dispensation of patronage. The paper then concludes with some reflections on the future of student politics in Pakistan, particularly considering the creeping authoritarianism that has arguably characterized the country’s politics in recent years.

A Brief History of Student Politics in Pakistan

7 The earliest accounts of student participation in Pakistan’s politics generally tend to focus on the role played by the Muslim Students Federation in the years leading up to partition and independence in 1947. Formed in 1937 as a part of the All India Muslim League, the MSF played a key role in the League’s attempts to generate and mobilize support for the idea of Pakistan in the cities of Punjab (Mirza 1991). However, soon after independence, the MSF’s position as the primary organization representing student interests in Pakistan was challenged by the emergence of rival groups on both the left and the right; the IJT was formed in 1947 as an affiliate of the Jamaat-i-Islami, the Democratic Students Federation (DSF) was created to be the student wing of the Communist Party of Pakistan in 1950, and the National Student Federation emerged as a left-wing union backed by the National Awami Party and other leftist forces. In addition to these groups, student organizations based in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) also emerged including the East Pakistan Students’ League (affiliated with

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the Awami League), the East Pakistan Students Union (linked to the East Pakistan wing of the National Awami Party), and the Islami Chattra Sangha (part of the East Pakistan Jamaat-i-Islami). Finally, the first two decades after independence also saw the emergence of explicitly ethnic student organizations such as the Pakhtoon Students Federation and the Baloch Students Organization. According to at least one contemporary account, 85 percent of student respondents in East Pakistan and 68 percent in West Pakistan were members of at least one of the organizations listed above (Maniruzzaman 1971a).

8 The multiplication of student organizations in the immediate aftermath of partition was arguably a direct result of the fragmentation of Pakistan’s broader political landscape after independence. As has been documented at length by Toor (2011), Malik (2013b), Raza (2013), and Ali (2013), the first decade of Pakistan’s history was characterized in no small part by attempts by left-wing political forces to assert greater influence in the politics of the country, an effort that was ultimately met with considerable opposition from the state leading to, but not ending with, the banning of the Communist Party of Pakistan in 1954. Early on, the imperatives of Cold War politics led the Pakistani establishment to align itself quite firmly with the anti-Communist bloc headed by the United States (Jalal 1989), creating a cleavage between anti- communist elites in the state and left-wing challengers in society that spilled over into student politics. This left-right divide was also supplemented by political differences over the role of religion in Pakistan’s politics and public discourse, with explicitly religious groups like the IJT coming into conflict with their secular opponents, generating antagonisms that would continue to shape student politics in the decades to come.

9 In addition to the Left-Right cleavage that pit some student unions against the state, Pakistan’s fractious ethnic politics also fed into the broader politicization of the country’s students. East Pakistani university students who were at the forefront of calls for greater ethnic and provincial recognition and autonomy, as evinced by the clashes that erupted in 1952 at Dhaka University over the non-adoption of Bengali as a national language in Pakistan, were the forerunners of ethnicity-based student mobilizations in West Pakistan that sought to challenge the hegemony exerted by Punjab over the country’s politics (Samad 1998; Hussain 2012). The Pakhtoon and Baloch student organizations that emerged in this period were linked to the nascent ethno-national movements that had begun to emerge in the provinces of Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa and Balochistan and were joined by groups like the Jeay Sindh Students Federation in Sindh. Like contemporary left-wing student groups, with which they shared some ideological affinities, these student organizations also found themselves at the receiving end of state repression aimed at preserving the political status quo.

10 Student politics in Pakistan’s early years was thus characterized by ideological and ethnic cleavages that set groups against each other and, in some instances, against the state. Matters came to a head during the military government of General Ayub Khan, when Pakistan’s disparate student organizations came together to participate in the movement that would eventually topple the regime in 1969. Despite systematic attempts by the regime and its predecessors to suppress left-wing political forces in Pakistan, the continued existence of such groups in both the Eastern and Western parts of Pakistan, buttressed by informal networks of cooperation and collaboration, meant that workers and students were able to marshal the resources required to effectively

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oppose the Ayub Khan government in the late 1960s (Malik 2013a). More specifically, left-wing and ethnic student groups antagonized by the repressive measures taken by the regime, including attempts to ban student politics when Ayub Khan first came to power, were joined in opposition to the regime by organizations that might have otherwise been expected to support it, with the MSF and IJT both throwing their weight behind the anti-Ayub movement (Ali 1970; Maniruzzaman 1971b; Sayeed 1979).3

11 The collapse of the Ayub regime was quickly followed by the secession of East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh, an event that severed the ties that had existed between the student organizations of both countries. In West Pakistan, the elections of 1970 had brought the Pakistan People’s Party to power with its charismatic leader, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, riding the wave of popular discontent against Ayub Khan to garner electoral support on an avowedly left-wing platform that built on the achievements of the various worker and student groups that had been instrumental to the success of the anti-Ayub movement (Jones 2003). Soon after coming to power, however, the new PPP government essentially turned its back on many of its erstwhile allies and supporters, engaging in a crackdown on left-wing workers and students’ groups that opposed it over its alleged lack of commitment to radical reform (Ali 2005; Malik 2018). The PPP government’s opposition to these groups was shaped by its broader political struggles, particularly against the National Awami Party and its affiliated organizations, as well as the Jamaat-i-Islami and factions of the Muslim League. The repression of alternative left-wing forces by the PPP government allowed it to claim the mantle of the Left in Pakistan even as the party itself drifted increasingly to the right (Akhtar 2010), and its own student organization, the Peoples’ Student Federation, emerged as a competitor for the political space occupied by rival left-wing unions (Paracha 2009).

12 The toppling of the first PPP government by a military coup launched by General Zia- ul-Haq in 1977 once again altered the topography of student politics in Pakistan. Zia’s regime enjoyed the support of the right-wing parties and student organizations that had underpinned the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) which had come together to oppose the PPP in the 1970s and was aligned firmly with the IJT and the MSF. In addition to this, 1978 also saw the birth of the All Pakistan Mohajir Students Organization (APMSO), an entity that explicitly sought to represent Urdu-speaking migrants living in Sindh’s major cities, and which would later give birth to the MQM. While the APMSO was, at least initially, suspected of being an organization propped up by the Zia regime to counter the influence of the PPP in Sindh, by 1981 the vagaries of local government and campus politics led the APMSO to join the United Students’ Movement, a collection of left-wing and ethnic student organizations opposed to the Islamizing and authoritarian tendencies of the Zia regime and its allies.

13 In subsequent years, the enduring power of the existing student groups was demonstrated when anti-Zia groups like the PSF swept student union elections held in universities in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At the same time, increasing repression by the Zia regime and the violent on-campus activities of the IJT led to the an increase in the frequency of armed clashes between rival student groups, a situation made worse by the influx of weapons from the war raging in Afghanistan which, when in the hands of student unions, resulted in unprecedented levels of death and injury. It was the combination of these two factors—the enduring appeal of anti-regime student groups and the weaponization of student politics—that arguably provided the pretext for the ban on student politics imposed by General Zia-ul-Haq in 1984 (Butt 2009;

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Paracha 2009). While the IJT was largely able to evade the effects of this ban, mainly due to the continued cooperation between the Jamaat-i-Islami and the Zia regime, other student groups were increasingly forced underground; while they still existed on campuses across the country, elections that they held were deemed void, their activities were closely regulated and suppressed, and the rambunctious democratic politics that had characterized student organizations in the 1960s and the 1970s was brought to an end.

14 When the government of Zia-ul-Haq finally collapsed in 1988, once more bringing the PPP to power, the ban that had been imposed on student politics was lifted. Subsequent union elections across Pakistan saw the IJT defeated by the PSF, the MSF, and other progressive groups, setting the stage for the revival of the kind of student politics that had characterized the pre-Zia years. However, in addition to generating clashes between groups like the PSF and APMSO which sought to fill the vacuum left by the IJT, the dismissal of the PPP government in 1990 and its replacement by one headed by the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI), a collection of conservative and religious parties set up during the Zia years and opposed to the PPP, saw the re-emergence of the campus clashes that had provided the pretext for banning student unions in 1984. Once again, the enduring popularity of the PSF and its allied groups, coupled with a split in the IJI that led to the IJT vying with the MSF for control in Punjab’s campuses, led to violent clashes that prompted the government of Nawaz Sharif to approach the Supreme Court in 1991 to uphold the ban on unions that had been imposed by General Zia-ul-Haq. The Supreme Court did so in early 1993 just months before Nawaz Sharif’s government was itself dismissed by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan (Paracha 2009). For the rest of the 1990s, student politics remained largely informal; while the IJT was able to reassert itself on campuses throughout the country in a way not dissimilar to how it operated during the years of the Zia regime’s ban on student politics, groups like the MSF and the PSF also continued to operate, albeit with dwindling influence and support.

15 By the time Pakistan experienced its third military coup in 1999, bringing General Pervez Musharraf to power, the student politics of past decades had mostly come to an end. While the PSF and MSF existed on paper (with the latter now aligning itself with the PML-Q, a breakaway faction of the PML-N allied with the new regime), these organizations no longer had the presence on campus or the resources needed to continue operating as viable political entities. Progressive groups like the NSF disappeared from the radar altogether whereas ethnic organizations like the BSO continued to operate in their relatively small provincial enclaves, often at the receiving end of broader state repression aimed at suppressing ethno-national sentiment. The IJT maintained a presence in universities and colleges, particularly in Punjab, but increasingly directed its energies towards regulating students on campus rather than engaging in mainstream politics. For Paracha (2009) and Nelson (2011), this apathy could be explained by two significant factors. First, the birth of the Musharraf regime coincided with the coming-of-age of an entire generation of students that had grown up under the shadow of the ban on student politics imposed by General Zia-ul-Haq, the effect of which was multiplied by the not entirely unwarranted belief that student politics in the 1980s and 1990s had been reduced to little more than violent clashes between unsavory elements acting as extensions of national level political parties. Second, the moribund nature of student politics created space for alternative organizations, such as more radical national and transnational Islamist outfits

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tolerated and even nurtured by the state, to attract students interested in engaging in politics

16 It was therefore surprising when the anti-Musharraf movement of 2007, triggered by a judicial crisis that erupted after Musharraf’s arbitrary and unlawful dismissal of the country’s Chief Justice, saw the participation, albeit in limited numbers, of students affiliated with elite, private universities like the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Beaconhouse National University (BNU), and the National University of Computer and Engineering Sciences (commonly known as FAST). As argued by Bolognani (2011), Talib (2011) and Kalra (2018), the participation of students from these universities, and LUMS in particular, was prompted by a combination of factors; in addition to possessing relatively high levels of privilege, derived from their socioeconomic status which insulated them from some of the dangers involved in taking on the state, they also benefitted from the presence of faculty and individual students ideologically committed to opposing authoritarian rule. Furthermore, the changing media landscape in Pakistan and, indeed, the world, facilitated their protest activities; not only could they access information about the anti-Musharraf campaign from an increasingly globalized media, these students were also able to use the internet and nascent forms of social media to organize, disseminate information, and garner support for their cause (Bolognani 2010; Talib 2011; Zia 2012). At the same time, following a confrontation with IJT activists during a visit to Punjab University to rally support for the anti-Musharraf movement, Imran Khan, the leader of the PTI, established the Insaf Students Federation (ISF) on November 14, 2007 as a means through which to mobilize students against the regime, but also in support of the PTI and its quest for political power.

17 When the PPP returned to government in 2008 following elections held after the fall of the Musharraf regime, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani promised to end the decades- long ban on student unions that had crippled student politics in Pakistan. However, no action was taken in this regard by the PPP or the PML-N government that succeeded it in 2013. While the Senate of Pakistan did pass a resolution calling for student unions to be revived in 2017, the ban on student politics remains in place. Yet, despite this, groups like the ISF and IJT continue to operate on campuses, even as older student organizations like the PSF and the MSF have struggled to emerge from obscurity.

Democracy, Electoral Politics, and Student Organizations in Pakistan

18 Matthew Nelson (2011) suggests that the tendency to view student politics in Pakistan in terms of national, territorially defined ideological, sectarian, and ethnic cleavages obscures how, since the 1990s, the decline of traditional student unions has led many young people to join and support transnational organizations, primarily Islamist in nature, that offer a political vision transcending the largely static politics of local organizations. While this highlights an important dimension of contemporary student engagement with politics in Pakistan, little has been said about how the country’s transition to democracy in 2008 has affected student organizations. Indeed, as argued by Javid (2019), Pakistan’s decade of democracy has borne witness to attempts by the mainstream parties in power at the Federal and Provincial levels, most notably the PML-N in Punjab, to consolidate their position through legislative and executive

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interventions aimed at strengthening their ability to control electoral candidates, politicians, local vote blocs, and bureaucrats, through the provision of patronage. These efforts have revolved around altering the rules of political competition by ensuring ruling parties monopolize the levers of state patronage and bureaucratic appointment, thereby skewing the electoral landscape in their favor and making it harder for political rivals to offer credible alternatives to the political status quo.4 In this context, it stands to reason that the student and youth organizations affiliated with these parties, and operating across the country despite the continuing ban on student “politics,” feed into these attempts to alter the broader political landscape.5

19 Concurrently, to the extent that current student bodies affiliated with mainstream parties represent little more than extensions of their parent organizations in ideological and electoral terms, thereby narrowing their scope for engagement with the larger political questions that characterize contemporary Pakistan, it is important to ask how students organizing outside of these constraints operate in an environment where formal “political” activity remains banned, popular participation in student organizations remains limited, and official state policy continues to form the basis for crackdowns and repression directed at forces seeking to campaign on issues related to social and economic justice, minority rights, and provincial autonomy. This is particularly true for left-wing groups attempting to recover from decades of opposition from the state, and the decimation of traditional left-wing organizations like the NSF and DSF that have all but disappeared from mainstream politics. As the following case studies show, focusing on the PLW, the ISF, and the DSA, the imperatives of electoral competition, the appeal of populist mobilization, and the impetus for radical change, all converge to produce different trajectories of political participation by students in a democratizing Pakistan.

The PML-N Youth Wing: Patronage in Place of Politics

20 When General Musharraf removed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from power in 1999 and subsequently exiled him and other top leaders of the PML-N to Saudi Arabia, the effect on the party was immediate and devastating; within months, politicians from the PML-N voiced their support for the new military regime. This culminated in the formation of the PML-Q, a pro-Musharraf political party; described by one commentator as “less an organized political force than a collection of opportunists” (Shah 2003:35), it would go on to win the general elections of 2002. The MSF, which had remained aligned with the PML-N throughout the 1990s and had attempted to maintain a presence on college campuses despite the ban on student unions, also switched its allegiance, formally linking itself to the new party in power. While this new partnership might have represented a significant political realignment in the heady days of the 1960s or the 1970s, the stagnant student politics of the Musharraf era meant that the MSF remained a marginal force, sinking further into irrelevancy.

21 Nawaz Sharif’s return to Pakistan after the end of the Musharraf government, and his party’s subsequent rise to power in Punjab in 2008 (and, later, its victory in the 2013 general elections) saw the MSF return to the PML-N’s political fold. While this shift prompted at least one exchange of hostilities between different factions of the MSF in Lahore’s M.A.O College on April 28 2008, matters were quickly settled as the organization settled into a now familiar routine; office bearers were elected, regional

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chapters were created, and the MSF could be relied upon to provide the PML-N with a small supply of students and other young people to attend rallies and vote as and when required. Again, the absence of any active student politics on university campuses, in terms of elections or campaigns, and the more generalized disenchantment characterizing student politics, meant that the MSF, as an organization built around student engagement, could only play an extremely limited role in the wider politics of the PML-N. Indeed, the frustrations felt by the MSF were perhaps best articulated by its Chief Organizer Sardar Mohsin Abbasi in December 2017 when he lashed out against the party leadership for not granting the MSF any representation whatsoever in the PML-N’s decision-making bodies.

22 However, soon after coming to power, the PML-N began to pursue an alternative strategy for engaging with young people and students, eschewing the use of the MSF and similar organizations in favor of a more centralized approach, directed by the party leadership, aimed at directly cultivating the support of these groups through the provision of patronage and the articulation of policies aimed at capturing the attention and, more importantly, votes of this constituency. In 2011, Capt. Muhammad Safdar Awan, Nawaz Sharif’s son-in-law, was appointed the head of the PML-N Youth Wing and was tasked with organizing and mobilizing the party’s young supporters, performing a task that, in previous years, would have been performed by the MSF. Yet, unlike the MSF, the PYW did not attempt to establish itself in universities and on campuses. Instead, it became a platform through which the party articulated policies aimed at highlighting the PML-N’s commitment to improving the lives of Pakistan’s “youth”—a putatively undifferentiated mass of young people—as well as directly recruiting members through meetings, rallies, and social media.

23 In choosing to attract younger voters through the PYW and its patronage-oriented approach to cultivating support, the PML-N was arguably replicating the same model of centralized patronage disbursement it employed to cement its control over the bureaucracy and local government in Punjab (Javid 2019). However, the decision not to revive the MSF on campuses was also borne out of the PML-N’s experiences during the early 1990s and later during the Musharraf years; clashes between rival factions of the MSF and other student organizations had, after all, prompted Nawaz Sharif to approach the Supreme Court to reintroduce the Zia-era ban in student politics in 1993. Similarly, the MSF’s defection to the PML-Q during the Musharraf regime served as a reminder that the PML-N’s party apparatus could be subverted and used against it by rivals in adverse political circumstances. These factors, coupled with the MSF’s organizational decline, prompted the PML-N to pursue an alternative model of student and youth engagement that promised to cultivate support without having to cede any organizational control or autonomy.

24 The main thrust of the PML-N’s attempts to attract young people revolved around the initiation of various schemes that aimed to deliver patronage to potential voters, offering them goods and services in exchange for political support. For example, one of the flagship schemes launched by the PML-N towards this end was a program, launched in 2012, that was slated to provide over 100000 free laptops to underprivileged students across Punjab at a cost of Rs. 4 billion, all of which came packaged in backpacks proclaiming their provenance as gifts from Shahbaz Sharif, the Chief Minister of the province. A related policy, launched by the Punjab government in 2012, saw Rs. 1.5 billion being allocated to provide internships to 50000 students in the province, some of

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whom were encouraged to take up positions in the Chief Minister’s Secretariat. At the same time, the Punjab government also pledged Rs. 3 billion for the provision of loans to underprivileged students. The following year, after winning the general elections of 2013, the PML-N continued its tendency to concentrate power in the hands of the Sharif family and its closest political allies, with Nawaz Sharif’s daughter Maryam Nawaz being appointed the head of the Prime Minister’s Youth Program, directing a range of different schemes aimed at providing young people loans, skills training, and tuition waivers. These schemes and others continued for the duration of the PML-N’s tenure and were constantly used by the party as a basis upon which to campaign for young voters.

25 At some level, as admitted in a 2011 interview by PML-N leader and minister Ahsan Iqbal, the PML-N’s shift to this model of campaigning was based on a recognition of how, since 2007, the PML-N’s relative indifference to students had allowed the PTI and the ISF, with their dynamic message of change and empowerment, to attract younger voters who might have otherwise been sympathetic to the PML-N. By 2018, on the eve of the general elections held that year, the PML-N’s prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi claimed that 1.1 million people had been beneficiaries of the various youth- oriented programs launched by his party, representing billions of rupees worth of spending invested in cultivating youth support. While there is currently insufficient data to indicate the extent to which this model was able to generate youth enthusiasm for the PML-N at the ballot box, the party’s entire approach to student politics over the past decade is one that runs entirely contrary to Pakistan’s earlier experiences in this area. More importantly, it represents an alternate mode of political engagement, with a well-entrenched, dynastic, and clientelistic political party foregoing often messy and difficult engagement with campus politics in favor of using the levers of state power to cultivate potential voters in a broader political atmosphere characterized by apolitical apathy and ideological emptiness.

The Insaf Students Federation: From Populism to Power

26 When Imran Khan first launched the ISF in November 2007, it was largely in response to the hostile reception he received at Punjab University when he visited its main campus in Lahore at the height of the anti-Musharraf protests. Then, the ISF was largely envisaged as a campus-based alternative to groups like the IJT which had managed to flourish in Punjab despite the formal ban on student politics. However, like the PTI itself, the ISF remained a marginal force in Pakistani politics for several years until enthusiasm and support for the party erupted in the wake of a successful rally in Lahore, held on October 30 2011, which was attended by an estimated 100000 people. That the PTI could stage such a large and successful rally in Lahore, considered the main stronghold of the PML-N, was taken as evidence of the party’s potential as a major political player, and marked the beginning of a political movement that eventually saw the PTI win the general elections of 2018.

27 From the very beginning, but especially after the 2011 Lahore rally, Imran Khan and the PTI’s appeal lay in their constant use of populist rhetoric, calling for radical change to a corrupt status quo characterized by poor governance and instability.6 Vowing that his party would wash over this system like a “tsunami,” Imran Khan relentlessly

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campaigned on an anti-corruption agenda that targeted the PPP, PML-N, and other mainstream parties, blaming them for Pakistan’s past and present travails. Over time, the PTI was able to attract heavyweight politicians who defected from rival parties. While older party workers and Imran Khan himself initially resisted the need to accommodate such candidates, the party’s underwhelming performance in 2013 (given the expectations it had created for itself) led to a reconfiguration of its strategy that saw it make judicious use of traditional constituency politicians to win power in 2018. While there have always been rumors, sometimes endorsed by leading politicians like Javed Hashmi who left the PML-N for the PTI only to leave it too in 2014, suggesting that the PTI benefitted from the support of a military establishment increasingly committed to removing the PML-N from power,7 the enthusiasm generated by the PTI, particularly among young voters, was undeniable. Indeed, polling data from the 2013 elections showed that the PTI was able to capture almost 30% of the youth vote, an impressive performance given that the party was a relatively new entrant to electoral politics (Siddiqui 2014).

28 The PTI’s success with young voters and students could arguably be attributed to its commitment to directly engaging with them. From its very inception, the ISF actively sought to recruit members from all of Pakistan’s provinces, and the party was arguably the first in Pakistan to recognize the tremendous potential of social media, making effective use of Facebook and Twitter to promote debate and discussion amongst the students and other young people joining the PTI. The PTI’s efforts to capture the youth vote were perhaps encapsulated by the party’s stated policy prior to the 2013 elections, of fielding only fresh, new faces under the age of 40 for provincial assembly seats in all of Pakistan’s provinces. The party remained true to this promise and while many of the resulting nominees were members of existing political families, the efforts made by the PTI to actively promote the voices of students and young people within its internal power structure arguably generated a sense of ownership and participation that explained the appeal it had for these groups (Siddiqui 2014; Lall 2014).

29 The PTI’s combination of anti-corruption rhetoric, apparent commitment to radical change, and active engagement with the youth was supplemented by a constant, visible, and sometimes even festive form of political contestation through mass rallies, demonstrations, and sit-ins directed against the PPP and the PML-N. In early 2013, hot on the heels of successful rallies in all of Pakistan’s major cities in which tens of thousands of attendees, many of whom were young, listened to speeches by Imran Khan and danced to campaign songs written by famous pop artists, the PTI joined a sit- in in Islamabad launched by the Pakistan Awami Tehreek which sought to force the resignation of the PPP government that was then in power. While this sit-in failed to achieve its objectives, it set the template for a months-long effort in 2014 when the PTI, protesting alleged rigging in 2013, planted thousands of its members in the heart of Islamabad to demand an investigation in the election. Night after night, Imran Khan and other PTI leaders made thunderous speeches castigating their political opponents while promising to create a “naya” (new) Pakistan should they be elected to power. These sit-ins were enthusiastically attended by PTI members from across Pakistan, were subjected to non-stop coverage in the media, and provided fodder for endless debates and discussions amongst Pakistan’s predominantly young consumers of social media. This model of campaigning also worked to great effect in 2017, on the eve of the 2018 elections, when allegations of corruption led to the dismissal of Nawaz Sharif as

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prime minister following a Supreme Court decision, relentlessly demanded by Imran Khan, which barred Sharif from holding public office.

30 However, while the past decade has shown the existence of considerable support and enthusiasm for the PTI amongst young voters, the party’s contradictions have increasingly come to the fore. Indeed, prior to the 2013 elections, the PTI’s reliance on rallies and rhetoric to mobilize support arguably came at the expense of an investment in the party’s organizational apparatus. This was demonstrated by the failure of the Tabdeeli Razakar (Agents of Change) program; initially conceived of as a platform through which younger voters supportive of the PTI could volunteer to campaign for the party’s candidates in constituencies across the country, the plan ultimately foundered due to a lack of planning. According to one senior PTI leader who would later go on to hold a cabinet position after the party came to power in 2018, the party initially believed that the enthusiasm displayed for the PTI by younger voters would mean that hundreds if not thousands of volunteers would be willing to work for the party’s election campaign in 2013. Yet, even though recruitment of Tabdeeli Razakars began in September 2012, the party’s failure to effectively train them or incorporate them within the party’s structure meant that this potential resource remained unutilized. The program itself died out after the 2013 elections.

31 More damaging than the party’s lack of planning, however, has been the PTI’s transformation into an entity emulating and ultimately reproducing status quo politics in Pakistan. As a party campaigning on a platform of change, it is paradoxical that it has had to rely on traditional patrons and brokers to consolidate vote blocs across Punjab and Pakistan; just as its legislative record in in Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa, where it won power in 2013, demonstrated a tendency towards centralization and the use of patronage to secure power that is not too dissimilar to the methods employed by the PML-N in Punjab. More significantly, as evinced by conflicts within the party between its so-called “ideological” wing comprised of old party workers and newer inductees belonging to the traditional political class, the relatively open and inclusive party structure that facilitated the participation of students and other fresh faces has slowly been replaced by a sclerotic party apparatus dominated by a few heavyweight politicians.8 Indeed, many of the pledges made by the PTI in 2013, such as its commitment to fielding young, new candidates in elections, were conspicuous by their absence in 2018 and while the party’s presence on social media remains impressive, it has gradually lost some ground to its increasingly web-savvy political opponents. Perhaps most importantly of all, in-fighting over internal party elections and the selection of electoral candidates has shown that the ISF, like the MSF, PSF, and IJT before it, has become little more than a mechanism through which aspirants to public office make use of connections with the established political elite to secure power. While there may have been considerable energy propelling the PTI to power, coming in no small part from the enthusiasm of young supporters, it remains to be seen if the logic of electoral politics will allow the PTI to contrast itself with its rivals in the years to come.

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The Democratic Students Alliance: Radicalism without Representation

32 The decline of student politics ushered in by the ban imposed by General Zia-ul-Haq was accompanied by the spread of more conservative, Islamist ideologies on campuses around the country. This was an effect of the continued presence of the IJT in universities, the dwindling influence of alternative, secular forces, and official state policy that encouraged the Islamization of life in Pakistan (Toor 2011). Indeed, one influential account of student attitudes and opinions in Pakistan, based on surveys conducted on university campuses in 2010, suggested that even relatively well- educated, middle class students were largely conservative and susceptible to radicalization by Islamist forces (Siddiqa 2010). While there are and were outliers to this general trend, such as the National College of Arts in Lahore which has long been known for possessing a relatively tolerant, diverse, and liberal campus environment, enclaves such as this have arguably only been able to survive due to concerted attempts by students, faculty, and administrators to actively prevent organizations like the IJT from developing a presence on campus. More importantly, for all its pluralism, the National College of Arts has hardly ever been a hotbed of student radicalism, its resident artists and musicians remaining largely disconnected from broader political struggles (Sankara 2010).

33 Nonetheless, despite this apparent decline in support for left-wing political ideologies amongst university students, one of the more interesting developments to emerge from the anti-Musharraf movement was the creation of small student groups, primarily organized on the campuses of elite universities like LUMS, that actively sought to nurture the tradition of progressive and democratic politics that re-emerged in that period. The activities of these disparate and often unconnected groups led to the creation of the Democratic Students Alliance in 2012, a loose collection of avowedly left-wing students that grew out of largely failed attempts to revive the NSF. With an explicit commitment to secularism, economic and social justice, and democratic politics, the DSA worked to expand its networks, with groups at LUMS and BNU, comprised of both students and faculty, reaching out to, and engaging with, potentially likeminded students in public sector universities like Lahore’s Government College, the University of Engineering and Technology (UET), and Punjab University. In early 2018, the Progressive Students Collective (PSC) was created as a parallel organization affiliated with the DSA; while the latter continued with its focus on issues of broader political concern, the PSC was set up to focus on questions related to campus life and the welfare of university and college students.

34 What distinguishes the DSA and the PSC from other organizations like the ISF is a lack of political patrons. This is partly an effect of the wider malaise of the Left in Pakistan, whereby the number and influence of left-wing political parties remains limited. Thus, while the DSA has often worked in collaboration with parties like the Awami Workers Party (AWP), one of the larger leftist parties currently operating in Pakistan, its political work remains distinct and autonomous, wholly directed by students themselves working with mentors from their faculties.9 While this has placed limitations on the ability of the DSA to engage in political work on the scale of its more well-resourced and politically connected rivals, freedom from the ideological and practical constraints imposed by the logic of electoral politics has allowed the DSA to

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mobilize around issues that might otherwise be ignored by mainstream politics, also facilitating gradual growth of a grass-roots activism steeped in an ideological commitment to progressive causes.

35 Like its contemporaries, the DSA makes extensive use of social media to facilitate debate, discussion, and organization, but also supplements this with regular meetings, study circles, and events aimed at generating interest in the campaigns it works on. Over the course of the past half-decade, activists affiliated with the DSA have held protests against religious extremism on and off campus, have joined forces with the AWP to campaign for the rights of the residents of squatter settlements in Islamabad, have worked to ensure fair wages for janitorial staff on campuses, have rallied in support of the rights of women and religious minorities, and have also protested the abduction of journalists and other dissidents who routinely go missing in Pakistan. Often, the DSA’s support for these causes runs entirely contrary to the narratives and agendas of the state and mainstream political parties, with the latter in particular choosing to avoid engaging with issues that could potentially be contentious and controversial.

36 Although the DSA represents an important voice in Pakistan’s student politics, carrying the mantle of a progressive tradition that has all but disappeared from the country’s campuses, its radical orientation and concurrent lack of engagement with electoral politics imposes inevitable limits on its power to act as a vehicle for change. While its entire model of student engagement rests on the careful and principled inculcation of progressive values amongst its adherents, with a view towards eventually generating or feeding into the mass movements of the future, it remains a relatively marginal and fragile force in contemporary Pakistani politics.10

Reflections on the Future of Student Politics in Pakistan

37 One of the more striking observations that can be made about student politics in present-day Pakistan is the apparent absence of the kinds of ideological divides that pitted organizations like the NSF, the MSF, and the IJT against each other for much of Pakistan’s history. While the IJT still exists as a force attempting to regulate social life on many of the country’s campuses, and while ethnic student organizations like the BSO and the PkSF remain active and visible (in no small part due to the ongoing repression taking place in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa as the state cracks down on militancy and ethno-national sentiment), organizations like the PYW and the ISF are largely bereft of any ideological identity. As a mechanism for the distribution of patronage, the PYW is an essentially apolitical body divorced from any actual engagement with politics and while the ISF was borne out of populist appeals for change, it and its parent party defy ideological categorization, with their actual actions reflecting the emptiness of the rhetoric that guides them. The DSA is an important exception to this role, but its limited size and scale restricts the impact it has on the political landscape.

38 In this sense, it may be fair to suggest that student bodies like the PYW and ISF are simply artefacts of the space in which they exist; while surveys show that young people in Pakistan have relatively high levels of political awareness, they remain disinclined to actually participate in politics, particularly when it is of the contentious variety

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(Lall 2014). This is what arguably creates the space in which ideologically barren organizations like the PYW and ISF can fill the void left by a previous generation of student unions. Matters are not, of course, helped by the continuing existence of a ban on student politics that has disembedded universities and colleges from their social context. Where students in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and even 1980s received a political education through the elections and campaigns fought by rival student groups, the generation that has now come of age lacks that kind of political training and is likely to remain disconnected from more substantive political engagement in the years ahead.

39 The hollowing out of student politics in this fashion has been accompanied by a paradoxical explosion of apparent political engagement on the internet and social media. While this is still a relatively new area of scholarly inquiry, preliminary research on the link between social media and political participation in Pakistan shows that younger people are more likely to be influenced by, and participate in, politics online (Javaid 2017). Yet, as even a cursory examination of the online mediascape would show, the internet and social media in Pakistan are characterized by the existence of increasingly partisan echo chambers in which rhetoric, disinformation, and superficial involvement take the place of actual political work. As argued by Jodi Dean (2009), contemporary “communicative capitalism” has resulted in forms of political engagement that fetishize opinion and contribution over debate, argument, and facts, with the simple act of participation being valued over the content and meaning of any contribution that an individual might make. This perhaps captures the nature of student politics on the internet in Pakistan, whereby the strikes, protests, and forms of direct action that characterized an older model of movements have come to be replaced by clicks, tweets, and likes that arguably have little impact on the real world. Perhaps the best illustration of this comes from how, every day, partisans of the PTI and PML-N take to Twitter to “trend” hashtags castigating each other, engaging in tens of thousands of online interactions that are notable for how little activity they seem to generate on campuses and in the streets of Pakistan.

40 Contemporary student politics in Pakistan also takes place in a context where the state has gradually but inexorably clamped down on dissent and alternative viewpoints. While Pakistan’s transition to democracy in 2008 opened the possibility of the emergence of a more democratic, participatory, and accountable politics, subsequent events have shown such hopes to be premature. In addition to allegedly abducting bloggers, journalists, and other critical voices, the state in Pakistan has also attacked campuses themselves; in 2015, for example, an event scheduled to be held at LUMS discussing missing people in Balochistan was cancelled following pressure applied to the university administration by the country’s security services, even as faculty associated with the event were vilified in the media. Similarly, faculty at the same university who were suspected of harboring sympathies for the Pashtoon Tahaffuz Movement, a Pashtun group protesting the brutality of the military during its anti- militancy campaigns in Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa, received phone calls and threatening messages from members of Pakistan’s intelligence services. In 2016 and 2017, one lecturer associated with the DSA was forced out of both Punjab University and Government College for his alleged anti-state activities, and was even picked up by intelligence operatives and held for several hours after a night-time raid on his residence in 2018. All these instances, and there are more, demonstrate a clear desire on the part of the state to silence dissenting voices on university campuses, and to stifle academic freedom in the name of national security. In conclusion, therefore, the

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trajectory likely to be taken by Pakistan’s student politics in the future is likely to see an entrenchment of the processes described above; the emergence of mainstream student organizations bereft of ideology and hamstrung by the logic of electoral competition coexisting with smaller, increasingly endangered bodies struggling to at least continue an older tradition of progressive politics.

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NOTES

1. As discussed below, the ban on student politics in Pakistan was introduced by the Zia-ul-Haq regime to blunt the radical potential of student movements. Except for a brief period from 1988 to 1993, the ban on student politics has remained in place, with its chief effect being the elimination of formal student unions connected to political parties or engaged in other forms of political activity. The one exception to this has been the IJT, whose ideological affinity with the Zia regime led to it being excluded from the ban, and “underground” student organizations— often ethnic—that challenge the state. Additionally, while older student unions and organizations continued to exist on paper (briefly being resuscitated from 1988-1993), the limits imposed on their activities—such as bans on rallies, protests, and electoral campaigning on and off campus—have gradually led to their obsolescence. 2. Examples include the Democratic Students Federations (DSF), the Peoples Students Federation (PSF) and the Muslim Students Federation (MSF); all of which were aligned with political parties prior to the ban on student unions imposed in 1993, and all of which are now either defunct or marginal. 3. The MSF’s decision to support the anti-Ayub movement was prompted in part by extant splits within the Muslim League that came to a head in the 1965 elections in which Ayub and his Convention Muslim League competed against Fatima Jinnah’s Councilor Muslim League. The IJT, like the Jamaat-i-Islami, opposed the regime over its supposedly secular orientation. 4. An example of this can be seen in how local government laws passed in all four of Pakistan’s provinces between 2012 and 2014 now make it extremely difficult for local politicians elected from rival parties to receive development funding and facilitate service delivery without the consent of the party in power at the provincial level. In the context of Pakistan patron-client politics, this sends a signal to voters showing that votes for candidates belonging to parties not in power at the provincial level are essentially wasted, inducing voters to instead select politicians who will be more likely to deliver on promises of service delivery due to their alignment with the ruling party. See Javid (2019). A new, less exclusionary local government law was passed in Punjab by the new PTI government in 2019 but had not been implemented when this article was written. 5. The defeat of the PML-N in the 2018 general elections arguably demonstrates the limits to the ability of incumbent parties to tilt the electoral landscape in their favor. 6. The “populist” label attached to the PTI is derived from its approach to politics; emphasizing its status as a party working outside of traditional politics and appealing directly to masses disaffected by establishment “elites,” the PTI has styled itself as a party articulating popular discontent with the political status quo. This is perhaps best demonstrated by its emphasis on holding past rulers accountable and its pledges to radically transform Pakistan for the better— without necessarily providing concrete proposals for doing so. See Mulla (2017). 7. Allegations of this sort clouded the 2018 elections, when organizations like the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and the European Union’s Election Observation Monitors concurred that the PML-N and other parties had suffered at the hands of pre-poll rigging engineered by the military establishment and designed to propel the PTI to power. 8. These insights into the factional conflict within the PTI, and the effect it has had on student politics, have been gleaned from interviews with PTI leaders and activists conducted by the author from 2014-2016. 9. The linkages between the DSA and AWP are arguably derived from how the organizations share some members. In particular, some of the DSA’s most prominent activists and members were or are part of the AWP. 10. Despite this, the PSC was able to successfully hold a large rally, called the Student Solidarity March, in Lahore on November 29 2019. The participants of this march were mostly drawn from

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public sector universities and while the demands made during the event primarily focused on the revival of student unions and other campus-related issues, space was also given to articulating broader political concerns related to, for example, the grievances of Pakistan’s ethnic minorities. The march was also notable for the explicitly left-wing rhetoric and slogans that were on display. While the long-term effects of the march remain to be seen, the state’s reaction has been a mixture of accommodation and repressions, with promises to restore student unions being accompanied by the persecution and imprisonment of key faculty and student organizers.

ABSTRACTS

Despite the over three decades of repression in Pakistan under the regimes of General Zia-ul-Haq and General Musharraf Student, student politics began its revival with the emergence of student- led activist groups during the anti-Musharraf movement of 2007. While formal student “unions” remain banned in the country, student and “youth” collectives aligned with various political parties have started to play an increasingly visible and vocal role in everyday politics and mobilization. This paper seeks to contrast three of the main student organizations currently operating in Punjab, namely the PML-N Youth Wing (PYW), the PTI’s Insaf Student Federation (ISF), and the left-wing Democratic Students Alliance (DSA). By focusing on the broader social and political context, characterized by state repression and systematic efforts to undermine student politics, in which these organizations operate, this paper argues that efforts by mainstream political parties to cultivate support amongst young people today reinforce patterns of political engagement and contestation that perpetuate the depoliticization of Pakistan’s students and further entrench the country’s framework of centralized patronage politics. This is particularly true for the PYW, whose approach works to incorporate students within the workings of its parent party, and the ISF, whose populist appeals have, over time, given way to a pragmatic politics bearing considerable resemblance to that of the PYW. The exception here is the DSA, an avowedly progressive and radical organization that remains committed to activism, but whose impact is limited by the constraints imposed by the wider political framework.

INDEX

Keywords: student politics; democracy; Pakistan; patronage; populism; protests

AUTHOR

HASSAN JAVID Associate Professor of Sociology at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

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The Spillovers of Competition: Value-based Activism and Political Cross-fertilization in an Indian Campus

Jean-Thomas Martelli

1 Situated at the crossroads of various biographical and historical dynamics, contemporary student activism in Indian universities is either idealized as a vessel for grievance-based countercultural politics (Henry 2018; Pathania 2018; Poonam 2018) or trivialized as a platform for the accumulation or the reproduction of wider dominant sociopolitical realities (Jeffrey 2010) based on caste (Kumar 2012; Young, Kumar and Jeffery 2016) or gender (Lukose 2009).1 Student activism in the Indian context is understood variously as a service lane of wider politics (Hazary 1987), as a platform strengthening existing social stratifications (Jeffrey 2008), or as a reified cultural artefact (Pathania 2018). By not accounting for specific campus socio-political dynamics, such perspectives overlook the processes by which select residential universities become prolific spaces of political socialization. Such mechanisms are critical in enabling sections of educated youth to reinterpret existing political narratives. Because they under-report the grounded micro-processes that fuel the distinctiveness of shared political spaces, existing approaches are ill-equipped to identify the specific transmission of political understandings in Indian campuses when compared to other social spaces.

2 This article examines the role of campus spaces in the gradual politicization of associational ties among students. It explores the conditions by which the social arrangements of campus spaces favor the emergence of dissenting forms of political participation. I understand dissent here as the ability to mount symbolic political challenges through communicating the message of difference to the rest of society (Melucci 1996). Following Klandermans (1997), I define participation in political life as the affective, normative, ideational and diachronic aspects of one’s involvements in collective action, which entails the networks, psychological engagements and resources

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that sustain them (Brady et al. 1995). Political participation in JNU is operationalized through observing the frequency of student attendance in political events as well as the self-declared affiliations of students to political groups on campus (Martelli and Ari 2018). In the ambit of the study, I use the term politicization as the process of “gradual transformation of political attitudes in light of prolonged exposure to a campus environment” (Martelli and Ari 2018:263). Here politicization of daily student life is understood as the sequence of politicizing events that gradually restructure the understanding individuals have of the society in which they thrive (Stekelenburg 2013).

3 By engaging with the case of student politics at a flagship postgraduate and residential pan-Indian university, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), I argue that competitive party politics drives inter-cohort political socialization in residential campuses while nurturing political spillovers, defined as the diffusion mechanisms and spinoff processes accounting for the emergence of new cycles of protest, mobilization and political awareness (McAdam 1995). Through fostering a participatory community culture based on the circulation of collective practices among politically socialized micro-cohorts (Whittier 1997), the competition between student organizations at JNU provides special impetus for critiques going beyond party-lines by nurturing ideological cross-fertilization. While organized political competition, facilitated by the on-campus concentration of students free from many social constraints (Hirsch 1990) enables the circulation of political capital among student batches, I show that dissension increases in such politicization as processes of ideological cross-fertilization emerge. Overall, political spillovers are likely to produce dissent because they create multiple discursive perspectives, contribute to the sustenance of transformative group- based political experiences, and ultimately strengthen distinctive political identifications and worldviews on campus.

4 The empirical analysis shows that these spillovers lead to the emergence of counter- discourses in addition to generating mutual political influence (Meyer and Whittier 1994). I suggest that dissonant claims in a sociologically diverse campus such as JNU (Martelli and Parkar 2018) are better understood as the byproduct of political competition rather than the result of the oppression of dominant groups (Scott 1990) outside and inside campus.

5 The manuscript combines archival methods and an ethnography of JNU from 2014 till date. The ethnographic insight builds on participant observation, semi-structured face- to-face interviews with former and current JNU student activists, professors, and “common students.” My preliminary insights are based on sixteen months of fieldwork at JNU (February 2014-May 2015) in which I lived in a shared hostel room on campus, attended classes and political events, stayed with activists and travelled with them in their numerous political campaigns both in Delhi and outside the capital. The fieldwork was complemented by four short visits to Delhi in March 2016 and December 2018. A new round of interviews was conducted in 2019 as part of an exhibition project on the legacies of campus politics in India in which most respondents’ interviews were filmed or recorded as well as transcribed.

6 As part of my ethnographic work, I progressively collected pamphleteer material (pamphlets, posters, manifestos, reports, press releases, letters to administration, statements, posters, wall paintings, murals, songs, slogans) from various JNU student organizations and individuals who had kept personal records of their activist years. The 73,782 documents, covering the period 1973-2019, were subsequently digitized,

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OCRized (text was extracted) and archived on a new freely accessible online platform, the “Pamphlet Repository for Changing Activism” (PaRChA) (2019).

7 The choice of JNU as a case study has several advantages. Less prone to engaging in interest-based and muscle politics, its strand of student politics displays strong signs of ideological forms of activism. Such propensity makes JNU a most-likely case to observe the mechanisms of ideational political spillovers occurring in campus premises. JNU, a public-funded residential central university is admittedly different from other Indian institutions for higher education in several respects: it is postgraduate oriented, English-medium and perceived as a prestigious social science institution located in the capital city. On the other hand, however, the administrative functioning of the university as well as residential nature of campus student politics is generalizable to other social-science public institutions in the country. The longstanding tradition of affirmative action in JNU as well as its pan-India scope makes the university truly representative of the sociological fabric of the country. Additionally, the variety of student political groups active on the JNU campus embraces broad sections of the rich ideological spectrum permeating politics. In those respects, JNU can be seen as a ‘mini- India’. Last but not least, because the current government pronounced the university as a den of anti-national dissenters, it has turned the campus into the all-encompassing symbol of value-based student political participation in India.

8 I divide the rest of the article into two distinct sections. First, I discuss the relevance of the study of political spillovers to the understanding of political movements and student politics in South Asia. After drawing the contours of student competition at JNU, I empirically elucidate the mechanisms that activate and maintain political socialization on campus. I argue that the political character of JNU is fashioned by the on-campus rivalry between student outfits of political parties, including left, Dalit and Hindutva groups, whose competitiveness engenders discourses relying on outbidding tactics while simultaneously fueling ideological cross-fertilization among affiliated and non-affiliated student groups.

Locating the Distinctiveness of Politics in Campus Spaces

9 In this section I examine the conditions under which it is possible to consider campuses as sites conducive to the emergence of distinctive political capital. Through a discussion on the centrality of political competition and its nonviolent outbidding logic, I mobilize the concept of political spillover to make sense of the manner in which intra-campus political rivalry paves the way for the formation of identifiable political idioms. The outbidding logic indicates strong advocacy in the name of a more genuine political line rooted in the interests of a political group (Bajpai and Farooqui 2018:293) supporting the demise of ideological moderation (Rabushka and Shepsle 1972:117). The subsequently produced spillovers are understood as the diffusion from one group to another of a range of political characteristics including ideas, frames, collective identities and cultures of mobilization (Meyer and Whittier 1994:278).

10 While many explorations of student life focus on the socio-political stratification and merit-making on campuses across the country,2 contemporary student movements emerging from Indian universities are receiving increased academic attention (Martelli and Garalytė, this issue). While the content and rationale of political initiatives vary

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greatly across campus spaces, the identity-based as well as value-based leanings of these movements shatter previous understandings of student politics in India. Indeed, they suggest that campuses are relevant sites for the production of political idioms.

11 However seemingly commonsensical, this claim departs from the body of scholarship on Indian and South Asian student politics. Indeed, the first approach to “student unrest” in India, emerging in the late 1960s and pioneered by Philip Altbach (1968a; 1968b; 1970), tended to focus on the “non-political” dimension of youth participation, that is the non-ideological— material—and career aspirations of student political participants. The overall emphasis was on student insubordination to parental rules (Rege 1971; Sinha and Gangrade 1971; Singhvi 1972; Malik and Marquette 1974; Shils 1974). Until the 1980s, they pictured agitated students as being in conflict with older generations (Cormack 1961; Gusfield 1970; Di Bona 1966; Singh 1968; Ross 1969; Vidyarthi 1976), constituting an undisciplined demand group (Kabir 1958; Banerjee 1980, 1984; Rudolph and Rudolph 1987), focusing on material and administrative grievances (Altbach 1969, 1970a, 1970b; Vidyarthi 1976; Chopra 1978), turning their back on their highly nationalist pre-independence peers (Chandra 1938; Reddy 1947; Hazary 1987; Rajimwale 2001) and acting as a spring board for prospective leadership (Hazary 1987; Singh 1974; John 1969). As noted by Karnena (2019), “student indiscipline” was the hegemonic framework to understand student politics in India.

12 Disengaging with the view of youth as turbulent unfinished adults, a new stream of studies progressively concentrated on youth as cohorts engaging creatively with the socio-political norms surrounding them (Nisbett 2007). They approached Indian campuses as a space where exogenous social dynamics crystallize, whether this is consumerism (Lukose 2009), semi-permanent limbo (Jeffrey 2010), economic despair (Poonam 2018), pre-marital sexual conduct (Osella and Osella 1998), party politics (Hazary 1987) or the consolidation of primary socializations— that is the effects of attitudes inherited during childhood as a result of parental upbringing (Kumar 2014; Kumar 2017).

13 In addition to this, recent scholarship continues to depict student politics in South Asia as an articulation of interest-based politics, dealing mostly with campus accommodation, administrative efficiency, job prospects, daily amenities and caste- based leadership-making (Shah 2004; Kumar 2012; Kumar 2014). Jeffrey and colleagues account for cultures of waiting among middle-class educated men (predominantly Jats) in India’s Western Uttar Pradesh, showing how they reproduce their dominance at the local level, mainly through using campus politics to channel contracts for businessmen and seats for students in private local universities (Jeffrey 2008, 2010; Jeffrey, Jeffery and Jeffery 2008; Jeffrey and Young 2012; Jeffrey and Young 2013 Young, Kumar and Jeffrey 2016; Jeffrey and Dyson 2016). Similarly, in Bangladesh the focus is put on the way student organizations gain power through Bangladeshi-specific muscle-politics (Suykens and Islam 2013; Suykens 2016, 2017; Jackman 2018; Suykens 2018) and resource allocation such as on-campus accommodation distribution (Rozario 2001; Ruud 2010; Christiansen 2012; Suykens and Islam 2013; Andersen 2014; Ruud 2014; Andersen 2016). Student politics appears there as an extension of party politics, additionally building on caste-based economic capital or middle-class masculinities (Lukose 2009).

14 Against the grain of such perspectives, which places student agency (Klemenčič 2015) into the tightening noose of pragmatic politics-as-usual, recent evidence indicates a

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revival of prefigurative value- and identity-based forms of student activism in South Asia. While acknowledging that student activism serves as an instrument of power assertion in South Asia, these studies unearth alternative processes of political self- formation. Snellinger (2018a) discusses sacrificial tropes among young revolutionary Maoists in Nepal3, tracing the journey of their political ideology. She portrays youth who had to renegotiate the moral idioms of their student activist years in the context of a post-civil war peace process characterized by patronage and the need to build career-based networks. Similarly, Pathania (2018) describes how student participation contributes to wider regional political regeneration. Through compiling existing accounts (Gundimeda 2009; Natrajan 2011, 2018; Garalytė 2015) he provides a picture on how several generations of Dalit-led cultural politics in Osmania University crucially contributed to the long-running mobilization for the creation of the Indian state of Telangana. From this it emerges that the mobilization of Indian youth is indispensable when rallying around identity-based issues. This includes demands to end anti-Dalit atrocities (Teltumbde 2017; Pai 2018) in Una (Gujarat) or Saharanpur (Uttar Pradesh), the inclusion of communities (such as the Patels in Gujarat) in affirmative-action quotas (Mitra 2017) or the assertion of regional identities through building on linguistic (Subramanian 1999) and ethnic claims (Baruah 1999; Deka 2015).

15 These are clear indications that universities matter politically. As exemplified by the youth-centric turmoil that surrounded the suicide of the doctoral student and Dalit activist Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad in 2016 (Henry 2018), the campus appears to be a potentially conducive space for the crafting of alternative political discourses. By way of pointing out the importance of Aligarh Muslim University (Uttar Pradesh) in the emergence of the militant Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), Ahmad (2009) shows not only the centrality of the university in the formation of the political identity of Muslims in India, but also highlights the possibility of contentious voices emerging within that campus space (Gautier 2018; Gautier, this issue). In Pakistan too, key university spaces (i.e. Punjab University, University of Peshawar) seem to emerge as instrumental territories for the development of new trans-nationalist political ideas about Islam (Nelson 2011). Certain campus spaces also appear instrumental in reshaping online and offline gender-based political identities: demanding safety (Dey 2018), challenging moral policing surrounding the public disclosure of romance and loitering (Kapur 2012; Murali 2016; Savory Fuller 2018) and empowering women to reclaim freedom of movement and access to public spaces at any time—for example by challenging a hostel curfew (Roy 2016) or accessing male-dominated tea shops (Poonam 2018). The sporadic emergence of young queer collectives in dialogue with several Women Studies Centers has enabled select campuses of prestigious Indian educational institutions to become platforms for the inceptive politicization of alternative sexualities (Dutoya 2016).

16 While acknowledging the importance of campuses in the local production of modalities of political representation, these recent works do not address the particular processes by which political idioms are generated in campus spaces. Pathania (2018) for instance argues that at Osmania University in Hyderabad, a “culture of resistance was created by intellectuals (students, alumni and teachers),” but engages neither with why “intellectuals” joined Osmania University nor on the processes by which certain student activists became “intellectuals” within the campus. Others (Henry 2018; Poonam 2018) do not grapple with the micro-processes of political socialization, understood here as the gradual process through which political knowledge is acquired

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and negotiated, leading to the development of idiosyncratic views of the political world (Wong and Tseng 2008; Fillieule 2013).

17 Engaging with such concerns, a recent account (Martelli and Baris 2018) indicates that exposure to campus gradually transforms the political attitudes of students at Jawaharlal Nehru University. The ethnographic part of the study argues that such political transformations are driven by an intergenerational process of peer-to peer socialization, in which politicized senior students progressively influence the attitude of younger cohorts. Value-based politicization is made possible because politically active seniors associated with student organizations maintain prolonged daily interactions with the student body through channeling and mediating student grievances. The study concludes that “sustained activist competition and rivalry, channeled by well-organized student organizations, create multiple incentives for progressive partisan identification”(Martelli and Parkar 2018:264) Further evidence (Martelli and Parkar 2018) demonstrates that such student politicization at JNU is pervasive and not structured around traditional caste divides, even though women and upper-class students tend to be less affected by it. Martelli (2019) also argues that in the context of rivalry between various affiliated political groups, the advertising of one’s self-transformation enables activists to claim successful representation of sociologically diverse student communities.

18 As evidenced by several studies, group-level socialization can enable in situ political polarization, shared experiences and collective consciousness-raising among students (Hirsch 1990; Fantasia and Hirsch 1995; Leach and Haunss 2008). Campuses are ecologically useful for recruitment and mobilization because students live together and enjoy free time (Zhao 1998; van Dyke 1998; Enriquez 2014; Earl, Maher and Elliott 2017). This resonates with the literature on “safe spaces” (Gamson 1996; Hill-Collins 2000), “free spaces” (Evans and Boyte 1992; Couto 1993; Groch 2001; Futrell and Simi 2004; Johnston and Noakes 2005), “movement halfway houses” (Morris 1986; Rupp and Taylor 1987), “cultures of solidarity” (Fantasia 1988), “cultural laboratories” (Mueller 1994), “cultural havens” (Hirsch 1990; Fantasia and Hirsch 1995),“submerged networks” (Melucci 1989; Mueller 1994), “abeyance structures” (Taylor 1989; Taylor and Rupp 1993; Taylor and Crossley 2013), “oppositional subcultures” (Johnston 1991) and “social movement communities” (Buechler 1990; Taylor and Whittier 1992; Taylor and Rupp 1993; Taylor and Whittier 1995). While I do not assume the political separateness of the campus from the broader social fabric, I use this literature to examine empirically the localized metamorphosis of existing ideologies circulating in South Asia, shaped by the competition of campus-specific political outfits connected with the broader Indian party system.

19 In order to understand what drives everyday intergenerational political change in campus spaces I mobilize the concept of political spillover, i.e. the effects and influences of political movements—big or small—on each other (Giugni 2013). More specifically, I examine how attempts by rival student groups affiliated with broader political outfits to outbid each other (Mitchell, Evans and O’Leary 2009; Bajpai and Farooqui 2018) enable the “spinning off” of political initiatives, drawing critical impetus from original initiator movements (McAdam 1995). I suggest that a necessary condition for the emergence of political spillovers is the micro-processes that are set in motion by dense activist networks at work on campus on a daily basis.

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20 The term spillover emerges from the social movement literature (Chabot and Duyvendak 2002; Bunce et Wolchik 2006). Engagements with the concept attempt to map the relationship between various political initiatives that belong to broader movement families (Tilly 1983) or develop in relatively coherent political scenes (Learch and Haunss 2008). Meyer and Whittier (1994) indicate that in order for spillovers to exist, a physical overlap between activist communities needs to be in place, facilitating the sharing of personnel, tactics and ideological idioms. The pre- existence of shared participatory cultures and common gathering spaces are important elements of the environments through which political spillovers emanate (Whittier 2013). More specifically, those particular geographies enable the institutionalization of cultural frames allowing for ideological and network intersections (Polletta 1999; 2004).

21 After briefly presenting student politics at JNU, I introduce debates around gender issues in order to trace the emergence of political spillovers within the campus space. The process by which political spillovers disseminate on campus is further examined through a discussion of political outbidding as well as ideological cross-fertilization among affiliated and non-affiliated student groups. By examining how streams of left, Dalit, Hindutva and environmentalist discourses interbreed as a result of political competition, I make sense of how such student politics at JNU becomes distinctive, dissonant and dissenting.

Dissonant Activism and Political Spillovers at the JNU

Campus Historical Background: Student Politics at JNU, from Resonant to Dissonant

22 JNU arguably occupies a particular space in both the academic and political landscape. Just a few years after JNU was established at the end of the 1960s, students at this residential4 postgraduate centrally funded university— mostly in the social sciences and humanities— started electing candidates displaying Marxist leanings thus becoming, in the collective opinion, a bastion of the student left along with a few other campuses such as Jadavpur University, Presidency University (West Bengal), Osmania University (Telangana) and several colleges in Kerala (Aikara 1977). Most commentators, whether enthusiasts or skeptics, consider JNU from its inception as a landmark in youth politics in India (Batabyal 2015). It has been recognized as a socialist bastion (Pattnaik 1982), a space of academic and political dissent through debate and discussion (Shakil 2004), a place where professors preach new-left ideologies (Bhasin 1974; Suroor 2011) and an environment in which activism is an integral part of student life (Lochan 1996).

23 This routinely politicized university became a symbol of free speech in 2016 after the police arrested several student activists on the grounds of sedition, triggering mass- scale protests while deeply impacting the media discourse (Sharma 2016; Thapar 2016; Deshpande 2016; Chatterjee 2016). The pro-Hindu nationalist nexus on campus—in tune with the government at the center—instituted fines for critical teachers, prevented political activities of leftist unions, established a school for Sanskrit studies, installed a not-yet-inaugurated statue of Hindutva icon Swami Vivekananda, and opened a school

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of management which bears the name of a former BJP prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee (Kidwai 2017; Paranjape 2017; Ghosh 2018; Sundar 2018; Beliappa 2018).

24 As a result of its largely “anti-right” political credentials, the University was severely penalized by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. As a research university with a majority of Master’s and MPhil-PhD degrees, JNU saw the number of seats offered to students wishing to enter the Master’s or PhD program drop by 84% in 2017, from 1,234 to 194 (Chaudhry 2017; Shankar 2017). The JNU Teachers’ Association (JNUTA) claimed that selection committees were de facto decided by the Vice- Chancellor (VC), more notably after he revised academic rules in order to unilaterally add names to the panel of experts in charge of faculty recruitment (Regulation M-18, Resol. No.6.11/EC/18.09.2017). However, a recent High Court order ruled that the VC’s suggested names must be first recommended by the Academic Council compelling the JNU administration to abide by its earlier procedure (The Hindu May 17, 2019). Further control by the administration was achieved through nominating school deans and chairpersons without respecting customary seniority principles (JNUTA, October 1, 2017). Along with the VC they do have voting rights for the recruitment of faculty members, and they nominate other similar-minded voters, including a visitor and an observer from the SC/ST community (Chetan, interview 2019, The Indian Express June 25, 2018). Because of the lack of Hindutva-compatible professors, the VC also attempted to appoint as Chairperson of a center a faculty member from another center, but that decision was later reversed in court (NDTV July 30, 2019).

25 As Jayal (2019) suggests, since very few academically minded faculty candidates have an ideologically compatible profile, recruitment panels tend to compromise with professional credentials. As a result, and in order to accelerate the political denaturing of JNU, the administration proceeded to recruit pro-Hindutva teachers (Shankar 2018) and academically under-qualified academics—sometimes even plagiarizers (Mahaprashasta 2018; Dasgupta 2018). It also stopped enforcing the rules that JNU had set for diversity in student admission which combined reservation quotas and deprivation points based on geographical backwardness and gender (Vishnu 2017). The new recruitment procedure is strongly disadvantageous to Dalits, Adivasi and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) who have represented almost 50% of entrants in the past and numbered only 7% in 2018 (Nagarajan 2017). The Vice Chancellor also decided to freeze academic advancement and promotions, a decision that pushed some victims to bring the case to court (Kidwai 2018). All in all, the academic and political life at JNU is marked by systematic administrative obstruction, and going to court has become the norm in many administrative matters, including for the declaration of Jawaharlal Nehru Students’ Union (JNUSU) election results (Hindustan Times, September 7, 2019).

26 While the political history of student activism at JNU and the threats it faces have evolved from year to year, distinct phases of political participation emerge since the university’s inceptive’s years (Martelli 2018). As the following phases demonstrate, JNU Students’ Union has been an “object of desire” of various political organizations, as their parties see the university as a valuable space for recruiting ideologically sound youth and organize campaigns in the capital. Batabyal (2015) suggests that JNU’s establishment first reflected the ambitions of center-left socialists (1964–1975). In 1971, a generation of highly educated upper-class students created a politicized Students’ Union, deeply influenced by Marxist thought. This Union took an active part in the affairs of the University from the beginning of JNU student politics (Martelli 2018).

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After the Emergency, the Union and the political narrative it professed reflected more clearly the regional domination of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—CPI(M)—in power in Kerala and West Bengal (1977–2004). In the 2000s however, the Union shifted allegiance to the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)—CPI(ML)—a former Naxalite Bihari-centric organization converted to parliamentarism (2005–2016). Finally, after 2016, rival left counter narratives joined hands in order to preserve the secular and liberal values of JNU student activism, against the concerted attempts by state and administration-led Hindu nationalists to eradicate them (Martelli 2018).

Figure 1. Political Affiliation of Elected Presidents of JNU Students’ Union 1971-2020

The main elected student organisations are: SFI: Students’ Federation of India, student wing of Communist Party of India Marxist CPI(M), AISA: All India Students Association, student wing of Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist CPI(ML), FT: Free Thinkers, independent student organization, AISF: All India Students Federation, student wing of Communist Party of India CPI, ABVP: Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, student wing of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh RSS, NSUI: National Students’ Union of India, student wing of the Indian National Congress. Other student organisations at JNU are: DSF: Democratic Students’ Federation, associated with Left Collective and Youth Bengal, BAPSA: Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students’ Association, sympathizer of the Bahujan Samaj Party BSP, DSU: Democratic Students’ Union, supporter of the Communist Party of India Maoist CPI(Maoist), UDSF: United Dalit Students’ Forum, sympathizer of the BSP Bahujan Samaj Party BSP.

27 In the shadow of these major historical developments, various different historical sub- phases animated student political life at JNU (Martelli 2018). First, the repression against JNU students by the police under former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s regime led to the establishment of an anti-Congress front on campus (1975–1983), structured mainly by the competition between the Students’ Federation of India (SFI)—affiliated with CPI(M)—and the Free Thinkers (FT). In the wake of the then student movement spearheaded by veteran freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan in various North Indian states, FT introduced to JNU student politics more vernacular understandings of the left, notably through popularizing the Lohiate socialist tradition (Anand Kumar, interview 2019). While “opposing” the left, FT incorporated many liberal and argumentative values of the left. For example, a press report of a JNUSU presidential debate notes that “The organization [FT] would work towards restoration of the tradition of debates and seminars in JNU” (PaRChA archive N-968, 1992). Back in the

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1970s, the emerging grammar of JNU political competition was structured by the contest between SFI and FT, although a third Trotskyite group, the Marxist Forum was there to “inject serious discussion on history of communism” (Gyan Prakash, interview 2019). Second, for an extended period of time, the dominance (see Figure 1) of the SFI was challenged by mostly independent student groups including FT (1983– 1991). Third, these contending non-affiliated groups—which range from FT to Solidarity—were progressively replaced on campus by pan-Indian student organizations. These included the Congress-led National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) and, more importantly, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) (1991– 2004), i.e. the All Indian Student Council, which is affiliated to the student wing of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) (the National Volunteer Organization) which is the leading organization of the Hindu nationalist Sangh Parivar (family of such organizations).

28 The growing institutional and political pressure on activism led JNU student organizations to re-examine the well-established campus cleavages within left political outfits. In a first of its kind alliance, in September 2016, the CPI(ML)-affiliated All India Students’ Association (AISA) and the SFI joined contested students’ union elections together (India.com, September 7, 2016). A year later, a splinter group of SFI, the Democratic Students’ Federation (DSF), joined the alliance and in 2018 All India Students’ Federation (AISF) decided to do the same (Press Trust of India, September 5, 2018).

29 Running parallel to this is the emergence of a new Dalit-centric oppositional force on campus, the Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students’ Association (BAPSA). BAPSA participated in the student elections for the first time in 2015 (Kumar 2018) with spectacular electoral results in 2016 and 2017. BAPSA eroded the reach of the left by building on the support of marginalized sections of the campus (Imran 2018) against what they portray as Savarna (non-outcaste Hindus, in particular forward castes) Marxists (Shobhana 2016).

30 Overall, the turn toward liberalization of the 1990s and the progressive decline of parliamentary communism in India—except in the state of Kerala—have transformed Indian society and politics while gradually narrowing the political alleys of Indian left activists. Consequently, the ideological backbone of JNU student politics has become increasingly alienated from the overall Indian political landscape. For many, dominant student politics at JNU now appears as ideologically “dissonant” and inherently anti- establishment (The Economic Times, November 4, 2015).

31 Keeping this in mind, I use the social movement analytical lens to outline the processes by which such political dissonance has been historically constituted. I place emphasis on the importance of political competition in forging and circulating dissenting political idioms on campus. The common empirical thread of the investigation will be student politics around gender issues at JNU, but a few inroads into campus debates on social inclusiveness and environmental activism will be included in the analytical matrix.

Evidence of Political Spillovers: Outbidding Processes at JNU

32 Soon after I arrived on campus in 2014, I started interviewing a small group of gay, lesbian and transgender students with higher urban educational credentials who had

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decided to oppose the institutional discourse on gender at JNU. Dhanak (rainbow), a queer collective created in 2012 as a private support group, had decided to “come out” and hold public meetings soon after the Supreme Court of India temporarily recriminalized same sex intercourse on 11 December 2013 (Vikram, interview 2015; see also Ghosh 2017). Taking over Anjuman, a defunct queer organization started in 2003 advocating the recognition of gender identities going beyond male/female dichotomies, Dhanak members felt that campus representation neglected non- normative sexualities and the stigmas attached to such orientations. In this subsection, I present the case of Golu—a frail and usually taciturn man from Rajasthan—who had learned, according to his friends, to assert his gay identity while studying his MPhil and PhD at JNU:

So we [Dhanak] wanted to be safe, safe, safe. Then what we heard was this complete inaction and complete othering, which was being done by the Students’ Union, which was the point where I got very furious and we had this meeting and we decided that probably it is high time that the campus really needs to know that there are queer students in this campus. […] In a department like mine, [in which] the only form of inequality we talked about were poverty and unemployment and all these issues, which are very relevant issues. Nobody… or gender, if we talked about women issues, never talked about queer issues… Never a mention. It’s like we have… complete ignorance and dis-acknowledgement of the fact that thing… even can exist.

33 The goal of Dhanak—which a couple of years later became inactive due in part to internal conflict—was not only self-representation but to be represented better by existing student organizations. Dhanak supported the SFI candidate for the election of the two student representatives in the then GSCASH,5 and the candidate in turn criticized the rival organization (AISA) accusing it of “suffocating diversity” on campus (SFI pamphlet, September 3, 2014). Dhanak served in 2014 as a queer pressure group, lobbying for a shift in the safety-based discourse on gender and advocating for practical reforms such as the increase in number of queer sensitive staff in the JNU counseling cell and the setting up of AIDS screening material in the campus health center (Dhanak pamphlet, April 9, 2015).

34 The way in which queer activists affected representation was utterly performative; it involved the organization of queer movie festivals, the “rainbowing” of the campus (coloring the campus trees, stairs and building with the colors of the LGBT+ flag) and the reading of personal material (poems, diary entries, songs) in order to make their issues known to students and affiliated activists.

35 One such event was “Talk to me,” a public performance organized by Dhanak a day before the University General Body Meeting—the public meeting in which GSCASH contestants go on stage to address JNU students. On this occasion Andheri, the initiator of the Dhanak group, began talking first and after a couple of minutes, he removed his tight superman t-shirt to reveal another one, pink in color. The scene, symbolizing his coming out in a “hetero-patriarchal” environment was witnessed by a crowd of students and most of the GSCASH candidates. Members of the Dhanak group and a couple of outsiders came to the center of the circle and told their stories.

36 In between personal narratives, affiliated candidates across the board showed their interest in the queer movement. Taking the initiative to question the activists, several contestants displayed a diligent curiosity; SFI candidate Kotaya asked what the letter

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“I” in the acronym LGBTIQ stood for and AISA candidate Shrini requested the definition of the concept “intersectionality.” In the attempt to represent queer interests, left student groups had to win the trust of the queer group. Political activists, in particular those with a left affiliation, worked hard to champion the LGBTIQ cause. Golu made no mystery that the final goal of the meeting was to educate the left on the queer issue:

Later on what we found was everybody, every person who was contesting for GSCASH started talking about it all of a sudden, without probably even understanding what queer rights is about. This is why we had to organize last year this event called ‘Talk to me.’ Just before the GSCASH election we came up with this… where we invited all these contestants, who were contesting for the post of GSCASH to come to us because everybody was talking very progressive—we want gay rights, we want lesbian rights—but do you understand what exactly are you going to do?

37 In order to further outline political spillovers in campus, I use text analysis as an inductive tool for grasping semiotic differences (McKee 2003) in pamphlet-writing on campus. Concretely, I present word distributions in the PaRChA corpus to outline relevant salient features (Mayaffre 2016). Here, the mix of ethnographic and textual insights embraces a common epistemological framework, as both approaches account for the subjective meanings of social action, student activism and political learning (Bray 2008; Yanow and Haverland 2012). Pamphlets were categorized according to the authoring organization and year of release, and subsequently measurements of over/ underrepresentation of select words in these categories were computed using the French software of lexicography TXM (Léon and Loiseau 2016, Gréa 2017, Pincemin 2018, Heiden, Decorde and Pincemin 2018). The text analysis method within an inductive research framework enables to synthesize and break the linearity of text in order to identify contrasting lexical patterns while enabling a contextual reading of such features (Duchastel, Paquin and Beauchemin 1992, Mayaffre 2014, Beaudouin 2016). Since text analysis does not inform us about the social conditions of production of political texts and the rituals attached to them (Bourdieu and Chartier 1985:270), the results it can generate are best comprehended when using a broader ethnographic lens.

38 In 2014, AISA, SFI, AISF, DSF, NSUI and DSU (See Figure 1) abundantly mentioned the lemma (head words as they appear in a dictionary, i.e. write, writes, and writing are forms of the lemma write) “queer” in their pamphlets. Among the JNU activist material I collected as part of the PaRChA initiative, nearly 56 percent of the total use of the word “queer” (or its plural) in the recent history of JNU pamphlets (1994-2014) was in 2014 only (Figure 2). It was not only Dhanak’s lobbying that successfully impacted the gender discourse on campus, but also the outbidding strategy of the various student organizations present on campus. Every political organization wanted to show the progressiveness of its own ideological understanding and this resulted in their attempting to be the flag-bearer of the queer cause. Dhanak, however, was not ready to support every political organization making statements about their queerness. At the GSCASH election in 2014, the group decided to support the SFI candidate Kotaya and waved the rainbow flag while she was giving her official candidate speech. Subsequently, after Kotaya was elected, Abu and other members of Dhanak came to congratulate her for championing the rainbow cause (Figure 3). Far from being short- lived, discussions around the “queerification” of campus were nested within broader discussions related to gender issues, which gained tremendous prominence on campus.

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As indicated in Figure 4, the weight of this topic accounted for 50 percent of the total weight of other topics contained in the corpus of pamphlets in years 2013-14.6 Such a topic includes words such as women, sexual, struggle, gender, justice, rape and harassment. The extent of focus on this particular issue was unprecedented except in 2001, when a JNU council had approved of the Gender Sensitization Committee Against Sexual Harassment (GSCASH)(2001)).

Figure 2. Co-optation of the Queer Agenda: Lemma Count of Queer in JNU Pamphlets (1994-2014)

Figure 3. Integration of New Political Idioms: Queer Activist Congratulating SFI Activist (left) for her Election as GSCASH Representative (right), 2014

Photo credits: On the left, courtesy of a JNU student, on the right, photo by the author.

39 Figure 4. Weight of Topics of Gender and Reservation in the Pamphlet Corpus

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Select predictive words for the topic “Gender Issues”: gscash, women, sexual, struggle, gender, harassment, committee, recommendations, rape. Select predictive words for the topic “Reservation Issues”: OBC, reservation, protest, seats, reservations, increase, implementation, intake, court, deal, category.

40 This case illustrates the competitive and dynamic way in which the ideological understanding of gender is constituted in the campus space. It not only provides a case of how student outfits “absorb” political idioms of exogenous groups; it also demonstrates how specifically social understandings are diffused when indexed by political rivalry on campus.

41 The case also shows how organizations try to outbid each other through attempts at championing the queer cause. While such outbidding processes are not specific to university spaces (Bajpai and Farooqui 2018), the residential nature of the campus makes the competing queer representation claim by student organizations particularly visible and efficient. Through queering they discourse, they contribute to “mainstreamize” queer politics and vernacularize certain queer understandings of gender identities and relations beyond a certain liberal-elite social niche.

42 The circulation on campus of new understandings of political idioms such as alternative sexualities relies on strong partisan cleavages from which competing statements on gender relations and identities emerge. Adding to this, the following abstracts from select JNU pamphlets (Figure 5) reveal the organizational competition to claim the leading role in the creation of the aforementioned GSCASH, a body that has symbolized political dedication to gender-related issues. GSCASH was created in the aftermath of the Vishaka Guidelines, the procedural guidelines for use in cases of sexual harassment promulgated by the Indian Supreme Court in August 1997. While these guidelines were implemented by the JNU administration when SFI and AISF were heading the JNU Students’ Union, AISA also claims it inspired the creation of GSCASH. As for gender, the requirement of displaying a political history in tune with one’s current organizational narrative applies to other topics also.

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Figure 5. Example of an Outbidding Process: Pamphlets Arguing over the Creation of GSCASH

Excerpt from AISA pamphlet, 16 November 1999, ID-1616 (argument 1, reference below)

(2) Excerpt from AISA pamphlet, 19 July 1996, ID-60333 (original reference)

(3) Excerpt from SFI pamphlet, 16 September 2006, ID-68362 (argument 2, reference below)

(4) Excerpt from SFI (JNUSU) pamphlet, 8 March 1999, ID-61717 (original reference)

43 While the campus molds and lubricates socialization around a set of political strands institutionalized by activist groups, it does not mean that such politics can ignore the opinions of students that are forged before they join the University. To show the limits of outbidding and political reconfiguration, I introduce here the self-proclaimed “Indecent Proposal.” At the end of 2014 a small group of students began advocating for a relaxation of the rules on drinking alcohol in public, and against gender division in campus accommodations (Indecent Proposal pamphlet, April 15, 2014).

44 Denouncing the moralistic undertones of the left on campus (active left activists for the most part refrain from disclosing their drinking habits to common students), the

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initiative received some support from highly educated students, leading established student organizations to label them as “elite” when they decided to organize a meeting with alcohol in the open. Drumi, a JNU PhD student summarized the spirit of the initiative: “GSCASH does not have the vocabulary to address this, and the organized left will not take the risk to alienate part of their constituency […] It [GSCASH] is not only about women, it is about privacy, condom machines, security.” A section of the pamphlet reads as follows:

What does it then imply when the left, and many others, label these concerns as that of the elite? But are questions such as the right to one’s own body, the spaces it inhabits, and the desires it expresses questions of privilege? We think differently. The left’s penchant to quickly “class”ifying issues does not always work.…The figure of an “elite” or the “privileged” is an ever shifting one because it is relative.… We must understand that in the garb of calling something “elitist” probably there exists a deeper kind of Moralism. The working class becomes the forbearer of this Moralism along with revolution. Can the Left therefore begin to think of an immoral revolutionary? (Indecent proposal pamphlet, April 15, 2015).

45 This case, echoing the claims of the autonomous Delhi-based women’s collective Pinjra Tod (break the cage) (Martelli 2017) exemplifies that not all the claims advocated by non-affiliated student groups are integrated by electoral student organizations on campus. It demonstrates, however, that the politicization of students’ attitudes, fueled by institutional competition among student groups, also permits the emergence of new political critiques, thus contributing to debates grounded in the JNU campus space.

46 For the most part, student activists themselves acknowledge the importance of everyday political competition, indicating that such routinized activity turns the campus into a distinctive political space. For instance, in the wake of the post-2016 repression on student activism and the need for left organizations to join hands, Lakshmi, an SFI activist acknowledges that:

I am actually against that alliance [between left organizations]. In the unit [SFI deciding body in JNU] I said the same. Of course, it makes sense in Modi times… and considering the current situation in campus. Look, we are now discussing [with an activist from another organization] on the roof of Brahmaputra [hostel]. That doesn’t matter. But because of that [alliance] we don’t politicize like before, we are not strengthening the organization, we are lazy and we know we will win anyway. How many programs are there [organized by student organizations]? Hopefully next year we [SFI] will contest separately… after Mamidala [JNU Vice Chancellor] goes…it’s not a bad thing for the campus and the left. The JNUSU contest brings energy, the kind of hardcore work we do, cannot happen within the alliance. Apart from being harassed by the administration, we get sleepy, we don’t talk to students as much as before, we are quite passive. So the result… the campus is kind of apolitical… less political at least… just sleepy and depressed.

47 Questioned on the matter, former JNU activist Azad agrees with Lakshmi’s argument:

[Lakshmi] has a point, that, if there is a fight between left organizations, there will be more mobilization, more political equality, more aggression and energy, but if we come together, less organization, less energy, because people have already made their mind that they will vote for left, so in the recent years, they didn’t campaign room to room. Earlier it was like, when there is a fight between AISA and SFI, room to room campaign was very

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rigorous, and it has politicized campus in one sense. In another sense they have undermined BJP.

The impatience of Lakshmi regarding the restoration of traditional intra-left competition becomes understandable when taking into account the broader effects of electoral competition on the politicization of students. Indeed, Lakshmi envisions the possibility of political participation through reenacting campus political cleavages. While keeping the focus on the political debates on gender at JNU, and in order to further understand the way in which dissonant political understandings are forged in campus spaces, I will now examine the cross-fertilization between political ideas on campus. I argue that campus politics becomes further distinctive when it favors the intimate ideational pollination between competing student groups. As long as these groups are value-based and not simply interest-based, the intellectual interpenetration between them enables forms of ideological cross-fertilization that foster the emergence of hybrid, thus novel and dissonant political idioms.

Evidence of Political Spillovers: Cross-fertilization Processes at JNU

48 “Have they really left from campus?” a student asked with a pinch of irony in the middle of our conversation. Although Nikita and Rajan had “passed out” (graduated) from JNU in the 1990s without completing their doctoral dissertation, many would be able to identify them from their frequent visits to campus. Nikita is not only the only female in CPI(ML)’s higher decision-making body—the politburo—but also the unofficial face of the political organization on social media, a mentor for AISA activists and a prominent figure on gender debates in Delhi. For his part, Rajan had been the AISA political organizer par excellence since the mid-1990s, overseeing the functioning of the campus organization and recruiting new students while making liaisons between the student body and the parental organization. While abiding by orthodox Marxist tenets, both have been instrumental in the synchronization of AISA/CPI(ML) in line with other ideological idioms circulating on campus. Both of them would spend precious time convincing me of the imperative of reading contemporary India from a Marxist lens.

We [AISA] can critically absorb things, you open a Russian doll, issues we fight for come out. […] Marx is beautiful, Marx has thought of everything, don’t try to look at Marx in detail, look at Marx in broad strokes. The point is, I understand what he [Marx] says, the potential of his words, the power of his analyses. I can reason out. Out of reason, I have reverence, not the other way around. The common sense has been manufactured […] people become sceptics without reading Marx, that is the conscious design of academia today, you start the class by saying that Marx does not have answers. They say that on women questions Marx does not have an answer, on environment question Marx does not have an answer, what the hell (Rajan, interview 2014). Caste is a material reality; workers are fixed to a certain kind of labor. Patriarchy is tied up with economic and land relations, a community will undergo greater strain because women are claiming land, khap panchayats [clan community organization in Haryana] got ruling parties and state governments to make politicians pass laws in their state assemblies to prevent women to inherit property. […] This is linked to honor killings and rape. When a woman marries outside, that means division of the land. It is structural… part of the social and economic relations. […] Capitalism in India

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is interested in subsidizing itself by making women do domestic work. […] Violence is structural… it comes from the superstructure. […] The market makes you feel anxious about your body. Freedom equals capitalism… not at all! (Nikita, interview 2014)

What is striking from the conversations is not the political sensitivity towards Marxism or feminism, but the way readings of both ideologies are woven together in a dialogical fashion. Through attempts to trace the genealogy of such intellectual dialogue, Nikita acknowledges that it is JNU that taught her “everything” and that her political commitment towards gender issues emerged in tandem with her concern about class relations in India.

49 Strikingly, the genealogy of the interpenetration of feminism and Marxism in the All India Progressive Women’s Association’s (AIPWA, the CPI(ML) women branch) ideology brings us back to the JNU of the 1990s. Looking for such evidence, I stumbled on the following paragraph in an AISA pamphlet from 1997 authored by Nikita herself (see Figure 6 for the full pamphlet):

Free thinking feminism, which, since it does not define itself as Marxist, necessarily has no consistent agenda for social change; and is thus in no position to change patriarchal structures. This leaves them in the position of defining sati [widow immolation], dowry, or rape as evils in a basically good society rather than the symptoms of an oppressive class-divided society. This deplorably inadequate position is paralleled by a “Marxism” which refuses to see the specificity and materiality of gender oppression and thus refuses the need for a feminist politics. AISA reiterates the need for Marxist Feminism and a feminist Marxism as integral and synonymous parts of our ideology and struggle (Krishan and Tanweer 1997).

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Figure 6. Cross-fertilization of Marxism and Feminism: AISA Pamphlet, March 1997 (ID-40753 & ID-40752)

50 This pamphlet not only exemplifies how central the JNU campus is in the formation of the core ideas of a wider political organization; it also outlines the importance of how campus-based ideological cross-fertilization permits the emergence of innovative interpretations of gender. In addition to Marxist feminism, other examples of

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ideational inter-breeding emerge on campus. Examples of political meetings advocating for a “Socialist political ecology” (cf. Figure 8) confirm the significance of cross- fertilization in the development of campus-based political dissonance. In fact, several cases exemplifying the existence of tactical strategies that enable student groups to “appropriate” rival political messages are found on campus. To illustrate this, I introduce two new cases.

51 The ABVP discourse is mainly based on Hindu nationalism aiming at “eradicating” the communist influence on university campuses (Jaffrelot 2007:18) while diffusing RSS core ideas, even when the paternal organization, RSS, is under attack (Govindacharya, interview 2019). However, interviews with right-wing student activists bring to the fore occasional, yet striking attempts to display left-leaning political arguments. It is possible to assume from their account a certain standardization of acceptable views on topics like women and queer rights, socialism, rights of marginalized castes and democratic deliberation, across organizations on the left and right of the political spectrum. Birendra, a JNU student and former Delhi University (DU) treasurer of ABVP unit would admit telling certain students that: “Off the record, I am Marxist; like [the deity] Ram, my concern is how to feed people… promote equality.”

52 In many respects it appears that, to a certain extent, ABVP members in JNU displayed values that conflicted with some of their own organizational leadership outside of campus. One ABVP JNUSU presidential candidate admitted to me his socialist leanings: “Here ABVP is socialist in character, I cannot deny it. We want freedom for girls, reservations for deprived based on economic grounds, more democratic rights… Not like those communists who prevented ABVP to talk in the last anti-Modi march” (Hrishabh, interview 2014). Another PhD student and ABVP activist, very active in the years 2007-2008, openly criticized caste humiliation perpetrated by Brahmins: “ABVP embraces the liberal values against caste oppression. At the time of my grandfather Dalits were not allowed in the house […]. My father let them in but then they have to sit on the floor. When dad was not in the house I allowed Dalits to sit on the bed […]. I am fighting inside the party to make insulting behavior stop” (Bharat, interview 2014). This reluctance to support religious and caste violence was persistent in my interviews with ABVP activists. Bharat, who was seen with other ABVP activists throwing stones at a Dalit JNUSU candidate back in 2007 (Singh 2007a, 2007b), was now claiming he was fighting within RSS to stop insults against Dalits and Muslims. Commenting on a then fresh anti-Muslim incident—a nativist Shiv Sena Member of Parliament, complaining about the food he was served, had force-fed bread into the mouth of a Muslim caterer fasting during Ramadan—Bharat replied to me, “this is just unacceptable, I will not let these things happen.”

53 Some ABVP activists like Saharsi, former candidate in a Delhi University student election (and also incidentally, my roommate for several months at JNU), gave examples of the difficulty of reconciling RSS ideology with the values internalized on campus. For instance, one day, while commenting on the series of forced conversions of Muslims, labeled Ghar Wapsi (home coming), carried out by a Hindu group in Agra, the Dharam Jagaran Samiti (Religious Awakening Committee), Saharsi expressed to me his deep unease:

Ghar Wapsi… they are some VHP [Vishva Hindu Parishad, another right-wing Hindu nationalist organization] people who do that, I don’t like it. They are also some fringe elements, Sakshi Maharaj [i.e. a notoriously controversial

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MP] in BJP for example. But I think India is the most inclusive country. That does not mean that government is patronizing reconversions. The government is actually concerned, look this year [there was] no violence on Valentine’s Day [day in which couples appearing in ‘romantic’ places are at times attacked by Hindu nationalists]… Of course I oppose government’s forceful conversion. If Muslims were doing that, then some Hindu would be converted forcefully. So far I have not found RSS guilty or even involved… but somehow yes they support that actually. I think there should be a genuine [i.e. different] voice [coming] from RSS. ABVP should not follow blindly what RSS says. It is very difficult to defend ghar wapsi [reconversion to Hinduism], but because of RSS some feel obliged to defend that in public.

54 There are evident tensions between the official line of the organization and the personal convictions of some of its members, such as three ABVP office bearers, who in February 2016 decided to resign from their posts. In a pamphlet they denounce the “hooligan” behavior of the government and, most importantly, the opposition to protests against academic authorities that led to the suicide of Rohith Vemula. The pamphlet concludes by stating two traditionally opposed slogans, one of the ABVP rallying cry Vande Mataram (Mother, I bow to thee) and one of the slogans of the proponents of Dalit leader Bhimrao Ambedkar, Jai Bhim (Victory to Bhim). The author of the pamphlet later (2019) referred to his left leanings within the ABVP as follows:

My personal experiences in JNU overpowered the broader understanding we should have built up back then in my village in Haryana. […] Society is conservative, feudal, casteist, getting in ABVP is easy, natural. […] I am a very left Ambedkarite person. When I was contesting for the election from the ABVP, Hassan [a left political opponent] was asking me: what about the beef festival in Kerala that has been vandalized by the ABVP? All these things, blah blah, meat festivals and all. I said, everyone has the freedom to eat anything. I condemn that [the vandalization]. People said he [referring to himself] is a soft sanghi…he is a left sanghi! […] I believe in the ethos of Marx, Bhagat Singh, Ambedkar, Nehru, Gandhi. We wanted to change the status quo, the hierarchy-based system, the feudal system. I wanted to change society, so I became left.

55 The paradoxical leftist imprint on ABVP worldviews in JNU is best exemplified by Nidhin, a once ABVP JNU student who is now a pro-RSS professor holding high administrative responsibilities in the university. He defines himself in opposition to the left who “forces students to de-Hinduize,” but simultaneously shows emotional attachment to liberal “leftist” values. While the post-2016 scenario has reinvigorated the official anti-national narrative inside and outside campus, it is still the liberal ethos forged by the left-paradigm in campus that continues to inform the ideological formation of the JNU-ABVP (Chotapatra, interview 2019, Shibak, interview 2019). Nidhin’s account not only demonstrates the cross-fertilization of political idioms across organizations (quote 1), but also shows the centrality of an activist’s ideological competition in shaping his political identity (quote 2).

See I am a different kind of right wing, who talks like a leftist. You know questioning ideas, questioning things, we have to be critical. You know sometimes people say that there is a little bit of red in everybody who studied in JNU. There is a little bit of red in me. The touch of red is that I want to open a bar [laughter]. In my time we used to have beer in front of the library canteen. We were nice, well behaved. […] Now I am [name of the

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administrative position], what a contradiction [laughter]. […] If I was a VC, I will never do this [i.e. to remove the political posters put up by student organisations on JNU walls], this is not good. Same regarding the crazy fees of the School of Management, I expressed my views. […] This is the 6th year of Modi government, I could have gone up very fast, but I want to give myself the possibility to move away. […] The politics of the cow, I find it irrelevant and absurd. It should not happen. […] In fact, my ideologue was Vajpayee, he was very moderate. […] People like me are vulnerable, left want to finish you at the first opportunity, and also a lot of moral conflicts arise. […] Vidrohi [left ascetic poet who lived in JNU] never took money from non-leftists. But then I realized he liked me for some reason. He was asking money from me in fact. See he lived his all life with principles. He was a staunch leftist, but he never compromised. JNU made me speak […] I was extremely introvert, in my first year in Peryar hostel I spoke to two people from my village for the entire year. The year after I was contesting for the post of GSGASH. […] It was a humiliation, that one girl was asking “did you have lunch” [reference to his lack of energetic assertiveness while approaching student voters]…Clearly, I was not loud enough during my campaign. […] JNU transforms you, whether you are right of left. […] Perhaps, if I had not fought against the left, my personality would not have developed. […] Everyone wanted the other to talk. […] There was a hostel mate who read one of my poems on my father [he recites his poem]. He was a staunch left ideologue and activist pretty involved and we decided that we will meet at 9:30 [pm] after our dinner and so after my dinner we met outside the hostel gate and he said okay, come to my room, and we started talking and talking and talking till 6 in the morning. And he said that, should we have some tea? I said why not…so we walked outside the campus till Katwaria Sarai which is almost 2 kilometers from the campus, we went there, we had tea, we came back and we shook hands before separating, just saying that: ‘I think we are different’. So, it’s a great feeling, it’s a great experience of life.

In all likelihood, the aforementioned Jai Bhim slogan is a symbol of ideational cross- fertilization, as it is not only coopted by the main Hindutva student organization, but also by the left collectives—in particular in the aftermath of the 2016 crackdown and the emergence of the Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students’ Association (BAPSA) as a strong political rival (Pallikonda 2018; Kumar 2018).

56 Such a semantic turn indicates a strong aspiration by the electoral left to reappropriate the Dalit “heroes,” the anti-Brahmanical figures and the anti-caste social reformers. Such contest over the representation of the Dalit community can be identified in JNU pamphlet production. Figure 7 shows that the mentions of the figures Ambedkar (1891-1956), Phule (1827-1890), Periyar (1879-1973) and Shahu (1874-1922)— who are the symbolic ambassadors of discourses on caste empowerment—is clearly not monopolized by community-based organizations such as BAPSA, the United Dalit Students’ Forum (UDSF) or the All India Backward Students Forum (AIBSF).

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Figure 7. Cross-fertilization of Ambedkarism and Socialism: Score of Association (Chi 2) between Ambedkar, Phule, Periyar and Shahu Words in Various Student Organizations in JNU Pamphlets

*1: Dalit Organizations – UDSF *2: Small Left Organizations *3: Pro-Maoist – DSU

57 Positive scores for words in Figure 7 mean they are overrepresented in the vocabulary of a particular student organization as compared with other ones in the PaRChA archive. In fact, the organization referring the most to Ambedkar is AISA, and the SFI- AISF combined with the Democratic Student’s Federation (who have many political references in common) are particularly interested in mentioning Phule. This result is not only evidence of the integration by mainstream JNU organizations of the “social- justice” political vocabulary; it clearly outlines how ideational political competition on campus spaces enables the diffusion of dissonant political idioms through competitive appropriation. This evidence of ideological cross-fertilization—whether tactical or not —in addition to the process of political outbidding already indicated how campuses can generate on-campus political spillovers that contribute to the emergence of original political imaginations in contemporary India.

58 The pervasiveness of spillovers and the cross-fertilizing effects they induce in campus should not lead us to consider such spaces as isolated from the broader polity. The scholarship on diffusion in social movements has unveiled multifarious ways by which activist tactics and ideas spread across space (Rogers 1995, Chabot and Duyvendak 2002, Bunce and Wolchik 2006). While some political novelty might emerge from the campus itself through activating and sheltering political “initiators,” in other instances student activists in universities might be better understood as “early adopters,” legitimizing though their action in a competitive space a set of new ideas that have emerged elsewhere (Tarrow 1998).

59 It is only through unpacking these processes of contagion that a definitive answer on the origins of political creativity among educated youth in India can be offered. Due to

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the sparse evidence on the matter, this article is not providing a definitive answer on the extent to which Dalit-feminist, left-feminist, and right-with-a-touch-of-left political hybridizations are produced and spread by on-campus political spillovers—rather than imported from outside as replica of the broader zeitgeist. However, the contribution suggests that while there is an indeterminacy on where in the political cycle new forms of political representation are seeded, the existence of on-campus political spillovers facilitates the diffusion and the generalization of political idioms by “early adopters”— if not by “initiators” themselves (Roggeband 2004). A good case of political “early adoption” in campus is provided in Figure 8. The two pamphlets displayed are testimonies of the visit to JNU of two leaders of the environmentalist movement in the early 1990s (Sunderlal Bahuguna and Medha Patkar). In the first one, two JNUSU elected representatives assert that Sunderlal Bahuguna was able to “stir in us the realization of our integral and harmonious relationship with nature,” which then led to the creation of a “struggle committee” on campus to support the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada River Movement) against the environmental damage caused by the building of dams in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.

Figure 8. Cross-fertilization of Socialism and Political Ecology: Letter & Pamphlet

JNUSU Meeting with anti-Tehri Dam and Chipko movement environmental leader, 1990 (ID-90072)

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JNUSU invited to a meeting of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, 1992 (ID-90152)

60 The aforementioned example exemplifies the rootedness of student politics in the broader ecology of movement-based politics outside the campus. While broader networks do inform political spillovers in JNU to an extent, political idioms also travel from campus to a variety of political communities, notably via students and graduates who take active part in wider Indian political affairs, ranging from political parties to NGOs, journalism and public service—while also penetrating informal political networks as well as communities of shared belief. In addition to such direct networks, online social ties and indirect forms of political imitation are also instrumental in disseminating political idioms outside campuses. In an interview (2019), Nithya, a reputed feminist professor-activist in JNU reflects on the articulation between the campus as a space of generative political confrontation, and on its broader imbrication in the larger feminist social movement field.

The campus [is significant], significant is a small word. Being inside a space in which our job is to be critical thinkers […] younger people are constantly pushing your sense of whatever you think your politics is. As a feminist I think I have travelled a long way from the time I was in my 30s in my understanding of sexuality, sexual harassment, all of this. […] At a meeting there are not students and teachers and doctors, there are all just feminists. We are all arguing things out. These are overlapping spaces, and campuses have always been one of those. One of the spaces that has been crucial, inside and outside the classroom. […] You realize that some of your theoretical positions have to be revised. It [campus] is a live space of introspection and challenge. […] There are a lot of bitter debates […] those confrontations lead to some new positions. I won’t say forward or backward, but something new. […] I edited a book on gender and politics in India in the 1990s…there is nothing on caste. I didn’t exclude caste, I just did not think about caste. […] There is a way caste enters our lexicon and our understandings and

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transforms us, because of the powerful Dalit voices that became more and more impossible to not hear. Once it happens there is no going back. And campuses are very important spaces for this and there is a critique made of the left, and probably rightly, that the left is, and I guess I should include myself, is blind to the way in which caste operates. […] there are still issues in which students have challenged people for quoting Ambedkar and saying “you are co-opting him… why should a savarna person speak about Ambedkar?” I treat it as part of the ways in which campus are prickly places, it is not romantic place in which we love each other, it is a place that produces blood among one another. And it is good blood.

Indubitably, the “prickliness” of the feminist debates in JNU—including students and faculty—is the expression of the creative everyday argumentative conflicts leading to self-transformation and the emergence of political spillovers. Yet, according to Nithya, this agonistic process does not emerge ex nihilo, and university should be seen as an “overlapping space” made of the repeated interventions from within and outside campus. All in all, while it is obvious that campus spaces do not have a monopoly over political innovation, it appears inaccurate to negate their political relevance as formative public spheres.

Conclusion

61 Contrary to idealistic accounts that provide a stylized depiction of student years as inherently agitational, this empirical analysis has shown that the campus as a shared dwelling space is not in itself a driver of politicization. However, when such ecology fosters ideologically driven competition among student groups, it then becomes a conducive ground for the politicization of educated youth. This article builds on the finding that inter-cohort socialization is central in the emergence of political attitudes on campus (Martelli and Ari 2018). It substantially complements this argument by examining the way on-campus competition between activist collectives is instrumental in the emergence political spillovers, notably through nurturing non-violent outbidding discourses and ideational cross-fertilization among student organizations. Because such political spillovers irrigate the social space of the campus across social cleavages, they concur with the generalization of novel and dissenting tropes in an institution such as Jawaharlal Nehru University.

62 The convergence of ethnographic and archival evidence offers a counterpoint to the literature that posits higher educational spaces as territories for the reproduction of broader social orders structured around caste, gender or family upbringing. Although it is useful to posit campus life as a mirror of the broader Indian political society, such a stand also tends to undermine the generalizable political features occurring specifically in university arenas.

63 Through addressing the political dynamics deposited in university premises by generations of student activists, this article suggests that select residential campuses such as JNU are favorable grounds for the activation of political idiosyncrasies dissonant from the larger public discourse. The article does not claim that all residential campuses are dissenting spaces, as the emergence of political spillovers do require an environment of ideational contest in which student groups engage in outbidding practices. However, the structural composition of the campus can facilitate the circulation of political idioms among cohorts of students relatively free from

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exogenous social constrains. In order to better identify the emergence of political innovation from within Indian campus spaces, I suggest that student activism is best understood in a diachronic fashion, through examining everyday processual mechanisms at work in the selective activation, emulation and circulation of value- based political idioms.

64 Despite the criminalization of student politics in JNU by the ruling dispensation since 2016, the fact that political spillovers in this campus favor social intercourse based on political argumentation (Habermas 1989:36) has wider implications for the study of Indian democracy. It indicates that JNU student politics, in its capacity as a public sphere situated between the state and the private experiences of youth, articulates political themes that are neither validated nor approved by the ruling Hindu nationalist regime and its media apparatus. The labelling of student politics in many public central universities as anti-national and Maoist serves as a mass communication narrative aiming at controlling ideologically incompatible, yet argumentative and autonomous youthful public spheres. As the regime consolidates its position as the political flag-bearer of a Hindu-centric nation, notably through demonizing pluralist campus politics as in JNU, it places educated youth’s experiments with competitive value-based politics as a prime danger to its hegemonic aspirations.

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NOTES

1. I gratefully acknowledge financial support from the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche through the research project Challenging Inequalities: An Indo-European perspective (ANR-18- EQUI-0003) 2. For further reading, cf. Chitnis 1972; Kirpal et al. 1985; Visvanathan 2000; Weisskopf 2004; Deshpande 2006; Sundaram 2006; Ghosh 2006; Ciotti 2006; Deshpande and Newman 2007; Chauhan 2008; Sen and Basant 2010; Nambissan and Rao 2013; Thapan 2014; Tilak 2015; Subramanian 2015; Henri and Ferry 2017; Chandra 2017; Devy 2017; Kapur and Mehta 2017; Kumar 2018; Fernandez 2018. 3. See for instance Pettigrew and Shneiderman 2004; Zharkevich 2009 and 2013; Snellinger 2005, 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2018b; Hirslund 2012. 4. According to the 2014–2015 attitude survey (Martelli and Parkar 2018), more than four-fifths of JNU students live in on-campus residences (0.81). On average, they join the university at the age of 22 years old (22.29; SD=3.14; N=365). The mean study duration for post graduates is around five semesters (4.95; SD=3.22; N=612). 5. The GSCASH was set up at JNU in 1999 applying the guidelines set by the Indian Supreme Court in 1997 (Chaudhuri 2007). Its missions are formal enquiry and redressal of cases of sexual harassment on campus, assistance and mediation of complaints and the sensitization of students on gender issues through the organization of programs and workshops (GSCASH Annual Report 2016). 6. For this analysis, I used Mallet, a topic modelling tool (McCallum 2002). A “topic” consists of a cluster of words that frequently occur together.

ABSTRACTS

The recent spur of student-led mobilizations in India led to the portrayal of select public universities as the epitome of resistance, dissent and countercultural politics. Departing from essentialist approaches to student politics, this article outlines the processes by which campus

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spaces activate the formation of political attitudes among participants. It builds on an archival and ethnographic account of educated youth politics in one of the most politicized universities in the country, Jawaharlal Nehru University. I suggest that everyday political competition among student organizations is a central condition for the development of dissonant political participation, as it enables both inter-cohort political socialization and the spilling over of ideological idioms to the sociologically diverse student groups on campus. I argue that mechanisms of political outbidding sustained by politically enterprising student collectives nurture value-based dissent by continually emulating political counter-narratives while fostering ideational cross-fertilization.

INDEX

Keywords: student politics, spillover, diffusion, spinoffs, political socialization, campus, dissent, dissonance, free space, ideology, JNU

AUTHOR

JEAN-THOMAS MARTELLI Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), Politics and Society Division, New Delhi

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Regional Charisma: The Making of a Student Leader in a Himalayan Hill Town

Leah Koskimaki

1 The main thoroughfare in Nainital, a small ‘hill town’ in Uttarakhand, India, is a place for strolling, gathering, protesting, and being seen. Locally referred to as the “Mall Road,” it serves as the main conduit through the busy side of the town’s central lake and is lined with various levels of out-facing hotels, homes, restaurants and shops built up against each other in a long row.1 Many small and cozy eateries serve as college haunts, where students from the local Kumaun University congregate in the afternoons to meet over snacks and tea. Various student leaders also would gather there to meet with friends and supporters, or to network with local activists who were protesting unemployment woes or other concerns facing local youth.

2 One afternoon, I was hanging out in one of these small restaurants with “Mahendra,” a member of Kumaun University’s DSB campus2 student union. I had arrived in Nainital after his electoral campaign, and so we began chatting about his success. “When we went for nomination in the morning, there was a large procession. They put mālā (garlands) around my neck, and the guys hoisted me up and carried me around on their shoulders,” he narrated with earnest pride. He particularly emphasized his style as a leader: “Here leaders don’t wear suits, we wear white-colored (khadi) kurta-pajama.” He said that his supporters were chanting: Mahendra nahīṁ - ye āṁdhī hai! DSB kā Gandhi hai! [He’s not Mahendra–he’s a storm! He’s the Gandhi of DSB Campus!]. Confirming that they were referring to him, a nascent youth politician, as India’s iconic leader of national freedom and self-sufficiency, he explained:

Yes, DSB is our college and Mahendra is not a māmūlī vyaktī (ordinary person). They made me Gandhiji, Mahatma Gandhi. It was out of their unkā pyār thā (affection). They felt that, ‘Hamārā netā sab se acchā hai’ (Our leader is the best). They were trying to impress the other students. Then my slogan was, ‘My Pepsi Cola and Mirinda is Mahendra. My Abhishek Bachchan is Mahendra. My Hrithik Roshan3 is Mahendra’…[pausing]

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You know Abhishek Bachchan? He’s a film star.

This lighthearted scene offers a glimpse into the kinds of ways that student leaders in post statehood Uttarakhand drew from various symbols and styles to produce stories and narratives of their political lives. In such spaces, Mahendra seemed to find it natural to represent himself simultaneously through the image of Mahatma Gandhi, the promoter of home-spun khadi cloth, and Bollywood actors who promote multinational branded soft drinks like Pepsi.4 After all, the famous people to whom he compared himself were all ‘heroes’ and personalities that could add fame and respect to his campaign. Pictures of these Bollywood film stars adorn the ubiquitous faded name placards of roadside food stalls in the hills, usually wearing “modern” attire such as sunglasses and designer jeans, showing off their worked-out bodies while drinking these beverages. Conversely, Mahendra’s style of dressing up in white kurta pajama during the election was the chosen Gandhian attire of political leaders. Despite its recent association with corruption, white khadi could convey his commitment to service and add an aura of experience and legitimacy to his intentions, while signaling a very Indian and yet regional history of anticolonial protest. His slogans reveal the seeming contradictions with which young people in the region grapple: consumption and austerity, corruption and authenticity, and national and regional affiliation. In untangling this seeming pastiche of representations, this article argues that the making of youth and student leaders in the visible political aesthetics of post-statehood Uttarakhand involved the cultivation of regional charisma.

3 Throughout the following sections, I delineate the ways that student leaders in Uttarakhand, in particular forward caste Hindu Pahari5 young men, attempted to cultivate this regional charisma: through performing their know-how and connections to the town and the environment, demonstrating their moral character and sacrifices, drawing on attachments and legacies of place, and connecting with political genealogies. In a region with comparatively limited financial resources, even successful everyday brokerage and forms of clientelism were not enough to secure one’s position on the political scene, and so such practices often were sutured in charismatic performances. Mahendra and other aspiring political youth embedded such attempts at generating charisma in long fought regional struggles, such as the movement for Uttarakhand statehood and aspirations for “development.”

Political Lives in a Mountain Region

4 Situated in the Western Himalayan region, Uttarakhand became a new state in India in November 2000 and has a legacy of regional assertion. The largely forested, mountainous and rural region is known in India for its history of peasant movements (Guha 2000) particularly the popular movement against deforestation known as “Chipko” (Mawdsley 1998). A history of anti-colonial mobilization (Pathak 1997) in which young people in the region were also called to join political action (Koskimaki 2016) has shaped activism in the state. This regionalist politics drew from enduring narratives and stereotypes of the hills as a place of honesty, purity and simplicity versus the plains as more combative and corrupt (Moller 2000), as well as tropes of a Pahari (person from the hills or mountains) identification with nature (Linkenbach 2006). This perceived dichotomy has partly acerbated grievances around the lack of progress in development, especially in the rural areas of the region as compared to

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many parts of India, with the blame often laid on the ignorance and apathy of plains- based politicians (Mathur 2015). Popular descriptions of Uttarakhand as a “sacred territory” (Tillin 2013) and pilgrimage place for Hindus has sustained a growing “regional Hindutva” (Joshi 2018), which has recently become increasingly majoritarian and exclusionary. In contemporary Uttarakhand, despite women having taken on a large role in environmental and other social movements over its history (Gururani 2014), men have often dominated a visible, street-based youth politics (see also Lukose 2009). A masculine development ethos (Koskimaki 2017) has in part influenced the narrative of regionalist demands around youth futures.

5 The idea of Uttarakhand statehood, which one generation of students imagined in the 1970s and the next generation fought for in the 1990s, evolved out of a feeling of spatial marginalization and neglect (Mawdsley 1999; Kumar 2000; Rangan 1996, 2000; Fiol 2013). Student politics increased in the early 1970s, after a demand pushed the state to form Garhwal and Kumaun Universities, representing the districts in the west and east of Uttarakhand respectively. In the 1990s, regional youth protested the implementation of reservations for OBCs (Other Backward Castes), which constituted a small percentage of the population in the hills compared to the state of Uttar Pradesh of which the region once was a part. Much of this protest involved youth from large regional Rajput and Brahmin groups who were relatively less wealthy and lacked the cultural capital of their plains-based counterparts. The regional memory and news reports of students and women protesting and demanding a new state, only to face violence at the hands of police (Kumar 2011), did little to build the public trust of administrative and state machinery. The post statehood generation was both haunted and inspired by the way the past has been imagined in present politics (Sivaramakrishnan 1995:32), and locals have continued to lack faith in the developmental state (Mathur 2016) and national politicians.

6 Uttarakhand is also home to many small Himalayan “hill towns” which the British either established or further developed during the colonial period. Like most of these towns, Nainital itself had a small population (of around only 40,000 in the 2001 census). As part of a historical legacy of paternalistic colonial governance, the British developed hill stations with their cooler climates as places of recuperation, holiday-making, and summer administration. In the towns power was spatialized, with regulations about who can travel where, the “Mall Road” being a prominent feature (Pradhan 2017). Further, those residing in hill towns experience what Mathur (2015) calls “everyday narratives of remoteness” (p.390), their spaces seen as “backward” and “inferior” (p. 368). Drawing from De Certeau (1988), she refers to “place as an ordering of elements in a relationship of coexistence with each other and space as ‘a practiced place’” (2015:367).

7 The intimacy and history of towns such as Nainital produced a political scene quite different than that of some of India’s larger cities. Professors, writers, journalists, activists and historians in Nainital often referred to regional legacies and spaces in conversation, print or speech, with affection. I found a flourishing activist print culture and journalism in the town, such as Hindi language books on local freedom fighters and regional ecologies, as well as magazines with photographs of mountain and rural scenes, alongside articles that critiqued senior politicians. Buildings, such as an old wooden library on Mall Road or the leafy university campus, had an aesthetic and affective presence. Student leaders would campaign in the popular flats area near the

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market at the end of the lake, and youth hosted small rallies at the colonial era District Collectorate, at the end of the Mall Road, or at Shailey Hall, another popular assembly place for earlier generations of activists. These off-campus places of doing politics tapped into the small hill town rhythms of life and ensured greater visibility. Mahendra and other leaders kept off-campus offices within the market place or up along the winding roads and small houses. In this way, the account of student politics in this paper is less about the campus, and more about how student leaders work to generate charisma as they move in and inhabit the political spaces of the towns themselves. Youth leaders of different affiliations were known figures in the towns, often engaging in political rallies or meeting people, while continually being reported on in well-read vernacular editions of local newspapers.

8 Further, regional towns were spaces of mobility and connectivity for those who left their villages for something bigger or for those who returned because they said they could not “make it” in the cities. Youth out-migration in search of employment has led to an “emptying” of the region’s villages (Mamgain and Reddy 2016). Yet these mobilities have added to a “reconfiguration” of an “ecological sense of place” in Uttarakhand (Joshi 2015:20). Dyson (2018) describes young men’s fascination and spiritual engagement as returnees to their mountain village in Uttarakhand, despite being changed by urban experiences. Such “rural imaginaries” have figured into hill town youth publics, with references in speeches and conversation to difficulties of village life in the hills and to dangers of travel within the mountains (Koskimaki 2011). In rallies I attended, youths conjured up metaphors such as linking the Ganges River (whose glacial source is found in Uttarakhand) to the fruits of development as flowing, along with regional youth, out of the state. Because hill towns in India are spatially “removed” from the urbanized spaces of commodity flows, although youth often migrated out for employment, their aspirations were often constrained by their inability to grapple with multiple worlds (Brown, Scrase and Ganguly-Scrase 2017). A feeling of “relational vulnerability” in Uttarakhand (Chakraborty 2018) has left mobile youth in states of constant transition. Many who travelled from rural areas to the towns in the region had to manage various strategic repertoires to signal either their “rural” or “urban” identities (Deuchar 2019). On regional university campuses, I encountered many students who returned or remained in Uttarakhand because they longed for the familiarity of life in the hills. This spectre of mobility for youth—of experiencing outside worlds, while still proving one’s “embeddedness” (Verstappen 2017) in the region—has produced a fertile field for the entry of young politicians who can act as guides for others of their generation looking to improve their prospects, but yet who want to stay connected to their home. Mahendra and others often claimed that they would “take me” to a particular village or rural area and “show me” how people live in a “simple” and beautiful way there and yet how they “struggle.” Student politics in towns like Nainital can be read within these regional idioms and aspirations.

Aspirational Youth Politics

9 The narratives of student politics I present here were taken from a total of 18 months of research living in Uttarakhand between 2004-2007 as part of a broader ethnographic and historical project on regional youth publics and development politics. At this time, on the cusp of social media use in the region, I socialized with young people who had

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less access to and thus were barely yet active on what were newly emerging forums such as Facebook. Rather, they were very engaged in street rallies, face-to-face meetings in organization offices, and political print production.6 I situated my examination of youth politics within larger narratives around development in the region, and the largely unfulfilled expectations after the achievement of statehood in 2000. One focus was on masculinities and how forward caste young men in the region politicized and imagined their futures.

10 While student leaders in Uttarakhand did at times engage in “muscular politics” (i.e. Michelutti 2010, 2013) and fights broke out between groups, politics in post-statehood Uttarakhand as I witnessed it was a provincial and less extravagant affair. Youth political action was less “violent” and less openly embedded in party political influence than those in other accounts from South Asia (Suykens 2018; Kumar 2012; Ruud 2010). Often, student politics was also “entangled” in town and state aspirations (Kumar 2012). As many young people in Uttarakhand were unemployed, student leaders used waiting and “time pass” (Jeffrey 2010a), or rather what Andersen (2016:421) refers to as “time-use” in shaping their political futures, which he argues were “intimately entangled with aspirations, morality and conduct.” Student leaders drew on tropes of sacrifice, sangarsh (struggle) and social service in conversation and protest (see also Jeffrey and Dyson 2014; Piliavsky 2014; Ruud and Price 2010; Krishna 2003; Skaria 2002). I found similarities to Suykens’s (2018) observation of Bangladeshi student politics, where “risk and self-sacrifice are two central and related performative repertoires deployed to build authority within student hierarchies” (p.886). Many youths in hill towns often oriented such sacrifices to counter the negative reputation of politics as corrupt (see Jeffrey and Dyson 2014). They aligned themselves with youthfulness as innocence, creating scenes of engagement through “disagreement” (Rancière 1999, 2004), and claiming spaces of recognition and political expression. In what Jeffrey (2010b) has also described as a “contradictory youth politics,” the ambiguous or liminal (Mannheim, 1972 [1936]) position of having not yet reached adulthood allowed youth to navigate and manipulate a negative reputation of state politics.7 Snellinger (2016) has articulated this position for youth in Nepal as they orient their hopes through what she calls a political mode of being as a “subjunctive as-if.” This youthfulness animated their new regional and charismatic representations. As “youth” is a cultural constructed temporality (Bucholtz 2002; Durham 2004), here I refer to unemployed and unmarried young men in the regional context. Their experience of a protracted stage of youth both limited and opened up political possibilities. Unlike the political socialization that takes place largely on campuses at urban institutions such as JNU (Martelli and Ari 2018), Nainital’s DSB campus was merely an extension of the town; much of political life took place off campus and in association with regional aspirations.

11 During this time as a relatively new state, some leaders were affiliated with student groups that had national counterparts, yet most groups at the time also made a point to publicly stress their “independence.” For example, members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vishwa Parishad (ABVP), a Hindu nationalist student organization that has been associated with the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), asserted to me during a meeting in their Almora office that even if “ideologically” youth “stand together” with certain national parties, “the youth should be united on the matters related to youth.” Another ABVP leader then also spoke out, generating nods of consensus from his friends, that “there is no need for the political parties to be involved directly in the matters of

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youth.” Similarly, leaders from an organization (that I will keep anonymous here), which had some ties to the ideologies of CPI-ML (The Communist Party of India, Marxist-Leninist), tended to focus more on their political goals such as assisting with development and awareness in the rural and mountain regions, than on party politics. One leader from a ST (Scheduled Tribe) background, who was popular and charismatic within the organization (his charismatic representation resonated largely within his left-leaning group which fought more strongly against caste inequalities), kept a low profile in the town due to his potentially politically sensitive mobilization in more remote regions. He asserted that the fight they had to wage was against “administrative” structures, and that their real work was in raising public awareness. In contrast, members of NSUI, the National Student Union of India, claimed to me during an event in a small town in Garhwal, that they openly did work to support the Congress Party, which was in power at the time of this research. An NSUI leader claimed that other groups deny their affiliations but “secretly” support the parties behind the scenes. Mahendra protested the policies of the Congress Party but did not at all affiliate with the ABVP or Communist student organizations. He participated in rallies where youth decried political parties as corrupt, even regional political parties. His speeches focused on alleviating the region’s suffering and expressed the need for youth to “unite” to fight a “system” that suppressed their future potential. However, this show of independence did not always persist into “adulthood,” as many matured into supporting political parties later on.

12 This need for secrecy regarding party support and assertions of independence grew out of a vocalized mistrust of political parties and “adult politics” as corrupt and self- interested. To fashion oneself as a student leader also often involved showing one’s ability to work for all regional youth. Off campus rallies that I attended often attracted a gathering of youth from even opposing groups, where they would make common demands for better regional vikās (development) and unnati (progress)—meaning facilities, education, loans and employment—while expressing “anti-Western” sentiments. This article largely examines the narratives and political engagement of Mahendra and his group of forward caste young male companions from the student union who associated with each other and others from previous generations of youth protest and who traveled to nearby towns to participate in rallies and mobilize other youth in protest of the lack of development and employment in the region.

Regional Charisma

13 Charisma as a political and social descriptor became prominent with the work of Max Weber ([1919]2009), who argued that legitimacy to power—or domination—came in different forms, one being that of charismatic leaders who inspire “devotion” not “by virtue of …statute,” but because people “believe” in them (p.79). A charismatic leader is thus one who possesses an “extraordinary and personal gift of grace” and “heroism,” and who was traditionally a “magician” and a “prophet” (p.79-80). Symbolic power and social influence can produce charisma (Geertz 2000); recalling the affective ways devotion and power can manifest, Geertz aptly describes charisma as “an abiding, if combustible, aspect of social life that occasionally bursts into open flame” (p.123). Charisma can animate leaders of various intentions and orientations as they generate support and trust and has been gendered and associated with “strong men”8 or a

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“politics of manhood” (Khadir 2012:363). Michelutti (2013) elaborates the notion of “muscular charisma” to describe physical dominance and an ability to mobilize violence.

14 But charisma is also a performative and place-specific quality, through which youth leaders can craft their self-image and creatively mobilize support. In Uttarakhand, regional charisma is cultivated through what Terlouw (2010) has described as the “charisma of space” and its temporal orientations—from pilgrimage sites of the past to the future imaginings of a place—as a way to produce legitimacy (p.339). My discussion thus builds on what Hansen and Verkaaik (2008) refer to as “urban charisma,” for which they elaborate two aspects: charisma of the city, which “imbues its physical sites and objects, and thus the people who live in them, with unique capabilities and even magical forms of agency”; and charisma in the city, which “rests on special forms of knowledge, networks, connectedness, courage and daring” of individuals who can “reinterpret and re-enact” the city’s “reservoir of myth and narrative” (p.9). Their work revises older static notions that viewed charisma as a “vaguely magical power of presence, style, seduction and performance”; charisma, they assert, has been “democratized” and is “now a widely marketed and desired object of self-making, within the reach of those with sufficient skill and purchasing power” (p.6). As described in the previous section, the hill towns provided a scene for youth politicians to play out their skills and demonstrate their connection to the region in stylized ways. Rather than refer to charisma as a natural gift, I show how it is generated through the relationship of youth to the region and its potent places.

15 Charisma is also gendered, caste and class inflected, and generational as continual hierarchies and authorities are built and reformed based on regional belongings and associations. I follow Gorringe’s (2005) critique of an over-emphasis on charisma itself; he argues that such power must be “legitimated socially” and continually produced, and attention must be paid to other social complexities such as caste and various “cultural precedents” in the making of both leaders as well as supporters (Gorringe 2012:122). Who can actively generate charisma and who cannot access the elements that comprise this so-called magical quality? While young men and women of various caste/class and religious backgrounds participated in student politics throughout the state, and indeed generated various aspects of charismatic fashioning, here I focus on the production of charisma amongst forward caste Pahari men, who often mobilized familial affiliations to demonstrate their regional political legacies. Forbess and Michelutti (2013) and (Michelutti 2017:236) have alluded to such attributions as “divine kinship” or “divine ancestors” as potential sources of charismatic affect for revolutionaries, comrades and patrons. In the case of Uttarakhand, I borrow this term to point to the animating role of the political legacies of associates, friends and family members. In addition to drawing on such affiliations, charisma often also required leaders to show one’s achievements (see also Michelutti 2018).

16 Charisma has to be continually maintained, drawing on multiple reterritorialized reservoirs and registers of style. I recall a student leader in Ranikhet, from a land- owning Rajput family who did not affiliate with any political party, telling me how he would watch Fidel Castro give speeches on television. He expressed that he aspired to speak and influence a crowd of people in the same way. A charismatic leader might be seen as a “hero,” recalling an earlier generational emphasis on a “spirit of sacrifice” or contemporarily idealized as “jugaadis” (those who could improvise to get things done or

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make things work) (Kumar 2017:327, 328). In Uttarakhand, to be seen as a “hero” might encapsulate both these ideals as student leaders work to build their charismatic affect through their accomplishments and affirmations of local style, often in “anti- Westernized” tropes. While political backgrounds might influence variants in leaders’ choices, one similarity that I found was the emphasis on simplicity. Spending time with ABVP members in their small and modest office, for example, one young man asserted to me that “if someone walks in the market wearing Indian kurta-pyjama, then some people may call him of purane vichār (old-fashioned), but if he walks in the same market wearing jeans, t-shirt and tie, or coat and pant, then the same people will say that ‘he is looking like a hero.’” He complained, “the word hero should be used for brave men… Actually, that person is weak. Say what you like, but it is a fact that all such acts are tricks of foreign powers…”

17 This quote shows the conflicting feelings around style and presentation; In my everyday conversations, many young people in the region expressed distrust or even seemed to insecurely mock show-offs and overly urbanized types, such as tourists from the plains with their “flashy” attire. To be charismatic in the hills manifested not through a “prestige economy” (Fuh 2012), but rather through simplicity and “ethical self-making” (Chandra and Majumder 2013). Martelli (under review) has interestingly written on the austere self-fashioning of left politicians at JNU in Delhi, who downplayed their privilege as a way to represent authenticity. In Uttarakhand, many young people also made a point to maintain simplicity. I found their demeanor to follow a style similar to what Rudolph and Rudolph (1967) have described as the “traditional roots” of Gandhi’s charisma- self-confidence, use of restraint, control over one’s environment, and moral idealism (p.199).

18 This leads us back into a discussion of khadi in student politics. Use of homespun cotton can signify ideals of purity, sacrifice and devotion to the nation (Trivedi 2007). Yet the choice of khadi has been referred to “a particular semiotic of corruption” and “as the uniform of the rogue” (Chakrabarty 2001:52,53), the corruption of the very ideals it was meant to represent (Tarlo 1996; Mazzarella 2010). Such assertions illuminate the negative associations with politics that young people work to overcome, and Mahendra used khadi as rather a semiotic of resistance, allowing him the ironic legitimacy of “experience” through political traditions of attire. He drew from the regional traditions of Gandhian politics and anti-colonial struggle. Furthermore, local environmental activists and intellectuals often wore khadi as a commitment to sustainable development and social service (see Klenk 2010). In this way, student leaders localized their performances and styled themselves by identifying with regional political idioms.

The Making of a Regional Student Leader

19 Mahendra was talented and energetic and knew how to place himself in Nainital. When I first met him, he was participating at the rally for unemployed youth at an administrative building above the Mall Road. There, he had been associating himself with a previous generation of student activists from the 1990s demand for statehood. That day Mahendra arrived wearing not the kurta pajama of his campaign, but an oversized sport coat with a simple formal shirt. He could be seen preparing the press release for that day’s protest and directing young men where to sit. Mahendra and

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others gave speeches to the eager group, critiquing the current leaders of the Congress Party and decrying corruption. “Our fight is with the system. We want to say to the government that the state of Uttarakhand has come into existence because of the sentiments and the feelings of the people, and we should be provided with our rights in this state,” he implored. Afterwards I congregated with him and other energized leaders in a crowded tea stall. Mahendra sat in the center and other youth crowded around him to see what he was doing. A supporter commented to me that he was speaking on the “right issues” and that he liked him because he was “common” and “simple.” His speech had “energy” too, he said.

20 But Mahendra did not always have such popularity, and at times failed at being a “naturally” charismatic leader. In Nainital he was also initially unconvincing in his identity as a Pahari. He was not born in the foothills, but rather grew up in a town in Uttarakhand’s plains areas near the southern border of the state. Grappling with contradictions, he tried to separate his image from that of muscular politics, which was associated with life in plains towns and cities, yet he realized that he had to show himself a strong leader. He conveyed:

When I fought the presidential election, I lost two times. People said, ‘He is bahār kā (an outsider) he is from the plains, he is badmāś (a scoundrel).’ My opponent was spreading this story to distort my image so that I’d lose. He claimed that I have people with guns and weapons...But when I showed up, they all said, ‘He is not a gunḍā (villain/criminal), he is a baccā (kid).’ [pause] Well, I agree that I scared some people to win the election. You know, it’s an election after all. You have to do such things to win... There was a student who was opposing me. I warned him not to, otherwise he would be in trouble. He was terrified. He said, ‘Bhaiyā (Brother), no problem! I’ll go back home.’ I said, ‘Don’t go home, cast your vote! But don’t spread bad news about me.’

This likely-embellished tale of bravery led me to ask for more details as to why people thought he was a badmāś (scoundrel). “What have you done?” I asked. “Nothing, really,” he insisted. Rather he felt that he needed to show his strength and fight against those wanting to tarnish his image. As described earlier, within the stereotypes of the plains versus the hills, “outsiders” are said to bring exploitative elements into the hill region that is characterized as peaceful, pristine, and honest. Even though he was from Uttarakhand, he did not grow up in the mountainous areas which were the source of identity and mobilization around the statehood movement.

21 But Mahendra had a Pahari name and a political legacy which he referenced at times to others; he proudly talked about being from a Rajput family with a tradition of anti- colonial activism. His grandfather was a freedom fighter during colonial rule, and Mahendra still held onto his document collection, such as Indira Gandhi’s letters when she was Prime Minister, and his tamra-patra (literally a copper plaque) that the government gave those who had honorably fought for India’s independence from British rule. He once asked out loud to me, as if demonstrating his grandfather’s sacrifice, “How did he work? This time we have vehicles, but at that time they used to walk 60 kilometers to Almora! He went to jail many times—sometimes for 6 months.” The neighborhood (“colony”) of Mahendra’s family home was “full of freedom fighters” because the government allotted them land there after Independence.

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22 He also had to prove that he would make sacrifices in students’ interest. When he first came and fought in the student election, he went on a hunger strike in a demand to open more positions for students seeking admission. He narrated to me:

No one knew me in those days... There were a lot of problems concerning university admissions. Many students were left behind who wanted to study but could not… When we started our protest, we wrote a letter to the college administration, but they refused...It was Friday when we planned to start our protest. All the other leaders insisted that since Sunday is holiday, that we should come on Monday. But I decided to start on Saturday! I stopped eating and drinking. I went on a hunger-strike on the campus. And all students who could not get admission joined and supported me.

He was able to meet with the college administration, and recalled, “Everyone got admission, and I became their favorite! After that, a lot of things happened. Some gundā (gangsters) came and destroyed our posters... But then people started to really like me. They felt that, ‘This guy can do something for us.’”

23 I attended multiple rallies where Mahendra gave speeches in Nainital and nearby towns. During one rally in the neighboring town of Bhowali, he dressed in simple, ironed clothes, such as a knit sweater and buttoned formal shirt, with his hair combed smoothly. Standing in the town’s central market, he addressed the crowd over the incessant honking of passing cars, speaking very quickly and emphatically in a Pahari- inflected Hindi, referring to the youth in the crowd as “brothers.” He again applauded the role of youth in the movement for statehood and lamented that regional schemes for youth loans and employment had failed to have an effect. Older Pahari men in khadi and white Gandhi caps, women passing through the market, and a large crowd of youth stopped to listen to his speech. The young men especially clapped and cheered him.

24 Mahendra had to learn how to navigate this political terrain and engaged in his locality by gaining visibility. Drawing from his youth and assumed “innocence,” he wanted to gain people’s trust. He was, in his terms, “just a kid.” Yet he tried to demonstrate a certain “toughness” to win elections and supporters. Even when recalling the story of his election to me, he seemed careful to project a self-image as a tough yet discerning leader.

25 His focus on development and anti-corruption carried into later political ambitions. However, his youthful “independence” of party politics did not. Some years later Mahendra joined the BJP which came to prominence in Uttarakhand after this research was completed. He went on to contest an MLA seat in a nearby constituency but lost to a member of the Congress Party. He ran on a platform of “striving” and “development” “without fear and without corruption.” His friend in the student union, who used to speak against party politics, also eventually joined the BJP and won a local position in Nainital. The student leader of a previous generation with whom they associated, later joined the Congress Party that he had vocally critiqued. However, all tried to maintain their platform of anti-corruption, and all cited their legacy in student politics as part of their credentials.

A “Pure” Vote?

26 To be regionally charismatic was, in the particular narratives of student leaders I met, to rise above dirty politics. Discussions of respect and “purity” in politics circulated in

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various print media outlets and youth cultural production in Nainital. The student yearbooks and campus newspapers for Kumaun University contained multiple poems and essays written in Hindi, and I offer one small example from the Nainital Campus Reporter:

Interviewer: In today’s student politics, without pamphlets, without posters, without chicken, rather, with only a speech, it’s a miracle to get more than a hundred votes! Student leader: I have full faith that there is still some īmāndārī (respect) left in the student body– those 418 votes were pavitrā (pure)!

A “pure” vote was seen as one that came from the heart rather than being bought or manipulated. This moral orientation in student politics (Jeffrey 2009; Kumar 2012) animated regional charisma, and its mobilization was a way to overcome the corrupt image of political leaders and state failures and gain supporters through emotive and aspirational means. Werbner and Basu (2002) argue for an understanding of charisma as a moral aptitude in postcolonial contexts where “it is often the opposition between a morally grounded charisma and the rationalized authority of the state” (p.15). When student leaders make “representative claims” (Saward 2010) to a body of local or regional youth, such claims can often occur “outside the electoral process” (Tawa Lama-Rewal 2016:169) of larger party politics, as they find ways to seek legitimacy away from perceived corruption.

27 Regional charisma confers an aura of legitimacy and enchantment to political figures engaged in what has been described as the “(im)morality” (Osella 2014) of localized clientelism and brokerage in India (see also Alm 2012; Nielsen 2012; Jeffrey 2009; Tanabe 2007). While appearing as polarized ways of generating legitimacy (charisma is often seen as “magical” and spontaneous while brokerage involves earthy types of material exchanges), both are sutured qualities in the making of regional leaders. “Vote-buying,” as Björkman (2014) has productively shown, often works through meaningful types of reciprocity and gift-giving (Mauss 1966). Such exchanges are “constitutive of enduring networks of trust, sociality, and accountability” and “signal access” that leaders have to various kinds of know-how and resources (Björkman 2014:618). Often leaders in India offer hand-outs because of competing expectations to do so in elections (Chauchard 2018), and yet such leaders see their “choice” being “not instrumental, but distinctly moral” as they imagine their “obligations” and relationships (Piliavsky 2014: 155). Gorringe (2012) argues that charisma “cannot perform the daily work on which movement allegiance depends” (p.122), yet competence and charisma are sutured in the quest for legitimation and “even hereditary leaders have few followers when they lack charisma and skill” (Mines and Gourishankar 1990:762). Without this regional charisma, such types of exchanges and use of know-how become more easily mundane and corrupt, rather than almost extra- ordinary and special.

28 When Mahendra narrated his election process, he seemed proud of the affection of his supporters and his ability to be a peacemaker. At the time of nomination, he said, another leader’s supporters were also marching on the road. A fist-fight then broke out between the supporters, and the police had to come and separate the groups. The proctor arrived, and in front of him Mahendra allegedly proclaimed, “OK, we won’t fight!” He explained to me, “When there is a large crowd, people get emotional. People are ready to fight. They fight for me.” Emotions such as anger, frustration or love

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underlie the substance of “mobilizing structures” and “opportunities” for youth (Goodwin, Jasper and Poletta 2001) and thus helped to generate charismatic affect. Morality and anger could thus be interlinked in such demonstrations (Jaoul 2008), and a leader’s ability to manage the emotions of others also added to their charismatic affect.

29 Mahendra was aware that his samārtak (supporters) had different ambitions, and his efforts to gain supporters show the contradictions and failures in generating charisma. Many had faith in and devotion for him, he claimed, often due to the sacrifices he made, and his group seemed to share a sense of familiarity and affection (see also Ruud 2010). One the one hand, he explained:

M: When my posters came from the printers, I gave them to all my good supporters who didn’t want money and gifts from me. They used to even go out at night in winters. They used to write on roads, paint, put up my posters and other things. LK: Yes. I can still see them around town. M: So, it was like that. They had a passion to make me a winner at any cost.

However, he also had others with him who “were supporting someone else and partying on my money” he said. Many knew that their supporters were self-interested, but they needed their help to get things done. Students tried to develop a youthful regional charisma in order to overcome the negative association with political corruption and self-interested support as well as to show themselves as more than “ordinary.”

30 Mahendra also reasoned that public expectations were misplaced, and he attempted to manage multiple means of gaining support. For example, he set up coaching classes and free lectures by well-known professors and historians on the campus. However, many students did not come, he surmised, partly because they did not trust the intentions of leaders:

We have this problem here. People think that the leader does not want to do anything for them, but it’s not like that. I know that I worked hard for this campus, I did a lot of things, but people also don’t want to accept good things. They just want their personal benefits from me. They don’t care about those things which are beneficial for everyone.

31 Like many of the leaders with whom I socialized, Mahendra often stressed that he wanted to fight the corruption in the state that was preventing proper development and employment opportunities from taking place; in speeches he decried the lack of progress on the part of politicians. Similar to the activist-politician in Nielsen’s (2012) account, Mahendra also posed himself as fighting the “system”:

I came into student politics when I saw our system. I wanted to be an IAS (Indian Administrative Service) Officer... but when I began college, I become aware of all kinds of issues. Then I felt that it’s not enough to be an IAS Officer. To change the system, I joined politics.

On Knowledge and Information in Student Politics

32 In demarcating a relationship between charisma and know-how—having or possessing knowledge and access to spaces that “ordinary” people do not have—I draw from what Hansen and Verkaaik (2009) refer to as “the magicality of these connections” (p.16; See

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also Jensen 2009). In speeches and conversation leaders employed the Hindi terms jānkārī and jñān to indicate knowledge that comes from special institutionalized learning or through particular kinds of experience and the term sūcnā usually when discussing “information.” Such language saturated their speeches and assertions: knowledge of the town and campus; how to get a job; which subjects of study to choose; how to make social connections in order to get ahead.

33 I refer to another charismatic Pahari Rajput student leader in a hill town in Garhwal, “Mohan.” He grew his hair long and was well-groomed, often dressed in pleated dress pants and shiny shoes, and exuded a calm confidence. When we first met, he gave me a tour of the campus, and students kept coming up to him to ask him questions or show him their papers. As we walked, he stressed that his main goal was to help other students to find employment, especially those coming from nearby villages. The students were lacking in sucnā-sūcnā (information) on how to navigate the new social spaces and the bureaucratic knots of the university and the town, he stressed. Mohan also used the term jānkārī (knowledge) as something he wanted to help students obtain from their studies. He emphasized:

Politics koī job nahīṁ hai (Politics is not a job). The meaning of politics is to live in samāj (society) and show people the diśā (way). Whatever field I join, I want to be able to give some time to the community...Because when I was in student politics I saw students’ dukh (troubles). I got quite a lot of anubhāv (experience) from the student union election...I obtained direct contact with the administration and secretariat. I want to give that fāydā (benefit) to the local students.

When asked about his aspirations, he claimed that after the year of service in the union, one gains pahacān (recognition). “What you learn in that one year, you cannot learn in your entire lifetime… No ām ādmī (ordinary person) could obtain the jñān (knowledge) that we gain thinking about student problems while President.” In particular, he claimed that youth of the new generation had a unique know-how that their elders could not possess. But to gain such knowledge, one had to be extraordinary.

34 Like Mohan, Mahendra also used his know-how strategically during his campaign. While I could not confirm many of the events that he described from his past, the fact that he unabashedly shared such behaviors as a “natural” part of politics, couching them in his perceived likability, is what is of interest here. He told me an interesting story about his election that reveals his efforts:

M: Girls started liking me. They started supporting me and said they will promote me. Then the election took place...When I went to meet them for the first time, they said to me ‘Neta ji! How did you come without bringing us anything?’ I said, ‘Next time I come, tell me your demands.’ They said, ‘It’s OK, next time you can bring things; this time get us some cold drinks and some patties [a type of food snack] for us.’ I gave money to my supporters and told them to bring these things. LK: You mean you will have to give them something so that they will put your posters up on the walls? M: No, no, I am not talking about posters. I went to ask for votes. Even girls demanded beer bottles and chicken. They told me that they wanted beer and chicken. They said, ‘Without that we can’t vote for you.’

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I naively thought I had misheard him. Especially in this part of India, many local young women would avoid being caught drinking. He clarified:

M: No, girls… they were serious– they wanted me to treat them before the election. I arranged drinks for them. Then they said, ‘If we come and vote, you will have to send a bus for us. We will vote then roam around town, and then your bus will drop us back.’ I did that.

35 On the one hand, Mahendra was effectively “buying” votes. Yet, he did favors by proving his abilities with exceptional ease, because he could employ his knowledge of the town’s rhythms and spaces and use his local connections. As Björkman (2014) writes about vote-banking in Mumbai, such exchanges “index ‘accomplished power’” ((Parmentier 2002:65) as cited in Björkman 2014:629) and instantiate “the networks of knowledge, authority, and resources that are crucially necessary for navigating” the spaces of the city or town (p.631). Mahendra helped the girls by allowing them a way to party freely, and also ensured their safety while they went out to socialize in the evening. This was a valuable favor; the girls’ hostels were built up high-up, off winding, forested, unlit roads that became dark early in the evenings, and they had to walk a long distance uphill in order to arrive before curfew. It was more socially acceptable for men to socialize and roam around after dark, and many of those out late at night were actually thought to be afflicted with alcoholism, a politically emotive issue in the region. The young women must have felt comfortable asking for help to privately engage in publicly less-approved practices. His offering of security for local women reveals how the cultivation of this particular elaboration of charisma worked through masculine cultural tropes, such as his attempt to take on a gendered “protective” role that not just anyone could have accessed.

36 Student leaders thus mobilized their influence by claiming special abilities to connect and guide; they had special knowledge of how to navigate social worlds in the town, such as the university campus, municipal offices, hospitals and their bureaucracies, as well as the streets, marketplaces, and other public arenas. A phone call could help a family member get seen at the hospital more quickly, a meeting could help young women deal with harassment, and a request could help a student gain admission at the university. Such information and connectivity helped many young people in Uttarakhand in a time of economic uncertainty. Taking advantage of his “networking” ability, Mahendra worked to show himself as important. Such brokerage and transactions could not be delivered by just anyone, even with connections. In the context of Uttarakhand and the spaces of emotional, aspirational struggles for “futures,” having the awareness of the unknown (or seemingly inaccessible) spaces of the town and its histories helped to build the overall charismatic influence of young leaders.

Conclusions

37 These stories of political self-making elicit questions regarding whether or not student leaders were successful at being a “truly” charismatic leader in a broad sense. Often relying on brokerage or fights, Mahendra also wanted to craft an image of Pahari morality, innocence and selflessness. The desire to be charismatic is one that touches on youth aspirations in the region itself. The notion of regional charisma moves beyond helpful, but static, Weberian definitions of leadership, instead opening up

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opportunities to show the powerful regional and place-made variants of generating and inspiring support on smaller and more intimate scales. Mahendra inspired devotion in some and was used by others. He relied on transactional relationships, and yet had a “magical” connection to the town, which attracted people to approach him. As even the most mystical of leaders have to continuously maintain the aura of their natural abilities, in this way charisma is unmasked as a mode of self-fashioning. Charismatic hill town politics develop through localized aspirations and reterritorialized cosmopolitan associations, family legacies, gendered performative displays of know- how and sacrifice, and even caste affiliations or privileges. Charisma can be mobilized as a form of dissent yet can also reproduce political and social hierarchies, as the cases of Mahendra, Mohan and others show. Drawing from their family associations and privileges, forward caste young men could mobilize belonging not only through regional identities, but through caste affiliations, youthful distance from corrupt adult party politics, and stylized and masculine political performances.

38 While this article has described the production of regional charisma in the making of student leaders in Uttarakhand, underneath this it attempts to reconcile the contradictions between experiential knowledge and political genealogies with that of newness and youthful ambition. Such knowledge is relayed through earlier generations and authority figures, but yet is refashioned in a youthful politics of the contemporary. Student politics often confronts the state, which is made up of those who have grown out of youthful ideals, and which fails to uphold the promises of “development.” Yet in their efforts to expand their experiential horizons, youth imagine what a charismatic leader should be. As student politicians begin to retreat from older generations of leaders and from the state as a steward of rights, a new generation rely on and remake charismatic repertoires as they seek support and attempt to carve out a future in the region.

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NOTES

1. The research for this paper was supported by a Fulbright-Hays DDRA grant. I thank Jean- Thomas Martelli, Kristina Garalytė, Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal, Bhoomika Joshi and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. I am grateful to K. Sivaramakrishnan and Danny Hoffman for their input and support when I was first putting this research to paper, and Anand Pandian and Devika Bordia who offered valuable comments when I presented an earlier version of this paper at the Annual Conference on South Asia at Madison. I thank colleagues in Department of Anthropology where I presented this work at the University of the Western Cape, and to the participants of the workshop for this special issue, for their stimulating comments and discussions. All errors in this paper are my own. 2. Kumaun University was formed in 1973 after a student demand, with the Nainital DSB campus named after Dev Singh Bisht, the father of Dan Singh Bisht, a 20th century Kumauni businessman and timber magnate who supported the building of the DSB Government College, which preceded the formation of the university. 3. Abhishek Bachchan and Hrithik Roshan were some of the most popular, young, leading male film stars in Bollywood at the time. 4. Cinema culture has often been intertwined with politics in India, in what Dickey (1993) has called a “politics of adulation.” Popular actors play heroes on screen, and some even later dabble in party politics, drawing from their fame and support. 5. Pahari means of the mountains or hills, derived from the Hindi work pahār, or mountain, and is used to reference people living there. 6. My methodology involved participant-observation, meetings with youth and student groups, interviews with older generations of activists and regional leaders, attendance of rallies and collection of print media such as Hindi language newspapers, magazines, campus journals and yearbooks, student posters and pamphlets. The research covered a wide range of youth engagement, from NGO workers in rural areas to activist journalists of different generations in hill towns in both Kumaun and Garhwal. Within this field of public engagement, I included a look into contemporary hill town student politics in Nainital as well as a few selected hill towns. 7. See also Cole 2004; Wood 2012; and Jeffrey 2010b on the role of liminality in youth engagement. 8. See for example, Eckert (2003:86) on the charisma of Bal Thackeray, the staunch nativist Marathi regional leader of the political party, Shiv Sena, in Mumbai.

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ABSTRACTS

This article explores the production of “regional charisma” in youth politics in hill towns of Uttarakhand, India. Focusing largely on the narratives and experiences of a group of forward caste student leaders in the hills in the years after statehood (November 2000), the article offers an ethnography of political aspiration. Student leaders worked to cultivate regional charisma through drawing on their caste affiliations and political genealogies, demonstrating localized knowledge, and referring to regional idioms of place. They fashioned themselves as appealing and caring moral leaders, orienting their political practices toward sacrifice and service, while disassociating themselves from perceived corruption in adult party politics. In this way, the article argues that regional charisma is a quality that is sutured in, rather than contradictory to, transactional political repertoires.

INDEX

Keywords: student politics, youth, charisma, clientelism, self-fashioning, regionalism, morality, Uttarakhand

AUTHOR

LEAH KOSKIMAKI University of the Western Cape

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Performing the Party. National Holiday Events and Politics at a Public University Campus in Bangladesh

Mascha Schulz

No “Joyful August”

1 One morning in July 2017, a group of 30 to 40 students belonging to the SUST (Shahjalal University of Science and Technology) Chhatra League (BCL), the student wing of the currently ruling party, Awami League (AL), crowded in front of Assistant Professor Minhaz Sobhan’s office to confront him regarding his recent Facebook post that had gone viral the night before.1 The post had been debated intensely among students on the university’s Facebook site. With emotions flaring, the number of reposts and comments quickly multiplied, spreading beyond the university circle. Several colleagues had called the professor advising him to avoid the university campus as he might be physically attacked. His office was locked in anticipation. The students started to vandalize the office from outside while shouting slogans against the teacher, calling for the university to take action against him. Chanting the common BCL slogan “jaẏ bāṃla, jaẏ baṅgabandhu” (Victory to Bengal, Victory to Bangabandhu [friend of Bengal i.e., Sheikh Mujibur Rahman]),2 they tore down Minhaz Sobhan’s nameplate and used it to break his office’s small window. As a symbolic act they threw the wooden nameplate on the floor and stomped on it. Later that day, the BCL students proudly shared their Facebook posts with pictures of the nameplate amid pieces of broken glass, along with descriptions and pictures of the meeting with the university’s vice-chancellor concerning this incident and their demands.

2 Minhaz Sobhan’s Facebook post was also heatedly debated among the university’s faculty and the issue dominated conversations for a couple of days; even teachers not directly involved in politics discussed this incident passionately, at times with deep

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emotional investment. Interestingly, many people argued that Minhaz Sobhan’s post was an insult and a “real danger” to “secular Bangladesh.”

3 Several pro-AL factions filed petitions to the vice-chancellor calling for Minhaz Sobhan’s punishment. The SUST BCL continued to push their demands in more non- violent ways, such as by organizing meetings with the vice-chancellor, selected professors and AL politicians, and with non-violent protests demanding the termination of Minhaz Sobhan’s university contract. Furthermore, the BCL leaders made sure their presence on campus was even more visible to both discourage Minhaz Sobhan from entering campus and to increase pressure on the university administration. The controversy about Minhaz’s Facebook post was not limited to campus, it reached central and local AL and BCL leaders, and was discussed in local newspapers.

4 Less than a week later, the assistant professor’s punishment was determined: he had to pay a fine of 50,000 Tk (about £425), take compulsory leave for six months and was demoted to the post of lecturer. The last punishment not only meant a reduction of his salary to about 40 % of the previous level, but—as many of my interlocutors pointed out —it was highly humiliating for Minhaz Sobhan to be considered junior to some of his recently hired colleagues after 14 years of regular service.

5 What kind of statement resulted in such a huge wave of protest and intensification of sentiments? As a first response to my enquiry, people usually explained that Minhaz Sobhan had written something against Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s father, who is also widely considered the “Father of the Nation” and is a highly symbolic AL party figure.3 Many immediately pointed out that it was not his first controversial post against Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and that Minhaz Sobhan’s previous Facebook posts had been even more problematic. Minhaz Sobhan is an active writer, well known via his Facebook posts and political poems as a supporter of the opposition party, BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party), while many also allege that he has close links with Jamaat-e-Islami and its student organization Shibir. The actual status he posted on July 15, which went viral, had proclaimed: “I count the days...my joyful August is coming!”4 In contemporary Bangladesh, August is considered a “mourning month” as Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated on August 15, 1975. Therefore, posting about a “joyful August” was taken as a statement against the party in power. This, however, does not sufficiently explain the strong repercussions and consequences that followed the post, thus raising the questions: Why and how did such a Facebook post evoke such fierce reactions? What was it about “August” that provoked such strong sentiments and widespread protests? What does this tell us about political contestations, the complex role of “ideology,” and, possibly, the configurations of the religious and the secular?

6 This incident can be interpreted in several ways, but it, in any case, illustrates the symbolic significance of “August” and the affective potential that is visible in these different groups’ outraged reactions. While it is possible to view Minhaz Sobhan’s harsh punishment primarily as a result of very unfortunate timing entangling him in personal and party-related politics on campus, I contend that beyond this, the incident illustrates the centrality of commemorative events for such politics.

7 Taking the incident as a starting point, this article focuses on the social and political life of national days at the SUST Campus to ask what such commemorative events and associated repercussions reveal about the reproduction of party political structures and

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ruling party’s hegemony. It complements work on student and party politics in Bangladesh that highlights so-called “seat-politics” internal factionalism, violence and the role of criminal entrepreneurs, or patronage networks (e.g., Kuttig 2019; Jahangir 1979; Suykens and Islam 2013; Ruud 2014; Andersen 2013) by highlighting the significance that ideological positioning and affective attachment to the major party founders play for campus politics.

8 Rather than contrasting “ideology” with “factional politics,” this article argues that ideological positioning intersects with factionalist dynamics and strategic considerations in the politics around commemoration events. This intersection results in popular complaints about a lack of ideology (ādarśa, cetanā, bhābādarśa, iḍiolaji)5, while at the same time ideological positioning—that is, the use of markers that indicate party belonging but are also associated with certain political ideas—appears to be highly present. Accordingly, “ideology” seems to be simultaneously highly relevant and irrelevant. Exploring ethnographic material on “August,” I discuss the various ways through which “party ideology,” that is, political ideas and affective attachment to them, becomes (ir)relevant; I begin with an interpretation of the Facebook incident through which the post’s content and ideological commitment to party politics appear close to irrelevant. The subsequent section complicates the picture by exploring the social dynamics around commemoration events and national days at the university campus to demonstrate this apparently simultaneous (ir)relevance of ideological positioning.

The University Campus, Party Affiliation, and the Politics of August

9 If I asked my interlocutors for an explanation of the incident outlined above, most would firstly point to the relevance of “grouping” and party politics. The factional nature of (party) politics in Bangladesh is widely noted (cf. Islam 2013; Suykens 2017a; Ruud 2010). The hegemonic role political parties play in socio-economic life and, consequently, the polarization along party lines have been captured with terms such as “partyarchy” (Hasan 2006), “patron state” (Lewis 2011), and recently “party-state” (Suykens 2017b). As affiliation to major parties, particularly to the currently ruling AL or the main opposition parties BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami, structures access to various institutions and resources, party politics’ significance reaches beyond formal politics, resulting in the continued perpetuation of a deeply politicized society.

10 The recently emerging literature on student politics and student party wings in Bangladesh also highlights the significant entanglement between party politics and public universities. These studies tend to focus on the (mostly male) main leaders of the student wings of the major political parties focusing on the Chhatra League, student wing of the AL; Chhatra Dal, student wing of the BNP; and Islami Chhatra Shibir,6 student organization of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami. The remarkable power of the ruling party’s student leaders has been attributed to their control over resources— particularly hall seats—their political backing, and their employment of force and violence (cf. Andersen 2013; Andersen 2016; Kuttig 2019; Suykens and Islam 2013; Suykens 2018; Ruud 2010; Ruud 2014; Christiansen 2012:200–202; Bleyder 2013; Rozario 2001). This description resonates with my research, although Shahjalal University at the edge of Sylhet city is not a fully residential university and therefore

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only limited seats7 are available for student leaders to redistribute. 8 It is often highlighted that the “confrontational divide” (Andersen 2016:418) and a so-called “winner-takes-all mentality” (for instance Suykens 2017a:1143) is reproduced by opposition student wing leaders’ deprivation. Indeed, well-known student politicians are often unable to enter campus once their party is in opposition.9 Thus, student politics at the university campus is a major contributor to the (re)production of party politics and confrontational factional structures. Previous research has further shown that the willingness of young men to participate in these often violent and risky politics is linked to potential benefits for their future careers, be it a presumed privileged access to the formal job sector via political links, their aspirations to become political leaders, or even possible future profits as a māstān (violent entrepreneur) 10 (cf. Ruud 2010; Andersen 2016). Given BCL leaders’ power on their campus, it is not surprising that nobody seriously considered punishing them for the destruction of university property.

11 While student politics on the university campus is directly linked to the national level and major parties, faculty politics similarly perpetuates the (re)production of party divisions, despite the fact that SUST faculty are legally prohibited to actively engage in formal party politics.11 Faculty politics are organized through faculty panels that, although they are not formally or officially affiliated to any party, are mostly referred to as the “Awami League panel” or the “BNP-Jamaat panel”12 in everyday conversations. All major administrative positions tend to be replaced with the winning party’s loyalists after elections. SUST’s vice-chancellor is directly appointed by the government. Further, administrative posts such as proctor, student advisor, committee member, and hall provost are allocated by him and are thus considered “political posts.” However, even the members of the faculty association and members of the academic council, who are elected in regular and secret elections, tend to belong to the panel “in power.” Political affiliations, widely known to other faculty, provide a basis for social interaction and determine access to certain positions, privileged promotions, and access to certain services, favors, or routine paper work to a considerable degree (see for other contexts: Shahjamal 2007; Parvin 2012). Being a member of the panel “in opposition,” like Minhaz Sobhan was, results in disadvantages and this is a relevant part of this story. Indeed, it was widely assumed that his statements were an angry reaction to his experience where his wife failed to secure a job in public universities despite her outstanding qualifications due to his political affiliation.

12 These kinds of panel politics were also highly relevant in the determination of Minhaz Sobhan’s punishment. Nevertheless, many who had forthrightly criticized Minhaz’s actions commented that the punishment was “a bit too much.” Typical comments were, “See, from a political perspective, there needs to be a punishment, but from a personal perspective, I think it has become too much.” It was widely assumed that the main reasons for the harsh punishment were “political,” and that this case became so political due to its very unfortunate timing, which prompted many of the involved actors to demand an excessive punishment to show their loyalty to the government and what is assumed to be the AL “ideology.” The decision about Minhaz Sobhan’s case had been made at the very last syndicate meeting of the outgoing vice-chancellor, who at that time remained hopeful that the incumbent government would re-nominate him to the position. Furthermore, other senior members of the syndicate meeting hoped to be considered for the position and thereby had a vested interest in underscoring their “ideological commitment” to AL leaders. Additionally, the SUST BCL committee was

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under considerable pressure to build a positive reputation at that time as their committee had been temporarily suspended. Current leaders may have been motivated to display their commitment to the party, thus the stronger reactions. It was accordingly difficult for anyone to speak up for Minhaz Sobhan as leaders of his faction and colleagues from his department had done during previous incidents.

13 However, such a perspective focusing on grouping and personal strategic considerations tends to reduce the statement on “August” to an ordinary demonstration of “creating an issue” and “showing off,” but it fails to account for why “August” became such a contentious issue in the first place catalyzing such strong affective reactions even beyond party-political divisions. Scholars concerned with the state, political leadership, and student politics in Bangladesh and South Asia have not attributed much significance to political ideologies. The recent focus on “muscular politics” highlights instead the significance of patronage, the pragmatic nature of politics, the role of violence, and access to resources (e.g., Atkinson-Sheppard 2017; Islam 2013; Jackman 2018; Jahangir 1979; Ruud 2010; Suykens 2017a). Scholars working on student politics in other areas in South Asia have often assumed that political ideology is of minor relevance, such as in the study of Jat students in Meerut who, according to Craig Jeffrey (2010), “viewed this quest in entirely pragmatic terms” (p. 140). Bert Suykens even suggests that ideology is not a relevant factor for politics in Bangladesh more generally; as he writes:

Both the AL and BNP have been built on weak ideological foundations. [...] These parties are, as such, often considered as vehicles for patronage, rather than centered on ideological differences [...] Commentators have thus found the ideological distinction between the two parties limited (Suykens 2017a: 1143).

Minhaz Sobhan’s case shows a more complicated relationship between party politics, significant symbols, and circulating political ideologies. While the factionalist struggle for resources and power might be a significant part of the story, commentators who interpreted this incident as a “real danger” for “secular Bangladesh” clearly see “August” not only as a symbol for party political struggles, but also as part of the political idea of “secularism,” which calls for more explicit analysis of the role of “ideology” in this context.

14 Ideology is of course a fuzzy and problematic term that can be used with very divergent connotations (cf. MacKenzie 2003; Lloyd 2003; Pelkmans 2017), and it is even more so if we consider the only partial congruence of the semantic fields to which the English term “ideology” is related in contemporary Bangladeshi Bengali,13 and say in contemporary British English. However, it is used here in a similar and similarly vague way as it is used by my interlocutors, or in the quote by Bert Suykens above, as referring to political ideas and ideals. The ambiguity is arguably inherent to the concept, as even the most standard examples of political ideologies, such as Marxism or Maoism, are never fully fixed or linearly linked to empirically observable coherent positions, but are umbrella terms that capture changing and often heterogeneous formations. Furthermore, political ideologies are rarely discussed as theoretical arguments in which dogmas and ideas ought to be precisely outlined in ordinary interactions. They are instead characterized by the usage of certain symbols and statements that refer rather implicitly to broad ideas and defuse political stances, allowing people with diverse interests to unite under certain banners. Accordingly, I

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focus my discussion here mostly on “ideological positioning,” referring to markers associated with certain parties as well as political ideas that frame party political divisions but that, as I show below, at the same time resonate with large segments of the society beyond those at the core of party politics. I will explore the role of ideological positioning in the following by looking at what has often been perceived as privileged sites of ideological transmissions, such as nationalism or party narratives, namely, national days and commemoration events. Subsequently, the ethnographic perspective on social dynamics around these days allows us to explore the complex role of ideological positioning and its significance for party politics, existing power structures and a deeper understanding of the political and symbolic significance of “August.”

National Days and Political Time

15 National rituals and spectacles have been accorded a significant role in creating “imagined communities” by transmitting elite ideologies, creating affective attachments to the nation, and reiterating a supposedly shared “national” history (see Tsang and Woods 2014; Anderson 1983). While national days aim at commemorating the central historical events of the nation, the presumed traditions are often relatively recent inventions that tend to prescribe and sustain, rather than simply reflect, a shared national history and collective identity (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Kong and Yeoh 1997). Changes in the political climate or regime are therefore often reflected in shifts in commemoration practices and contestations around national days or monuments, as various studies have shown (Kook 2005; Stańczyk 2014; Chang and Holt 2011).

16 In Bangladesh, where competing historical narratives and imaginations of the nation have been propagated by the two main parties since at least 1990, this has implications. Different governments’ attempts to introduce, re-interpret, and shape commemoration practices in order to establish particular historical narratives in favor of their party’s hegemony have been described by several scholars (Uddin 2006; Kabir 1990; Ahmed 1990; Schulz 2012). Sufia Uddin (2006) discusses how shifting patterns of celebrating major holidays are linked to parties’ agendas and attempts to establish competing versions of nationalism, as well as to changing public perceptions on secularism and religion. Referring to the confrontational politics between the AL and the BNP, she writes: “Depending on who is in power, national holidays are celebrated differently—so differently that the festivities clearly indicate how competing nationalisms are articulated” (p. 139).

17 In the context of my research, many of my interlocutors highlighted the relation between party politics and commemoration practices, and some also referenced specific government policies. August 15, the National Mourning Day, is indeed an illustrative example in this regard. It was introduced as a national holiday when the AL came into power in 1996; it was reversed when the BNP was elected in late 2001 and declared November 7 a national holiday instead. The “National Revolution Day” commemorates the 1975 uprising when General Ziaur Rahman, a leading figure and founder of the BNP, came to power. Strong supporters of the AL continued to commemorate August 15, but had to do so without access to governmental resources or recognition, mainly in closed circles and discreetly to avoid harassment. In August

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2008, the caretaker government again reversed the decision and the jātiẏa śakh dibas (National Mourning Day) has been officially observed since. It is widely believed that the intensity with which the day is commemorated has increased considerably, as of 2018 not only the day itself is observed but the entire month of August is considered to be śakher mās, a “month of mourning” (cf. Mookherjee 2015:31–46).

18 The politicization of commemoration days along party lines is very apparent in the controversy about opposition leader Khaleda Zia’s claim that her birthday is August 15 and contestations around the subsequent annual celebration on that day by her followers.14 AL supporters allege that Khaleda Zia deliberately changed her birthday and interpreted this as provocation amid highly confrontational politics. In August 2016, Khaleda Zia announced that she will refrain from public “cake cutting” for her birthday, a decision she officially explained with reference to the national crisis, recent floods, forced disappearances, political murders, and the 2016 terrorist attack.15 Some interpreted this decision, however, as a change in strategy at a time of intense political repression. The fact that the (non-)celebration of Khaleda Zia’s birthday was extensively discussed on social media,16 on the streets and in other places of āḍḍā (chat) illustrates the highly symbolic and contested significance of August 15.

19 The Mourning Day is not the only day that was re- and de-introduced according to the “political time,” a concept coined by Jonathan Spencer (2007:125–126) to describe people’s tendency to divide time units according to political markers17 rather than referring to years. The politics around national holidays is further demonstrated in the government’s attempts to receive international support to increase recognition of historical events that highlight the party’s legacy. One example is the AL government’s successful lobbying in 2000 to have February 21 (Ekushe) recognized by the UN as the International Mother Language Day.18 It is well documented how, even for the British- Bengali community in East London, contestations around appropriate commemorations of Ekushe are “a primary site for a version of nationalist/cultural identity work and politics” (Alexander 2013:591), one that “draws the lines for the contestation of this identity, particularly around a broad religious/secular nationalist divide” (Alexander 2013:593) while at the same time intersecting with party-political lines even in the Bengali diaspora (Uddin 2006; cf. Mapril 2015 for a similar case in Lisbon).

20 In recent years, the government has implemented several policies concerning commemoration practices, making it obligatory for schools, universities, alia madrasas, 19 and other public institutions to observe official national days. It has also allocated budgets for universities to organize programs or events on these days. These commemoration policies not only attempted to increase the number of days of commemoration, but also to incorporate larger segments of society into the observation of core national days.

21 The mere existence of these government policies and commemoration ceremonies, however, has not necessarily resulted in general acceptance of historical narratives and their related ideological messages. Indeed, some of my interlocutors reflected critically on government attempts to foster hegemony through commemoration practices and were rather cynical about the historical narratives. As one of my research interlocutors commented:

It was already bad when I was in school. We learned one kind of history and then, once the government changed, the answer that counted as correct in the previous years, was suddenly marked as wrong. It’s crazy. […] But at least

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we did not have to attend all these days and seminars. My girls have to be in school today all day long although it’s a holiday.

Attempts to establish hegemonic narratives are never fully successful, but are instead countered by alternative readings, acts of resistance, or outright ignorance. It appears to me that in the case of Bangladesh the deconstructive perspective that many of my research interlocutors shared was facilitated by the oscillating commemoration practices promoted by the different parties, next to other factors such as the diversity of school forms,20 that promote different perspectives. Thus, it is important to pay close attention to how, why, and for whom commemoration events become significant and symbolically charged in ways that allow incidents like a Facebook post on August to create such strong reactions at the local level.

22 In his well-known ethnography of Shiv Sena in Bombay and Thane, Thomas Blom Hansen (2001) notes that many of the local party committees are not active all year around, but rather “before and during the festival season” (p. 56). This resonates with my observations in Sylhet, where commemoration days and events were a major activity for the various AL-affiliated committees and groups. Most committees not only observe the official holidays, but also several other days with historical relevance for the party.21 These ritualized national holidays result in “creating the actual occasions that visually enable the imagining of community” (Trivedi 2007:110). It is, however, not overly clear what kind of community is imagined in Bangladesh. It seems that rather than merely establishing “the nation,” these national and commemorative days result in competing “imagined communities” through the reproduction of party political divisions and an increased awareness of what Jonathan Spencer calls “political time.”

23 While I have outlined how party policies and the ruling party’s national decisions aim to transmit their ideological messages and affection for their party via national days, it is also important to understand why people accept the narratives and engage in such party-based, politically driven days of observance. Looking at the organizations responsible for national day celebrations in locations such as the university allows a more nuanced understanding of the reproduction of party political structures within larger segments of society and the role ideological positioning plays therein, creating commitment to certain ideas that reach beyond those actively engaged with party politics.

Performing the Party?

24 Commemoration activities are carried out in various forms, but in order to look at the role of ideological positioning in these commemoration events, I start with the discussion of one particular form that seems to be a major site of ideological transmission and the (re-)production of historical narratives: discussion assemblies or seminars (ālocanā sabhā) organized by the SUST university administration.

25 These seminars at university are held on all major national days and are organized by a vice-chancellor-nominated committee. It selects a main speaker, normally a faculty member charged with presenting the main paper about the day’s significance and history, which is published as a booklet and distributed among all participants. Lasting for about 30 to 50 minutes, this talk usually provides a narrative that traces the historical development from British colonialism or the language movement in 1952 to

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what is perceived as a current and on-going post-1975 crisis and distortion of “the spirit” of the independence war. Afterwards, the main paper is commented on by several invited discussants, normally other faculty, student leaders, and sometimes special guests such as politicians of the ruling party, who tend to reiterate the historical narratives themselves, but sometimes also relate the history to contemporary political issues or comment on campus events. The seminar generally lasts for about three hours.

26 The seminars seemed to be a crucial site for the reproduction of historical narratives that substantially add to the legitimacy of the ruling AL. References to secularism, but even more to non-communalism and “the spirit of 1971,” figure prominently in the historical narratives, and are often highlighted in the paper titles and comments. The seminar discussants often link “secularism” rather directly to the AL, particularly to Mujibur Rahman, and accordingly mark the secular “Other” as the (party) political Other. This can be seen for instance in the first comments by one professor after the main speaker at the SUST seminar on August 15, 2016:

[…] But just after the British rule was cut off, the first attack of Pakistan’s arbitrary, discriminatory and oppressive rule was on our mother tongue. Another chapter of life struggle for Bengalis started. […] With this hold [non- communalism] Sheikh Mujib continued politics throughout his life. In 1955, “Awami Muslim League” was transformed into the “Awami League.” This party created an osāmpradāẏik cetanā (non-communal spirit) against the misuse of religion. Sheikh Mujib has built this party by his own hand.

Recalling the history up to the war of independence with references to historical events in 1954, 1955, 1956, 1958, 1966, 1970, and 1971 and to the four principles (nationalism, socialism, democracy and dharmanirapekṣatā (secularism)) of the 1972 constitution, the speaker continued:

But […] he was killed with many family members due to the local and foreign conspiracy on the 15 of August, 1975. At the same time, a graveyard was created for osāmpradāẏikatā (the politics of non-communalism) and muktiyuddhar cetanā (the spirit of the independence war). One of the four principles of the state, that is, dharmanirapekṣatā (secularism), was rejected. Consequently, politics in the name of religion started. […] The good news is that in the national elections of 2008 and 2014, the leading party of liberation war, the Awami League, has come to power. […]22

As outlined above, National Day celebrations have been analyzed as ritual performances and public spectacles that provide occasions for the dissemination of elite ideologies to wider audiences, the creation of emotional and symbolic attachments to the nation through what Durkheim referred to as “collective effervescence,” and operate as a means to “manipulate collective memory in the promotion of political legitimacy” (Kook 2005:166; cf. Tsang and Woods 2014). Due to repeated reiteration of history, lengthy discussions of “the spirit of independence” and emphasis on the role of the iconic party figure Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the AL’s contribution, it seems that these seminars are a prime site for the transmission and renegotiation of (party) ideologies, most notably non-communalism and secularism.

27 Speakers are, nonetheless, not always convinced of the ideological significance of these events. While many emphasized the need to build historical awareness and transmit the “spirit of the independence war” to the younger generation, others were more disillusioned about the effectiveness of these seminars. Given the considerable effort

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that goes into preparing for the events, it is quite surprising that there was usually neither notable publicity nor effort to attract wider audiences; these events are often not even announced publicly. Faculty members who attend these events often belong to the faculty panel that supports the current government, and, more specifically, to the faculty faction that supports the university administration, while the majority of students who attend the seminars are BCL students. Their participation in these long seminars was not entirely voluntary, but rather expected by their leaders. Some viewed this obligation to participate in AL-related commemoration programs as an obligation not dissimilar to their other BCL activities, such as occasional participation in physical fights and so-called “showdowns,” walks or motorbike rides as a display of group power.

28 Asking one of the invited speakers, a politically ambitious professor, a few days after one of the seminars what he personally thought about it, he replied:

Well, honestly speaking I think this is useless. The problem is that this is all political. I think it would be more relevant that we actually change the thinking, that we actually do something more for secularism. But some of the people who talk about this at the seminar, they are communal themselves. You know, some of them are not really AL-minded themselves.

Thus, while he clearly held personal convictions relating to political ideas that are reiterated in these events, he also shared a de-constructive and skeptical position towards the event itself due to its political nature. His statement not only shows a disillusionment with the event however; it also makes a strong association between the AL and secularism and non-communalism apparent, a linkage that was also reinforced by the narratives reiterated at the event itself. Therefore, it was not the content of the event nor annoyance with such ideological-political education (or propaganda), but the alleged insincerity of those who “are not really AL-minded” and the “political” nature of the event that resulted in his complaint about the uselessness. His statement is, therefore, quite revealing in terms of which ideological positioning seems to be simultaneously highly relevant and irrelevant. I propose that this simultaneity is the result of the ālocanā sabhā (discussion meeting), being two very different, but intersecting kinds of performances.

29 While I have illustrated the role of these seminars in the reiteration of historical narratives that strongly work in the ruling party’s favor and results in its association with certain values and political ideas, the event can also be analyzed as a “complex political performance,” similar to what Suykens and Islam (2013) have done for hartāls (general strikes)23. In this view, the performative aspects go beyond nationalism and historical narratives. In their analysis, Suykens and Islam have pointed out that some aspects of these political performances are oriented towards internal audiences and thus underscore the need to pay attention to the performances’ multiple audiences. According to them, the organization of hartāls provides “opportunities for local party organizers to show, maintain and improve their position in the local power structure” (p. 61). Similarly, I argue that organizers and participants in these Bangladeshi national commemoration events are not primarily concerned with the ideological message, but rather with the event’s organization, such as the order of speakers, their positions on pictures, and names appearing on the banners. Generally, these events provide actual or aspiring leaders with an opportunity to display their relative strength, number of followers, and political affiliations. Observing attendance at the commemoration events

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at the university, for instance, gave me a strong sense of the shifting loyalties and alliances to the administration, particularly the vice-chancellor. It is therefore not surprising that a considerable proportion of the speaking time during seminars tends to be used to name the various people present at the event.

30 While such dynamics in the organization of party events lead to popular complaints about a supposed lack of commitment to the imagined ideals associated with the party, from an analytical perspective it is important to pay attention to the intersections of such events’ micro-politics and the resultant ambivalent significance of ideological positioning among my educated interlocutors. I will explore this argument in more detail in the next two sections by discussing the commemoration activities beyond the 2017 seminars.

Commemorating “August”: The Micro-Politics of National Days

31 August 2017: Even before the beginning of the month, the streets of Sylhet become cluttered with black banners depicting Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and expressions of grief have been put up in the name of various local AL leaders. Throughout August, various events—large and small—are organized, mainly by the different AL branches and wings as well as by organizations loosely affiliated with the party. Activities include elements of the standard repertoire, such as wreath offerings at the Shaheed Minar, discussion seminars, mourning rallies, human chains, milād māphils (special prayer ceremonies), and publications. Commemoration practices tend to be based on pre-existing groups. Wreaths are, for instance, offered in the name of a particular organization and milād māphils (special prayer ceremonies) are organized on behalf of a specific group or leader. While the government and party stipulate these days’ public commemorations, such events are not always public, as the university events underscore.

32 At the university campus, a few large banners referring to the śakh dibas (Mourning Day) were erected. However, the only leader who put up his own August posters on campus was the newly appointed acting president, Shafikul Islam. His posters depicted not only Sheikh Mujibur Rahman but also the general secretary of the BCL’s central committee. The “postering” by Shafikul was seen as a way to become known to a wider audience and to acknowledge and strengthen his bond with the leader in Dhaka.

33 The BCL on campus held their annual śakh dibas (Mourning Day) program as usual. They placed wreaths at the Sheikh Mujibur Rahman mural at midnight and the commemorative event was announced to start at 1:30 pm on August 15. Although BCL programs often start late, sometimes with delays of 2–3 hours, the event started promptly. Each of the main leaders said a few words on Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s significance while holding the banner. After the commemoration, the leaders and their main followers returned to the “food court,” the common assembling space used by BCL’s 100–300 followers who normally attend these events. Each leader’s different groups are easily distinguishable, forming separate circles, while the main leaders sat on a bench; it was only then that Shafikul Islam arrived. Later, when I asked Razon Chowdhury, one of the other main leaders, for the reasons behind the late arrival, he

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replied somewhat ironically: “See, I told Shafikul that the program will start at 1:30. If the president cannot be there in time, is that my fault?”

34 After āsarer nāmāj24 (the daily afternoon prayer), a milād māphil (special prayer ceremony) was held at the university mosque and all BCL followers, Hindus and Muslims, were urged to attend while I, the female anthropologist, waited in the entrance hall of the mosque. As the final part of the day’s program, the whole group jointly went to the high school attached to the university where free snacks were distributed to children from indigent backgrounds. The number of food packages and children on that day was relatively small, but the event nevertheless took a long time as the banner had to be rearranged a number of times. As is the case for most programs, each of the main leaders had instructed one of their juniors to take photos and upload them to Facebook. A lot of importance is given to the order of the different leaders in relation to the banner, the food packages, and their visibility on the pictures.

35 A few days later, shortly after the appointment of the new vice-chancellor, a banner at the central roundabout appeared announcing an ālocanā sabhā (discussion meeting) on August 24th in commemoration of the śakh dibas (Mourning Day) at the university’s philosophy department.25 This was highly unusual, not only because departments normally do not hold separate national day seminars, but also because the head of the department was a known Jamaat-e-Islami supporter. The newly appointed acting BCL president, Shafikul, a student of that department, was named as one of the main speakers. The lecturer in charge of organizing the event was slightly nervous; as a former BCL activist he easily grasped its politics. Shafikul had not talked to the other leaders before announcing this event publicly. His attempt to improve his reputation and display his newly gained power by organizing a separate event was, however, hampered by the interference of other BCL leaders. Threatening to prevent the event from happening by using force, they were able to change the event’s character. After long, late-night negotiations, the list of speakers was altered to allow other factions’ junior leaders to be included as discussants along with, remarkably, a number of so- called “general” (non-political) students, including several female students who are normally not even seen in these seminars’ audiences. The banner announcing the event with the BCL leader’s name was removed from campus a few hours after it had been put up, replaced by another banner that mentioned no names.

36 This short description gives some impressions about political commemoration practices in Sylhet, in particular the micro power-dynamics of the organization of these days. The commemoration events themselves seem to function as occasions for leaders to improve their position and show relative strength. The aspiring leaders’ main concern during the event was not what they would say in a speech, but how many people had attended on their behalf. While hardly any efforts were made to involve a general audience in these commemoration events, the leaders paid a great deal of attention to the event’s representation and documentation on social media.

37 This also highlights that the commemoration events’ organizers are not necessarily concerned with a particular event’s ideological-symbolic content. Student leaders often follow their own agendas when engaging in the organization of and participation in these events. National days in Sylhet seem to be a privileged site for the renegotiation of power relations and factional affiliations. In his ironic comment, Razon Chowdhury made it very clear that it was no coincidence that he made Shafikul Islam miss the August 15 program, while at other times programs might start two hours late because a

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senior leader is delayed. Conversely, leaders or factions’ intentional late appearances are often strategic acts to indirectly, albeit publicly and highly effectively, communicate any discontent or problems in the relationship. The micro-politics behind the organization of these events become clearly visible in Shafikul Islam’s attempt to organize a separate August program. The ethnographic material thus suggests an intricate entanglement of ideological projects launched through national commemoration policies and factional logics at the local level.

Commemoration and Shifting Sentiments: August beyond Factionalism?

38 The analysis of the micro-politics among politically active students and faculty should nevertheless not lead us to be too quick in dismissing ideological positioning as being merely “instrumental.” Instead, it should push us to question why commemoration days are a prime site for such intra-party politics at the university. I suggest that the commemoration of persons and days, and the concomitant evocation of the political ideas associated with them, become such a privileged site for micro-politics because of their symbolic significance as markers for party belonging and because the imagined party political divisions reinforced by such events are indeed linked to broader narratives and affective attachments to certain symbols and ideas.

39 This also becomes apparent in various BCL members’ reasons for their political engagement. In my experience, when asked, the replies mostly evoked historical narratives and alignment to secularism or non-communalism, which are sometimes repetitions of standardized narratives and sometimes highly personal statements with references to the person’s own biography and convictions. Many of them claimed in the very same interview that they doubt other politicians’ “ideological commitments.” Such doubts are also mirrored in the politically ambitious faculty member’s quote above, which contended that some speakers engaging in this narrative are not really “AL-minded.” However, it thereby simultaneously reveals the normative assumption of this teacher that doing politics for a party shall be linked to a certain state of mind or ideological orientation. Despite the deconstructive complaints about the politics behind the organization of commemoration events, “grouping” and power politics, and, crucially, despite an at times strong disillusionment with politics, people apparently keep up the idea that party politics is supposed to be about “ideological commitment.”

40 Similarly, it should not be underestimated that such significant “ground work” for the national days contributes considerably to establishing strong repercussions among certain segments of society, despite the striking “absence” of the “general” (non-party affiliated) public at commemoration events in August. This is true not only for the National Mourning Day, but also for February 21, Independence Day, and Victory Day, which resonate far beyond the specific days and result in patterns of “seasonal commemoration.” At the beginning of each month—for example, in the December “victory month”—many people update their Facebook profiles with comments about or symbols of the relevant day, or post historic photographs. Most newspapers also cover these days extensively, publishing editorials on them providing historical analysis, as well as featuring politicians and influential intellectuals’ letters or articles. The time from December to April encourages emphasis on Bengali nationalism and it is no

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coincidence that most of the cultural events and theatre performances in Sylhet take place in December, February, or March (cf. Uddin 2006; Mookherjee 2015).

41 Despite its relatively recent establishment as a national commemoration date, śakh dibas (Mourning Day) has also been generalized as a “śakher mās” (month of mourning) and has achieved a remarkable influence within wider sectors of society. For instance, students at the university campus had a strong awareness that some events, such as modern music concerts, cannot be held during August. Like during Ramadan, people avoid holding music events as well as cultural programs in August if they do not relate to the historical events of 1975. More generally, public depictions of happiness are discouraged during this “month of mourning.” Although there is a certain division along party lines regarding the extent to which this is followed, it is clear that the government-encouraged commemoration practices have also reached into the private domain.

42 It is against this background that we need to view Minhaz Sobhan’s Facebook post and the outraged reactions and moral criticism it provoked from a wide range of persons, not only party workers, but also left-leaning people, and even some moderate BNP supporters. After the angry responses to his Facebook post, Minhaz Sobhan tried to defend himself saying that his post was never intended as a political statement. Rather, he argued, he had personal reasons to look forward to the start of the month, as his own and his wife’s birthdays are in August, and he was about to submit two articles on which he had worked for a long time. However, this explanation was widely viewed as a defense strategy rather than a legitimate reason. People pointed out that neither his birth certificate nor his graduation certificates state that August is his month of birth. It is true though that the biographical note in his literary publications mentions that month of birth, but this was probably not particularly helpful for his defense because it stated August 15, which was seen by many as a political statement in itself.

43 What I found striking during my research was the strong condemnation of Sobhan’s post that also came from people not directly affiliated with party politics. For instance, this case was discussed widely among the cultural activists in the city; many were outraged and were emotionally invested in condemning his post. For example, the left- leaning activist, Sujon Anindyo, explained his enthusiastic support for the punishment: “We know this guy. This is the kind of person that we fight against in our activism. This is the kind of persons that we tried to fight with the Gonojagoron Moncho movement.26 This is the kind of person who endangers a secular Bangladesh.” That Sujon Anindyo considered a post on August to be against “secular Bangladesh” and rejected it with strong emotional investment, while he is otherwise highly critical of party politics and some of the ruling parties’ actions, can be taken as an indicator of the complex entanglement of ideas of party political divisions, commemorations, and wider contestations about ideologies such as secularism. Furthermore, some politically unambitious university faculty strongly condemned the post, and many who are considered “culturally minded” saw it as a “danger to secularism” but in further explanations pointed to his presumed party affiliation rather than any particular behavior.

44 These affective reactions observable among different groups are not merely spontaneous and individual responses but are related to underlying power structures, political regulation, and normative orders (cf. Blom and Jaoul 2008)—not the least of which are those political processes outlined above with regard to national holidays.

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Interestingly, the emotionality and moral condemnation provoked by a post that was perceived as political, and as a statement against the central AL leader, is in some regards comparable to other forms of “outraged communities,” such as those that emerge after what has been perceived as “hurting religious sentiments” or blasphemy (see, e.g., Blom 2008; Riaz 2008; Mahmood 2009) or in times of symbolic injury in the context of sectarian or inter-caste conflicts (e.g. Jaoul 2008). This could then be indicative of the symbolic significance of August and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman beyond direct party politics as well as the pervasiveness of party political divisions in society.

Writing on “Sensitive Issues”: Factional Politics and Party Commitment

45 While the symbolical leverage of “August” and commitment to certain ideas is the reason why the Facebook post became such a contentious issue on campus, it is also arguably the effects of factional structures themselves that lead to strong commitments and affective attachment to certain groups and symbols that are embedded in, and simultaneously reproducing, these party political divisions.

46 Many comments on Minhaz Sobhan suggested that he is “strongly BNP” and “very committed to party politics.” However, when he joined the university in mid-2004, he was not really interested in engaging in politics and claimed that he never participated in student politics. Having joined the university during the BNP-Jamaat Alliance, he was loosely affiliated with the respective faculty panel. As he explained to me: “At university we should do politics in the interest of the teachers and student, but instead we do central politics. So I thought that I should focus on my career and teaching.” He became more known for his “political identity” in late 2007, when he started to write against another influential professor and leader of a pro-AL panel. Some of the faculty on his panel had encouraged him to do so, and he received further encouragement from them after the newspaper article was published. By contrast, faculty who supported the AL started to speak up against him and he increasingly felt the need to get the support or “shelter” of faculty from his own panel, who also encouraged him to continue writing. Consequently, through his writing he was increasingly drawn into panel politics, and thus party politics at the campus level. After the AL came into power in 2009, he saw his wife suffering from his political affiliation, having difficulty securing a job despite her qualifications and own strong family background and their affiliation to the Awami League. Seeing this hurt him, he explained, and he thus started to write even more strongly against that government. His writing in the form of Facebook posts, comments in newspapers, and (political) poems has accelerated further amid an increasing public silencing of positions such as his and in reaction to a number of national developments. This includes the political polarization and contestations in 2013 around the Shahbag and Hefajat-e-Islam Movement, the 2014 national election— won by the AL allowing the party to stay in power but seen by many as not being democratically legitimized since more than half of the seats remained uncontested due to the opposition alliances’ boycott—and the increasingly repressive political environment in Bangladesh since then.

47 After the university administration decided his punishment, many people advised Minhaz Sobhan to change his attitude, to refrain from any kind of political writing, and

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some suggested that he might consider changing faculty panels to mitigate the punishment. His wife also told me:

See, my uncle called me. He is a very influential AL politician. He knows our difficult situation. He told us that he can help out, that he could talk to some central leaders to sort things out when my husband joins the party [AL]. I was very polite, but I know that he will never do this. He is just not such a person. He just cannot do this. Now we never talk about politics at home anymore.

Some people on campus suggested to me that Minhaz Sobhan’s actions were motivated by hopes that he would gain advantages once the BNP comes into power. However, even if this was the case, I suggest that such a narrow instrumentalist perspective, which interprets party political affiliations and actions mostly as rational choices in a game around resources and power, underestimates the complexities in which such informal party affiliations are embedded and the far-reaching implications that such entanglements have.

48 Minhaz Sobhan and his wife did hope the punishment would be changed when the new vice-chancellor joined the university more than a month later, but they soon realized that this would not be easy. Being very much aware that a recently installed vice- chancellor also needs to display his party loyalty, Minhaz Sobhan’s wife commented: “Well, in the end I can understand that he can’t do anything. These are all very sensitive issues (my emphasis). There is nothing that we can do but be patient and wait.”

Party Politics, the University Campus and the (Ir)Relevance of “Ideology” in Public Performances

49 In this paper I have looked at the complex role that ideological positioning plays in campus politics in Bangladesh. Previous research has highlighted factional divisions and the pragmatics of party politics assuming issues of “ideology” to be of minor relevance. That position is also echoed in popular complaints about a lack of ideals, morality, and ideological convictions in the politics of the major parties in Bangladesh. This paper, in contrast, has highlighted the complex ways in which “ideology” and factional party structures intersect. This leads to the paradoxical effect whereby “ideology” might be simultaneously highly relevant and irrelevant. As it is seen as a significant marker of belonging, party ideological positioning provides a fertile ground for micro-politics among persons with political ambitions, which in turn results in continuous doubts about the motivation for such ideological positioning. Due to this intersection, student and faculty activists’ eager participation in commemoration events at the university or their strong stance on specific ideological statements and positions might not be seen by others, or indeed themselves, as a sign of personal ideological commitment. Conversely, widespread participation in the dispersion of ideological messages and historical narratives reflects and produces strong sentiments about various issues and what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate behavior at certain times of the year, like August, among Sylhet’s educated middle class. The ethnographic material discussed and the case of the conflict around “August” thus provides insights into the complexities of ideological positions formed and shaped in specific political structures and enhances our understanding of how and why ideological positioning matters (or does not) for party politics in Bangladesh.

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NOTES

1. I am grateful for Mathijs Pelkmans, Katy Gardner, Johannes Quack, Raphael Susewind, and Mohammad Javed Kaiser Ibne Rahman’s comments on an earlier draft of this article. My gratitude is also due to the participants of the BASAS panel in 2017 on “Party Politics in Bangladesh in Local Perspectives,” particularly to Arild Engelsen Ruud and Julian Kuttig, and further to the three anonymous reviewers, and above all to the anonymized protagonist of this article. I would further like to acknowledge the institutional and financial support of the University of Zurich, the Swiss National Fund, the London School of Economics and Political Science and the HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, beyond Modernity” in Leipzig.

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2. This slogan is mostly, although not exclusively, used by AL supporters. 3. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1920–1975) is also called “Bangabandhu” (friend of Bengal). In a number of previous cases, people have been prosecuted under the section 500 and 506 of the Criminal Penal Code for the defamation of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. 4. Original in Bengali “dīn gunchi—āsche āmār ānandar āgāsṭ.” 5. These are only some of the terms that have been used by my interlocutors, at times exchangeable to iḍiolaji (ideology) and at times with slightly different connotations. A detailed discussion of the semantic field goes unfortunately beyond this article. Please see the last paragraph of the next section and footnote 12 for a more detailed discussion of my usage of “ideology.” Related to the main theme of this paper, it might be noted that the term cetanā, which can also be translated as consciousness, sensibility, cognition or spirit depending on the context, was at the time of the research at least loosely discursively linked to Awami League rhetoric. 6. This is the name of the male student organization. Student politics in Bangladesh is highly male-dominated. While a few female students might be included in BCL or Chhatra Dal committees, the Jamaat-e-Islami explicitly mobilises a substantial number of female students, who are organized in a separate organization called Islami Chhatri Sangshta. 7. While the university has slightly more than 10,000 students, there are only an estimated 1,500 seats for students in the three halls for male and the two halls for female students. 8. While halls are officially managed by the hall provosts, de facto BCL leaders divide the seats in the male halls among them and re-distribute them according to their wishes and often in exchange for political loyalty. However, some rooms are reserved for other groups including journalists, members of the Chhatra Union, Khelafat Majlish, and Tabligh Jamaat. 9. This was true during my time of research: The exclusionary politics even prevented several former leaders from entering the campus in fear of violent attacks. However, there is no linear relationship between national power and campus politics; local power dynamics are also significant. Shibir students continued to control parts of the halls at SUST long after the AL came into power after the 2008 elections and were only evicted from the halls in 2012. This contrasts with Ruud’s observation at Dhaka University: “‘Hall capture’ was a routine practice at the university, where after each national election the winning party’s student wing evicted all prominent losing party activists from halls of residence. Politics in Bangladesh is effectively a two-party system and every national election until 2014 has led to a change of government, which in turn led to ‘a change of guard’ in the university student halls” (2014:306). 10. Māstān, often used as synonymous with the term gunḍā, refers to local strongmen and has been translated as “criminal entrepreneur.” For an overview on the debate on “māstān” in Bangladesh, see: Atkinson-Sheppard 2017; Jackman 2018; Ruud 2014. 11. As stated in section 51.3 of The Shahjalal University of Science and Technology Ordinance, 1986 “[t]he service conditions shall be determined without any prejudice to the freedom of the teacher or officer to hold any political views, but he shall not propagate such views nor shall he associate himself with any political organization.” This prohibition is not inscribed in all University Acts and does not apply to Jahangirnagar University or Dhaka University, for instance. 12. More precisely there are three different panels: the pro-AL-leftish faculty panel “Mahānmuktiyuddher cetanāẏ udbuddha śikṣakbṛnda” (Teacher Panel Inspired by the Great Independence War), the pro-AL-centrist faculty panel “Mahān muktiyuddher cetanā o mukticintaẏ aikyabadyā śikṣakbṛnda” (Teacher Panel United in the Spirit of the Independence War) and Pro- BNP-Jamaat panel “Mahān muktiyuddho, bāṃladeśi jātīẏabād o dharmīẏa mūlyabodh śraddhāśīl phorām” (Teachers Forum in Respect to the Great Independence War, Bangladeshi Nationalism and Religious Values).

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13. Notably, this is not a mere problem of translation. As it is the case for many other English terms in Bengali, “ideology” is used within spoken Bengali but often with different connotations than such a concept might have for a British English speaker. 14. The date of birth on official certificates can easily be changed in Bangladesh. This is widely acknowledged, e.g., in the recently issued policy that names, place of birth and birthdays in passports might not be changed without substantial reasons. 15. Referring specifically to the incident at the Holy Artisan Bakery in Gulshan in July 2016. 16. This was hotly debated during my fieldwork in 2016, when various pictures of scans and allegedly fake scans of her passport were circulated on Facebook to substantiate claims about whether or not her birthday was on that day; see also: The Daily Star, August 13, 2015 “Khaleda’s passport scans are fake!” 17. People in my research context often referred to “the time of the BNP” or “at the time of the AL” when recalling events in the past even when they were not related to politics. 18. According to media reports in 2017, Sheikh Hasina further attempted, though without success, to change the date of International Genocide Day to March 25. The recognition of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s March 7 speech as documented heritage in the Memory of the World Register by the UNESCO in 2017 was celebrated throughout the country. 19. Alia madrasas are administrated by the Alia Madrasah Education Board, follow mostly the Calcutta Alia traditions and their degrees are considered as equivalent to public or private schools, while Qawmi madrasas are not subject to the same regulation and are mostly run by charitable organizations using donations following mostly the Deobandi model. 20. Due to the diversity of school forms—including NGO-run schools, English medium schools following international curricula, public schools, private schools, madrasa education—and a considerable proportion of the population without formal education, the curriculum at the level of schooling is much more diverse than in countries with universal governmental schooling. 21. Including January 10 (Day of Homecoming of Mujibur Rahman), January 24 (Mass Upsurge Day, commemorating Mujibur Rahman and others’ presentation of the six demands in 1966), March 7, March 25 (Genocide Day/Black Night), April 17 (Mujibnagar Day on which the government-in-exile was formed), May 17 (Homecoming Day, commemorating when Sheikh Hasina returned in 1981), August 21 (commemorating the grenade attack on Sheikh Hasina and party members in 2004), November 3 (Jail Killing Day, referring to the killing of four freedom fighters in a Dhaka jail in 1975), and December 14 (Killing of the Intellectuals Day) to name just some of the most prominent days. While some of these days, such as December 14 or March 26, are observed by a wider audience, including commemoration by non-party organisations such as freedom fighter associations or cultural groups, many of them are observed primarily by AL subcommittees without much public notice, including national days such as March 7 and 17, April 17 and December 14. 22. Translated transcript of the SUST Seminar on August 15, 2016. Originally in Bengali, translated by the author. 23. Hartāls (strikes) are a widely established protest forms throughout South Asia. Many of the commemoration practices overlap strongly with established South Asia protest forms, such as mānabbandhan (human chains), michil (procession) and rallies (protest marches). 24. Also “asr.” 25. The identity of the department has been altered for the sake of anonymity of my research interlocutors. No Philosophy Department exists at SUST. 26. The Gonojagoron Moncho (“People’s Awakening Platform”) movement formed in February 2013—in the context of the “International War Crimes Tribunal” after the announcement of the verdict of Quader Mollah sentencing him to life imprisonment—to demand death penalties for the 1971 war criminals. In Bangladesh it was widely seen as an anti-Jamaat-e-Islami and “secular”

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movement. Mobilization was strongest in Dhaka, where people protested for weeks at the Shabhag junction close to Dhaka University and became known as the “Shabhag movement.”

ABSTRACTS

Based on 15 months of ethnographic research between 2016 and 2019, this article explores the campus as a core site for the (re-)production of Bangladesh’s ruling party’s hegemony and domination. While previous research emphasizes the pragmatic and violent nature of student politics, this article explores the role of ideological positioning in campus politics, focusing on commemoration events and the significance of certain symbolic national days. Commemoration practices contribute to the reproduction of party narratives and ideologies at the levels of both student politics and the university administration. However, far from just reflecting the official party discourse, individuals organizing or attending these events often have pragmatic perspectives using them strategically for their own micro-political endeavors on campus. The ethnographic exploration of these dynamics elucidates when and how ideological positioning and commitment becomes relevant, as well as how personal convictions intersect with other reasons for engaging in party politics.

INDEX

Keywords: student politics, ideological commitment, commemoration, National day, Bangladesh, university campus, party politics, August

AUTHOR

MASCHA SCHULZ Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland

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Symbolic Boundaries and Moral Demands of Dalit Student Activism

Kristina Garalytė

Introduction: Dalit Ethics and Multiple Moralities

1 This article presents an analysis of a debate between two students of so-called “untouchable origin”1 during which they discussed the moral dictate of “paying back to society.”2 Among Dalit activists, “paying back to the society” is a common explanation for why they engage in Dalit student activism. Such altruism is not solely a Dalit idiosyncrasy, but should rather be seen as reflecting a broader Indian moral concern (Bornstein 2012; Copeman 2011; Jeffrey and Dyson 2014; Srivatsan 2019).3 Srivatsan has shown how sevā (social service), “the keystone of ethics of modern India” (2019:24), has reoccurred in different contexts by various forms in the postcolonial Indian history. This research also highlighted how through sevā (social service) hierarchical relations were maintained and altruism used as a means of domination. Contradicting the predominant image of youth in the global South as entangled in “predatory patron- client networks,” Jeffrey and Dyson showed how Indian youth in Uttarakhand engaged in “generative politics,” by “channeling their energies and time into serving...others,” and thus generating new social and political relations (2014: 967-68).

2 Dalit social responsibility ethics, while resonating with the broader Indian cultural values of altruism, also have their own characteristics and logic rooted in the Dalit movement’s history and ideology. The idea of “paying back to society” was introduced by Kanshi Ram, the founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh. It was based on the vision of the broader Dalit community, which encompasses different ex- untouchable groups. Kanshi Ram suggested that having benefited from the quota scheme, upwardly mobile Dalits should reciprocate and work for the betterment of the community. This idea was intended to help overcome the prevalent caste-centrism and competitive division among the SCs while encouraging social responsibility. Naudet argued that “paying back to society” has become a central ideological reference of Dalit social mobility (2008, 2018).

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3 Social responsibility ethos has been a major source for classification and social categorization among Dalits since the beginning of the Dalit movement. In his speeches Ambedkar made a distinction between the “illiterate masses” and the “educated few” whom he denounced for not engaging in social service (Ambedkar, cited in Yengde 2019:155). Kanshi Ram in The Chamcha Age (1982) distinguished the “genuine and real fighters” and “chamchas,” stooges of the upper caste Hindus, as different categories (p.90). Recently, Dalit scholar and activist Suraj Yengde critiqued the Dalit middle class in Caste Matters (2019). He identified several Dalit “castegories” according to their different levels of social responsibility. He identifies various Dalit middle class types such as “Token Dalits,” “Elite Dalits,” “Salaried Hypocrites” and “Self-Obsessed Dalits.” A significant and common characteristic of these groups is that they do not overtly embrace Dalit identity or view of caste refraining from contributing to the Dalit community and movement, instead prioritizing personal goals. Yet, Yengde also makes note of another group, the “Radical Dalits” who, proud of their Dalit identity, see the world through the lens of caste and actively engage in political struggle. Hence, we can see that throughout the history of the Dalit movement there has been ongoing concern about the “not-paying-back” members of the community and that movement leaders and community organizers actively reproduced social categorization based on social responsibility attitudes.

4 I will present an ethnographic vignette of two students debating over which means for “paying back to society” are most legitimate. This debate reveals key elements of how categorization figures within micro-contexts. It shows that although “paying back to society” among SC students is a strong structuring moral demand, there are multiple ways in which SC youth perceive, relate to, and enact it. While discussing the conflict, I look at the dynamic relations between the symbolic boundaries revealed by the two students, the way each morally positions himself vis à vis the Dalit community and movement. I also analyze their respective subjectivities in terms of their socio- economic backgrounds and personal moralities.

5 I will show how the above mentioned differences take the form of symbolic boundaries among the students. Symbolic boundaries are the “conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space” (Lamont, Pendergrass and Pachucki 2015: 853-54). They are assumed to precede and to be “a necessary, but insufficient condition” for the emergence of actual social boundaries (p.169). The latter are governed by concrete rules that distinguish and separate one group from another, while the former are less tangible, essentially conceptual and notional. Contributing to the literature that explores the link between boundaries and morality within social movements (for a literature review see Lamont and Molnár 2015:853–54), I will show how categorization takes place among SC students —“non-activist middle class Dalit” and “Ambedkarite”—and how students draw lines between themselves based on class and, most importantly, relation to the Dalit movement.

6 The question of morality becomes particularly relevant in the context of cultural and societal change. Such contexts produce “moral breakdowns” (Zigon 2007) or “moral torments” (Robbins 2004), as people are forced to respond to particular ethical dilemmas and to match contradicting value systems (Zigon 2007:140–43). Some of the SC students on university campuses, as individuals or as a group, have been experiencing intense cultural transformations; illiteracy to literacy, social isolation to

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social exposure, political socialization through various trajectories. All these changes necessarily affect, but do not determine their moral outlook and likely create a favorable climate for moral dilemmas.

7 Zigon’s approach provides a means for me to examine the moral views of SC students more comprehensively. Instead of viewing morality in terms of totalizing moral discourses and normative uniformity, Zigon urges readers to conceptualize morality in terms of “assemblages,” “unique conglomeration(s) of various aspects of diverse and often contradictory discourses, as well as diverse and sometimes incompatible embodied moral dispositions” (Zigon 2014a:18). Departing from the idea of a society composed of separate moral-value spheres (Robbins 2007),4 Zigon suggests that “every social context has multi-aspectual moralities that are themselves pluralistic” (2009:263) and that “plurality forms the very ‘stuff’ of moral experience” (Zigon and Throop 2014:12).

8 The counter-cultural discourse illustrated by the Dalit movement asserts a distinctiveness and uniformity of ethics and moral code, as if Dalits constitute a moral- value sphere that is different and, in a way, autonomous from the dominant Hindu cultural morality (Garalytė 2015). Existing research on the Dalit middle class and social mobility suggests that these views are internalized to a significant extent, though not absolutely, among the SC members who identify with the Dalit political project. Naudet has argued that Dalitization—the internalization of Dalit counter-culture narratives and resistance to caste domination—has become the cultural repertoire upwardly mobile Dalits most often draw upon as it allows them to “succeed without betraying” (2018). Srinivas agrees that the Dalit middle class fosters a separate identity, a “product of protest ideology” referring back to B. R. Ambedkar (2016:220). While acknowledging the influence of Ambedkarite ideology in forming students’ moral views, I distinguish a plurality of moralities within the SC student community and demonstrate how students, “consciously and creatively find a way to be moral” (Zigon 2009:263). Devan’s case in particular deviates from the accepted unilineal identity development trajectory of Dalitization (Charsley 1998; Ilaiah 2009; Naudet 2018, Yengde 2019) revealing the moral dilemmas that may surface during Dalitization. In addition, through this case study, there is opportunity for a re-evaluation of the uniformity of the social experience of untouchability (Guru and Sarukkai 2013) as a key factor in determining Dalitness.

9 Contributing to the understanding of ethical and moral life in South Asia (Blom and Jaoul 2008; Pandian and Ali 2010), this case study shows that students envision various moral ways to climb the social ladder, and how they deal with the moral dilemmas arising from social mobility. Summarizing existing sociological research on social mobility, Naudet states that “[t]he memory of the group of origin is always present and causes the upwardly mobile person to be torn between his attachment to his group of origin and his desire to recognize the social legitimacy of his new group” (2008:416). However, he also argues that “this question of the tension between the group of origin and the new group does not play the structuring role in the Indian context, that it does in Western sociological literature” (2008:416). This case study, in contrast, brings out tensions that arise at the intersection between Dalit movement’s ethics and multiple individual moralities.5 I argue that in the case of SC students, moralities should not be reduced to social categories (e.g. Dalits) or ideological claims (e.g. “paying back to society”) but instead should be considered taking into account their complexity and

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their actual everyday manifestations in line with the “ordinary ethics” (Lambek 2010; Das 2012) and phenomenological approach (Zigon 2009, 2014a, 2014b; Zigon and Throop 2014) rather than through explicit ethical discourses, codes and rules.

Dalit Activism on Indian University Campuses

10 Scheduled Castes have been guaranteed reserved seats in governmental education institutions by the Constitution of India since 1950; however, their visibility within universities has grown gradually. While the emergence of other student political groups goes back to the time of the Indian independence movement (Altbach 1968; Shah 2004; Wilkinson 2020), Dalits as political actors with distinct political identity, started mobilizing on campuses in the 1990s, when Indian society and politics underwent significant systemic changes.6 In the context of these broader shifts, various Dalit and other lower-caste student organizations came into being, mobilizing on caste identity and for improving the political climate of some Indian university campuses. These new caste identity-based organizations began and continue to defend the constitutional rights of ex-untouchables with regard to education, lobby against caste discrimination, and fight for public representation of this recently politically recognized and defined group.

11 Early scholarly accounts of the Indian student movement and campus politics barely mention Dalit and caste issues (for a literature review see Shah 2004), and Dalit political activism came to popular and scholarly attention only recently. SC students on Indian university campuses have been mainly analyzed in terms of their experience with caste discrimination and inequality in the field of higher education (Desai and Kulkarni 2008; Pathania and Tierney 2018; Ovichegan 2014, 2015; Pandey and Pandey 2018; Sen and Gundemeda 2015). Meanwhile, Jeffrey (2008, 2010) analyzed Dalit student mobilization in Uttar Pradesh where Dalits asserted their moral superiority with regard to the dominant Jat student groups, and attempted to gain symbolic control of the university space.

12 What received more academic attention is the Beef and Asura counter-culture politics7 through which Dalit students challenged dominant Hindu practices and beliefs and expressed their cultural distinctiveness and autonomy (Gundimeda 2009; Garalytė 2015; Pathania 2016). Dalits and caste issues also appear episodically in other ethnographic accounts that look at overall campus political culture (Kumar 2012; Martelli and Parkar 2018), while Pathania looked at Dalit student participation in the Telangana movement on the Osmania University campus (2018). All these works largely explore the ways in which Dalit students position themselves with regard to other student groups and the broader social caste structure; less attention has been paid to SC intra- group relations and dynamics and the ways SC students perceive and relate to the Dalit political activism. Ovichegan (2014, 2015) showed the distinction between economically affluent, “creamy-layer” Dalits, and economically weaker SC students (2014:368). However, his analysis does not take into consideration the role of the Dalit movement and campus politics in determining intra-group ideological differentiation. Drawing on the notion of symbolic boundaries (Lamont and Fournier 1992; Lamont and Molnár 2002; Lamont, Pendergrass and Pachucki 2015), this article explores the emerging differentiation within the SC student community at the intersection between caste, campus politics and social movement experience, resulting in a more

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comprehensive understanding of Dalit students as a socially and politically heterogeneous group.

Research Site and Methodology

13 I will discuss SC students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the stronghold of Leftist politics (Batabyal 2015) where I conducted ethnographic research from March to June, 2013.8 My field research data comes from semi-structured interviews and conversations with Dalit student activists, Dalit professors, students from other political groups, and politically disengaged students held in popular gathering places. Interviews focused on students’ life stories and campus experiences. A significant part of the research data comes from participant observation of everyday campus life and through conversations gathered as I was “moving with the participants through their space and time” (Burawoy 1998:14).

14 I follow Burawoy’s reflexive science approach that “takes context and situation as its points of departure” and looks at everyday social interaction (1998:30). The main narrative of the article revolves around an argument between two SC students while they were in a local hangout discussing “giving back to society.” I was present at this discussion and as a result of my ongoing participation in their everyday activities, I did not appear to have any effect on the way they expressed their respective moral and political stances regarding what counts as “paying back to society.” As I understood it, the conflict destabilized and problematized the ideological reproduction of the normative discourse of the Dalit movement and allowed me to discern the plurality of experiences and moral views among SC students. Such a natural, unforeseen situation, rather than a strictly scripted research plan, allowed me to better grasp what Burawoy has called “situational knowledge” and tacit social relations (1998:15).

15 In order to understand in what broader socio-political context the discussed conflict appeared, it is worthwhile to present an overview of the social field of Dalit student activism on the JNU campus. In 2013, the concerns of Dalit students were advocated by a number of student groups such as UDSF (United Dalit Students’ Forum), AIBSF (All India Backward Students’ Forum), BSF (Bahujan Students’ Front), Mulnivasi Sangh and The New Materialists. Each of these groups claimed to represent subaltern lower caste communities in a different way. UDSF mainly addressed Dalit issues from the Ambedkarite perspective and claimed default membership, meaning that all SC and ST students on campus were seen as natural members of UDSF. AIBSF and BSF searched for broader alliances with the OBCs (Other Backward Classes) working from the Bahujan (majority)9 angle. The New Materialists merged Ambedkarite and Marxist perspectives, while Mulnivasi Sangh experimented with focusing on autochthon and race. The existence of these different groups shows that the subaltern student activism on the JNU campus was fragmented and faced ideological and practical difficulties in forming a common political platform. “Whenever SCs, STs and OBCs start coming together, something comes up in the market that creates divisions,” Prem, one of the protagonists of this article, aptly sums up the perennial problem of subaltern politics in India.10

16 Despite their differences, the groups above engaged in similar and quite often collaborative activities. They organized intellectual and awareness programs during which students and scholars debated Ambedkarite ideology, caste issues and Dalit-

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Bahujan culture. Some of the groups, such as BSF and AIBSF, contested JNUSU elections several times, although without major victories.11 Dalit and pro-Dalit student activism with its caste critique and claim to represent subaltern groups, though at the margins of electoral campus politics, had a growing ideological resonance with the Left- dominated campus. Dalit student activist groups resembled a loose network with flexible boundaries, unlike the strict organizational structure displayed by the more established student organizations. What mostly characterized Dalit student activism on the JNU campus was the intersectionality between diverse groups and ideological discourses: leftists, autochthon, feminist, regional etc. Martelli’s account (2020) illustrates that, in general, “ideological cross-fertilization” can be seen as a major characteristic of JNU student politics.

17 In early efforts in the 1990s, during the anti-Mandal protests, Dalits at the JNU and other university campuses mainly mobilized to safeguard the reservation system and to engage in identity politics. Twenty-five years later, victimization sentiments gave way to the more radical claims of Dalit counter-culture and Dalit moral superiority.12 Dalit students criticized other student groups for perpetuating caste order and caste mentality and represented themselves as culturally autonomous and morally superior citizens and political actors (Garalytė 2016).

18 The university campus environment, which shelters social, cultural and political diversity, is an extremely rich site to research how people experiment with their social and political identities while simultaneously negotiating their moral views. We will see that at JNU, as I believe is common to other politically vibrant South Asian campuses, political mobilization goes hand in hand with moral socialization.

Differing Experiences and Moralities

19 My arrival in New Delhi (March 2013) coincided with the conference “Dalit Art and Visual Imagery” held at JNU on the occasion of the publication of G. M. Tartakov’s eponymous edited volume. At the entrance to the auditorium where the Dalit conference was held, there was an exhibition of the varied Dalit artwork that was discussed during the conference, ranging from works by the renowned painter, Savi Savarkar, to those by lesser known Dalit folk artists. At the end of the last conference day, while I was standing and looking at a painting depicting caste discrimination scenes from a Bihari village, a student in his early twenties approached me and asked if I understood what was depicted in them. He asked me about the painting, he said, because he was a Dalit from Bihar and could offer me an explanation of what it depicted.

20 Devan13 became one of my closest informants in JNU. I met with him regularly— drinking tea in dhābā (food stalls), roaming around and attending events. Devan once invited me for a poetry reading called “Caste Away” in the Kunzum Travel Cafe in Hauz Khas village, a gentrifying neighborhood and popular hang-out place among middle class Delhiites. During the event Devan read his poem, winning two awards for the best Hindi poem and the best line. On another occasion, Devan invited me to a theatre play in which he was performing. We went to the play together with his new upper-caste friend and her parents. Compared to other Dalits who usually socialized with fellow Dalits or other self-described subaltern students, Devan had a set of social contacts beyond his caste and class boundaries and also beyond one type of political group.

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21 Devan’s relation to Dalit student activism was ambivalent. He was interested in Dalit issues and Dalit politics, but did not participate in Dalit student activism and was reluctant to make public comments during the Dalit events held on campus. Devan’s interest in the Dalit topic became more evident as he gradually engaged in my field research, suggesting what people I should meet and participating in the informal interviews that were often more like spirited table discussions. Devan introduced me to several student activists who were not from SC background, but were engaged or supportive towards the Dalit student movement, as well as student leaders from other student organizations.

22 I got to know more about his background from his friends than from Devan himself. His reluctance to tell his life story stands in a sharp contrast to the Dalit activists’ willingness to share theirs. Interestingly, Devan did not describe his life as “suffering or struggle,” although he did narrate one incident that he faced at school related to drinking water,14 a common experience among Dalit students. Devan comes from an educated, intellectual Ambedkarite family. His father was the first in his generation to be educated, and despite difficulties managed to rise up to the position of school principal in Bihar. The only time Devan spoke about his father, he said that his father had a good friend who was a Brahmin and an active Hindutva supporter. Apparently, their common interest in poetry strengthened their bond. Devan recalled that the Brahmin friend had helped Devan’s father a great deal. For example, he once filled out an application for a higher teaching position on behalf of Devan’s father, which eventually led to his promotion. “They were eating, sleeping together, using the same utensils. This fact attracts me a lot,” Devan recalled. I got the impression that Devan, motivated by his father’s experience, was especially interested in understanding upper- caste people’s involvement in the Dalit movement and their intentions: whether their support was genuine or merely related to practical calculations. Altogether, Devan was an ambivalent figure, talking and acting differently from most of the Dalits whom I met and who were active in the Dalit movement.

23 On May 23rd, 2013 Devan came with me to meet Prem,15 a Dalit activist belonging to one subaltern student organization on the JNU campus. This was their first direct encounter, though both agreed that they were aware of each other on campus. This was also the first time when Prem and I engaged in a longer conversation covering diverse political topics such as different Dalit student organizations on the JNU campus, existing political and economic divisions among Dalits and the future of the Dalit movement. In the interview, he criticized the use of the label “Dalit” for its degrading connotation and also for its part in obstructing the building of broader alliances with other oppressed communities. He felt much more comfortable defining himself as Mūlnivāsī (Originals of land), an identity term which asserted that SC, ST and OBC communities were the original inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent and share a racial affinity and potential to revolutionize Indian society. Ideologically, Prem defined himself as being Phule-Ambedkarite.16 From time to time, Devan interjected short affirmative comments and questions into the interview such as: How Ambedkar’s ideas relate to the idea of a revolution; how academicians perceive the Mulnivasi term; why different Dalit groups do not work together under the same banner; whether unity among Dalits should be based on Ambedkar’s ideology or rather merely on identity? The general mood of the interview was cheerful and there were no signs of tension as Prem expressed his ideas and knowledge about Dalit politics.

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24 After approximately one hour of our conversation, Raju, a Dalit student activist, and friend of Prem, came and joined us. I had met Raju several times on other occasions before this meeting and we had already established a friendly relationship. Raju came from Haryana and his life story displayed a dramatic pathway of upward social mobility. Raju was from an uneducated and economically backward SC family but he managed to get admission in the prestigious and elite education institution in the capital. He adopted his maternal grandfather’s surname because his real one was typical among ex-untouchables and immediately revealed his caste identity, a big obstacle in his professional field. Raju explained to me that his inspiration for political activism came from his mother, who once rebelled against the insults of upper caste villagers by refusing to continue working until they apologized. Raju repeatedly noted that there was an urgent need to create Dalit media and to educate Dalits as journalists, because according to him, all Indian media, especially English media, was dominated by upper-castes and their discourse. He was equally critical of Indian higher education and shared the common view of Dalit activists that Indian universities were Brāhmiṇ agrāharam17 and thus replicating the social exclusion existing in villages. During the time of my fieldwork, Raju was actively involved in organizing FYUP protests.18 He, in the company of other activists, took me along on visits to New Delhi Dalit politicians as the students searched for political support.

25 For some ten minutes, Raju simply observed the discussion between Prem, Devan and I, as we talked informally although with a digital tape recorder on “record.” Eventually, I asked my final question, igniting a passionate discussion that eventually turned into an agitated dispute; the question was about their future plans. Initially all of them agreed that they would likely pursue an academic career; then the conversation took a very different turn. Addressing the activists as elders in the respectful pronoun “Sir,” Devan declared:

Āp bol sakte hain ki main…main…matlab is māmle men thoḍa avasarvādī hūn… Opportunist mere liye negative term nahīn hai...Merā mannā hai ki if you are fighting against Brahmanism you have to use same tool to fight against Brahmanism [as] they are using. (You can say that I…I…mean…in this case I am a bit opportunist…Opportunism for me is not a negative term...I think that if you are fighting against Brahmanism you have to use the same tool to fight against Brahmanism that they are using)

As an artist, Devan expressed his individualism and apolitical stance:

Main kisī group kā part nahīn bannā chāhtā hūn, nahīn ban saktā hūn, kisī movement kā part nahīn bannā chāhtā hūn. Ṭhīk hai? Sīdhī bāt hai?[…]Mujhe ambeḍkarvādiyon pe viśvās nahīn hai. (I don’t want to join any group. I cannot join any group. I don’t want to become a part of any movement. OK? Straight point? ...I don’t believe in Ambedkarites).19

26 I can only guess whether Devan’s open demonstration of his opportunistic views was intended to provoke the activists, to be intimately honest, or to show off. Unsurprisingly, activists Prem and Raju, became irritated by his comments—his mentioning of Brahmanism and its methods, his admission of being both opportunistic and politically disengaged. This is exactly what Ambedkarism inveighs as morally corrupt—Dalits who succeed and do not concern themselves with their group and their structural, symbolic and material marginalization in society. Prem and Raju were radically opposed to the views expressed by Devan. Instead they inveighed the

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collective ethos of Ambedkarism, entailing a moral responsibility to the Dalit community. For the activists, political engagement was a moral act, a way to “pay back to society.” For Devan, politics was associated with dirty business.20 Devan tried to explain that he is working in his own cultural ways (cultural admī hūm), researching Dalit literature, cinema and art. However, Raju did not seem to take it seriously and maintained his negative perception of Devan. Raju and Devan now led the discussion, with me remaining as a passive recording observer. Raju positioned himself as the interviewer pushing Devan into a corner with his questions: Aur āp change lānā chāhte hain. Without movement kā part bannā, very good… (How can you change society if you are not participating in the movement? Very good…) followed by demonstrative ironic clapping.

27 To illustrate what made the activists so irritated by Devan, I provide a short excerpt from their conversation:

Devan: Mujhko kuch fāydā nahīn hai. Phir bhī main kuch denā chāhtā hūn, ṭhīk hai, na? Isliye politics mere liye nahīn hai. (I don’t get any benefit, but I want to give something, OK? That’s why politics are not for me.) Raju: Agar āp kuch denā chāhte hain to politics kyon nahīn karnā chāhte hain? (If you want to give something, why are politics not for you?) Devan: main dūngā, na. Main apne tarīqe se dūng. (I will give, I will give in my way.) Raju: āp kyā denge, āp kis tariqe se denge? (What will you give? In what way will you give?) Devan: Main kisī tariqe se dūngā. Maine batāyā ki mujhe money chāhiye. Uske binā I cannot do anything uske binā. (I will give in some way. I have said that I need money. Without it I cannot do anything.) Raju: To money kahān se milegā? (So how you will get money?) Devan: Main apnā rāstā talāś kar lungā. Agar ye system brahmanical hai, to main isī brahmanical system se money raise karūngā…āpko academics me jānā hai. Agar main academics men jātā hūn, main paisā raise nahīn kar saktā hūn. Mujhe market men jānā paṛegā. Market kiskā hai? Brāhmaṇvādiyon kā hai. (I will find my way. Even if that system is Brahmanical, so by using that Brahmanical system I will raise the money. You will go for an academic career. If I go into academics, I cannot raise the money. I will have to go to the market. The market belongs to whom? It belongs to the followers of Brahmanical ideology.)

The more intense the discussion was getting, the more Devan became frustrated and started to lose control of his emotions. He was in front of two activists and also in front of a female researcher, unable to make his point in a convincing manner. Devan had a habit of spitting on the ground, and this worsened in moments of emotional excitement. Raju had an advantage because he had his activist friend near, had positioned himself as the questioner and appeared to be in better command of himself. After ten minutes of dispute, Raju told me to stop the recorder.

28 To interrupt the tense discussion, we went to Mamus dhābā for a tea. Devan was frustrated and was spouting the following arguments: that he is not the only one who thinks like this, that there is a contradiction in the movement, that he is socially frustrated, that he has a team, that he is planning to make a cultural revolution, and so on. Prem sarcastically reproached Devan by saying, “You have multiple personalities, have you visited a hospital?” In a similar vein, Raju approached him with “You need to go to Allahabad.” Raju asked me if I understood what he meant by Allahabad. When I

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said no, he explained “You have been to Agra, no? There is a mental hospital there, so there is one in Allahabad.” When Devan went to retrieve his bag, Raju and Prem started asking me what I was doing with this pāgal (crazy) guy and how I came to choose “these kinds of people” for my research. Raju noted that I needed to choose people to communicate with “who have something to do with the movement.”

Symbolic Boundary in the Making

29 As the vignette suggests, the moral demand of “paying back to society” promulgated by the Dalit movement is at the center of the student debate. This can be seen in the repetition of the Hindi verb denā (to give) in the previously cited dispute, which is a direct reference to this demand. Apparently, this moral ideal of “giving back to society” was ubiquitous among the students, but they related and interpreted it differently due to the experiential and class differences that separated them.

30 Raju, coming from an economically and educationally disadvantaged background, had developed a strong anti-Brahmanical and anti-Hindu attitude, and was proud of being involved in the Dalit “struggle.” Devan, who belongs to an educated, Ambedkarite family background, got involved in friendships with upper-caste people and refrained from Dalit student activism, yet sympathized with the Dalit cause. The students’ pre- university background and economic position significantly affected the way caste was experienced by both of them during their formative years and in the ethnographic present on campus. As a politically active Dalit, Raju spoke in terms of collectivity and community. For him Dalit politics constituted one of the main avenues for social mobility. Meanwhile Devan, as a member of the middle class from birth had accumulated the kind of capital that allowed him to take an individualistic stance to the world at large and to venture into social experimentation.

31 One might wonder whether this conflict does not simply reflect the tensions arising from the different class positions of students. Undoubtedly, class differences play a role in the above conflict. However, I believe that the central point of disagreement focuses on the moral positioning and ideological alignment associated with the Dalit movement. From my experience, I believe that the encounter between students would have taken a very different turn if Devan, instead of pronouncing his alternative views, had expressed his loyalty to the movement. During my fieldwork, I met relatively affluent students of non-SC origin who were well integrated into the Dalit student circles due to their ideological alignment with the discourse of the Dalit movement proving social position is not the primary issue of contention.

32 While discussing the described conflict, we cannot talk about social mobility, morality and ideology as separate things, but rather should take into account their interrelatedness. Social mobility in India is largely understood in terms of collectivity– caste communities (Fuller and Narasimhan 2014; Naudet 2008, 2018; Osella and Osella 2000; Still 2011). Meanwhile, individual trajectories of social mobility are less explored (for a literature review see Vaid 2018). In the described situation we can see how collective and individual imaginaries of social mobility interact. The conflict among students erupted because while talking about his future plans Devan approached the moral obligation of “paying back to society” in a symbolically oppositional way to that of Raju and in so doing also questioned Raju’s moral authority. Devan openly said that he is an opportunist and that he is ready for anything, even

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adopting Brahmanical ways to reach his goal of middle class standing and professional success. For the Dalit activists, this must have sounded like a selfish goal and a betrayal of the collective Dalit struggle. Social responsibility plays a central role in defining the meaning of Dalitness, which in a broadest sense means approaching the future asserting Dalit identity, supporting the Dalit movement and working for the Dalit cause. Upward social mobility, if not followed by the social and political commitment to the Dalit community, is not justified and is seen as immoral and deviant (Yengde 2019).

33 Robbins (2007) and Zigon (2009) discuss two types of moralities—“morality of reproduction” and “morality of freedom” (2007:296; 2009:252). This is a distinction between culturally constructed/reproduced morality and the morality which comes through the conscious freedom of choice. As a Dalit activist, Raju is in a way obliged to reproduce the discourse of the Dalit movement. He has to motivate others to be politically active and to join the Dalit movement. Meanwhile, Devan, as an artist and non-activist, has some freedom to question the imposed morality. Though apparently tacitly aligning with the moral demand of the movement, he does not want to be limited by Dalit politics nor their strictly constructed worldview. As a socio- economically advanced student, Devan can choose and negotiate his moral views and, most probably, his existence does not depend anymore on the Dalit community. While for Raju, as a first generation educated person, the Dalit community’s support is existentially important and, therefore, “paying back to society” becomes his guiding moral principle. We can surmise that for Raju “paying back to society” is a necessity, while for Devan it is a choice.

34 The moral views of Raju about his obligations to his primary social identity as a Dalit could be seen as shaped within one moral-value sphere, which is largely defined by the ideology of the Dalit movement. In this particular situation, his moral views appear to be consistent and unproblematic because as an activist he is representing Dalit cause. Devan, quite contrary, seems to be pulled between different moral-value spheres, between the social responsibility of the Dalit movement and the individualistic “opportunism” of the closed and highly competitive professional world of art. In the same interview, he explained to Raju “In that field where I am going there is no way for a person like me, all doors all closed...if you are talking about cinema, art. So you are not going to find a person like me, you are not going to find Ambedkarvadi.” Interestingly, previously Devan distanced himself from Ambedkarites, meanwhile, in these lines we hear him placing himself among them. In the interview, as well as on other occasions, Devan repeatedly described himself as being “socially frustrated” and “seeing contradiction in the movement.” This might be related to the fact that he was motivated by the ethic ideal of the Dalit movement, however, he has had to adapt his behavior to the real life situation, in which Ambedkarism does not always offer an easy solution. Such moments of dilemma, or “moral breakdowns,” when ethical ideals are confronted by reality and the individual discover himself “caught in this betwixt state,” offer the opportunity for a comprehensive anthropological exploration of morality (Zigon 2007:140).21

35 It is also interesting to observe to what extent Dalit moral ideology is internalized even by those who question it. Though Devan claims that he does not believe in Ambedkarites and even though he refrains from participating in Dalit student activism, in his actual actions he is not detached from the Dalit issues. Devan openly claims that he is working for the Dalit cause in his own “cultural” ways and is therefore aligning

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with the movement’s “paying back to society” moral demand. (It must be noted that he may have considered that doing things under the “Dalit” banner is likely to bring some symbolic and social benefits). However, instead of expressing his absolute loyalty to the Dalit movement and its ideology, Devan voices independent views on political activism. This “independent thought” leads Dalit student activists to question his mental state. Devan’s tacit moral alignment does not gain him recognition, consistent with that of the dominant Dalit moral type, from his peers. Paradoxically, both Devan and Raju construct their social mobility projects in relation to the Dalit movement, one through political activities, the other through cultural. They each consider their method as being the more moral. However, they appear unable to see their shared “moral ideals” because of initial pre-categorization and a mutual sense of competition.

36 In the described students’ encounter we can see distancing, differentiation and hierarchy construction among the SC students. Devan distances himself from Dalit student activism and claims that he does not believe in Ambedkarites. Meanwhile, Raju assumes moral superiority over Devan, judging him to be a “not-paying-back” Dalit. He thus engages in the behavior typical in symbolic boundary-making by “impos[ing] a specific meaning as legitimate” (Lamont and Molnár 2002:172), i.e. by claiming that “paying back to society” has to be done through political means. Interestingly, throughout the students’ interaction, we hear only Devan defending his views while Raju’s views are taken for granted as legitimate, as if the movement’s discourse need not be spoken out and justified. The assertion of moral superiority often goes hand in hand with boundary-making and the construction of some sort of inequality as Le Espiritu (2001) shows in his analysis of Filipino immigrants in the USA.22

37 A considerable amount of empirical research has already delved into the domination and inequality question within the SC community. Naudet (2008) has suggested that “upwardly mobile Dalits prefer to be dominant among the dominated than dominated among the dominant” and that among them “there is both a wish to become dominant economically and socially and a reluctance to become like those who are currently dominant” (p.435). Ciotti (2006) has demonstrated how unequal access to education fragments Dalit community and creates new inequalities. Ovichegan (2015) argues that there is “a growing divide between the creamy layer (usually urban) Dalit and the Quota Dalit (rural/urban and less privileged)” and that the quota scheme, instead of bringing only positive results, becomes a source of division within the Dalit community (pp.148–9). He observed that “creamy layer” Dalits “form privileged groups in which they are comfortable, and perpetuate their internalized biases against other, less privileged Dalit students;” that they are “individualistic and seem to prefer to separate themselves from other factions within their community” (p.149). These scholars agree on the point that the reservation policy and education can work to produce class inequality and domination among the SCs, enabling the formation of tangible social boundaries among Dalits.

38 In the student encounter described in this article we see another type of boundary in the making. This conflict was not about being a richer or poorer Dalit. It was about the reproduction of the Dalit movement’s moral ideology and worldview and the meaning of Dalitness. What finally established a symbolic boundary between the students was Devan’s political disengagement and his mention of “opportunism” and “Brahmanical ways,” which are anathema to Dalit activists for going against the moral ideal of the Dalit social mobility.

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39 Naudet has argued that “paying back to society” serves as a stabilizing narrative that neutralizes tensions arising from upward social mobility (Naudet 2018). In this article I have demonstrated that “paying back to society” for some SC students provides an empowering ideological program for social upliftment, while for others it is an ideological imposition limiting free human agency. This case study shows that among the SC students tensions appear not from the upward social mobility alone but also from the ideological framing of morality. Moral demands, such as “paying back to society,” may result in stability and continuity, as Naudet has argued. However, they can also, sometimes, become a point of disagreement and contestation and an impetus of new symbolic boundaries.

Conclusion

40 Despite “paying back to society” being a significant moral demand of the Dalit movement, there is an apparent complexity of moral views and multiple social mobility imaginaries evoking tensions among SC students. Dalit moral order, centered on “paying back to society,” is a political project that is debated and differently defined, protected by some and threatened by others. Also a center of moral gravity, it is defining symbolic boundaries within the Dalit community. These boundaries are porous and implicit, but nevertheless real in establishing if not hard divisions, at least separateness of interest and goals. While discussing the student encounter, it was inevitable to address “paying back to society” as a “totalizing moral discourse” (Zigon 2014a:18) and to recognize its structuring effect. Of this pervasive normative ideological claim, none of the students, no matter their background or economic status, appears completely free. However, we could see how students disagreed over which means of “paying back to society” is more moral and legitimate; through this disagreement the plurality of moralities becomes apparent.

41 I began this article by discussing how the Dalit movement has been reproducing social and moral categorizations and then, through ethnographic vignette, I presented how this categorization played out in an actual social situation among students. One can consider social and moral categorization among Dalits as being descriptive, mirroring existing socio-economic differences in society. However, categorization can be also understood as being prescriptive, reifying the not yet firmly established differences and boundaries and predetermining how individuals will perceive and relate to each other. In this case, the discussed students’ interaction was largely shaped by the prescriptive categorization, which has been instrumentally maintained by the Dalit movement. Raju and Devan reproduced and applied to each other existing categories— community oriented Dalit activist vs. opportunist middle class Dalit—without realizing that their moral views, at the core, were not that incompatible. They both support and follow the Dalit code of moral conduct, “paying back to society,” in disagreement simply over the nature and the form of giving. This interaction demonstrates how predetermined categorizations either of each other as individuals or of those established as “Dalitist” do not account for the multiple moralities and differing ideological alignments within the group as a whole.

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NOTES

1. Naming of untouchables has been a controversial question (Charsley 1996; Guru 1998; Webster 2007) and none of the existing labels avoid certain pitfalls. Firstly, since the Constitution of India outlawed the practice of untouchability in 1950, there is a consensus to denote these culturally and experientially diverse people using the prefix “ex-” or “former-” before “untouchables.” However, in certain contexts untouchability is still practiced in its cruelest forms, i.e. caste atrocities, which do not allow thinking of it merely in terms of the past (Jaoul 2008; Teltumbde 2008). Secondly, since the time of B. R. Ambedkar, the term Dalit has become the umbrella category with which to identify various groups that are known to belong to any of the untouchable caste groups, and is now considered the politically correct term for untouchables. However, the term Dalit is related to a certain political orientation involving anti-Hindu consciousness, which is not naturally accepted by all ex-untouchables. Additionally, it is not absolutely clear who can be named as a Dalit; opinions range from including only those marked by the experience of untouchability to including various types of groups affected by social stigmatization and subalternity (the latter tendency was promulgated by the Dalit Panther movement as well as the Bahujan Samaj Party more recently). Though the term Dalit was seen as carrying liberating potential, it cannot escape from turning into a hegemonic category imposing a certain type of political consciousness. Finally, Indian governmental categorization of various untouchable groups as the Scheduled Castes puts culturally diverse ex-untouchable sub-castes (jāti) into one artificial administrative mold. However, in some contexts such as Indian universities, the governmental categorization seems to have the most importance in people’s lives compared to other terms. I endorse the view that one should be conscious and cautious when using one or another category denoting ex-untouchables and their particular usage context. In this article, I employ the term Dalit to indicate people who are the followers of Ambedkarite ideology; Scheduled Castes will be used as a generic term to name those who are of untouchable origin but who do not necessarily adhere to the Ambedkarite ideology and the Dalit movement. 2. My biggest thanks go to the protagonists of this article for allowing me stepping into their lives and for sharing their experiences. I am also grateful to Victor de Munck, Emilija Zabiliūtė, Rūta Žukaitytė, Armin Chiocchetti and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. 3. In the Nepali context, student and youth activism has been conceptualized as social service (Snellinger 2018) and sacrifice (Hirslund 2012).

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4. Drawing on Weber, Robbins suggested to view society as constituted of distinct and incompatible moral-value spheres. “Morality of reproduction” happens within one moral value sphere, meanwhile, “morality of freedom” comes to the fore when a person discovers herself stuck between two conflicting moral value spheres and has to figure out her moral positioning (Robbins 2007:298–300; Zigon 2009:252–53). 5. Raju’s case will reconfirm Naudet’s argument about tension-less social mobility, while Devan’s case will contradict it. 6. Changes included the expansion of the reservation policy to Other Backward Classes, economic liberalization, the rise of the Hindu Right and leading communal conflicts, and the emergence and success of the Dalit political parties (Corbridge and Harriss 2000; Jaffrelot 2003). 7. The idea of Dalit counter-culture emerged on Hyderabad university campuses (The University of Hyderabad, Osmania University, The English and Foreign Languages University) from around 2010 onwards. Dalits began claiming that they were the ancestors of mythic Asuras (dark and fierce demons in Hindu mythology) or historical Dravidians (local inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent conquered by the invader Aryans), and staged performative commemorations of death anniversaries of various Asura characters that were cruelly killed by Hindu gods or upper caste Aryans. These commemorations served as an assertion of Dalit identity and, most importantly, as a reference to various caste atrocities against Dalits. Dalit students have also been staging performative beef eating festivals on Hyderabad university campuses, thus trying to de- stigmatize beef as a food item questioning the hegemony of Hindu vegetarianism, and simultaneously attempting to give a positive sense to their own identity. Though initially started as an assertion of the Dalit culture and identity, these festivals have developed into the broader anti-establishment, counter-culture initiative, uniting different student groups that were against the Hindu Right politics and the caste system. 8. Though in this article I present material only form JNU, I rely on a continuous multi-sited fieldwork and online observation of the Dalit student activism in New Delhi and Hyderabad university campuses (The Jawaharlal Nehru University, The University of Delhi, The English and Foreign Languages University, Osmania University, The University of Hyderabad) since 2013. 9. Term Bahujan (majority) was popularized by the BSP (Bahujan Samaj Party) - Dalit party that was founded by Kanshi Ram in the Uttar Pradesh state in 1984. The term has been used to represent Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes and religious minorities. 10. Author’s interview with Prem at JNU, May 23rd, 2013. 11. This trend was interrupted by the emergence of BAPSA (Birsa Ambedkar Phule Student Association) in 2014 which relatively successfully contested the JNUSU elections in 2016. 12. These claims found their expression in the Beef and Asura counter-culture celebrations that have been rocking some of the university campuses in Hyderabad, and to a lesser extent JNU, since around 2010. 13. I have codded the names of the informants and also changed the minor biographical details in the narrative to mask their identities. 14. One of the traditional practices of untouchability is related to preventing untouchables from fetching and drinking water from the common water sources. Among Dalits, water has gained a deep symbolic meaning, not only as a source of discrimination, but also as a means of resistance. In 1927 B. R. Ambedkar initiated Mahāḍ Satyāhraha a non-violent resistance protest, during which he and his followers fetched water from the public water tank in Mahad locality. When telling their life stories, Dalit students quite often refer to “water incidents” that have happened in their lives, thus aligning their personal experiences with the grand narrative of the Dalit movement. 15. Prem appears episodically in the narrative as he did not take a central role in the discussed conflict. 16. Jotiba Phule (1827-1890) was an anti-caste social activist and writer from the Maharashtra state, belonging to the Mali (gardener) caste that today would be categorised as the OBC. He

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promoted the idea of the unity between Shudras (present-day OBCs) and ati-Shudras (present- day SCs) and worked to educate them. Phule has become an ideological icon not only among OBCs but also among SCs and gained a respectable place in the Dalit ideological pantheon. 17. Agrāharam is an area of a village in Tamil Nadu where Brahmins reside. 18. In 2013, The University of Delhi implemented Four Year Undergraduate Program (FYUP) reform, which extended undergraduate studies from three to four years. Among other arguments, this reform was seen as creating hardships for SC, ST and OBC students, by increasing educational load and financial costs. There was a series of protests against the reform in 2013 and 2014. Various student organizations from JNU jointly supported the FYUP protests. 19. Author’s interview at JNU with Prem, Raju and Devan, May 23rd, 2013. 20. Youth in the global South often equates formal politics with corruption and “gerontocratic power structures” (Oinas, Onodera and Suurpää 2018:12), meanwhile attributing a positive meaning to the youth political engagement as “generative politics” (Jeffrey and Dyson 2014). 21. The reader might sense a certain imbalance or even injustice in my description of the two students’ moral views, as I depict Devan in terms of moral complexity and Raju in terms of moral uniformity. Looking from Zigon’s (2007) perspective, only Devan’s case could be interpreted as a truly “ethical moment,” (p.148) revealing his moral dilemmas and confusion in defining his own identity and negotiating his way of “paying back to society.” I am aware that there is a much greater complexity in Raju’s moral positioning than what I could access and what got revealed in the described situation. Also, it is worth keeping in mind that Raju’s identity and position as a Dalit student activist might have significantly affected not only his moral positionality, but also his freedom to express himself. Furthermore, from the point of view of research ethics, I have more freedom to reveal personal details about Devan, because he was not a public figure on campus and, therefore, he is not easily identifiable, quite contrary to Raju. 22. The role of moral demands in symbolic boundary making has been analyzed by Le Espiritu (2001) in the context of Filipinos immigrants in the USA. He has shown how Filipina Americans asserted moral superiority over “white” Americans by criticizing the morality of white women and at simultaneously restricting their own women’s freedom (2001).

ABSTRACTS

Emerging literature on Dalit student activism explores the ways Dalit students position themselves with regard to other student groups and the broader caste structure. However, less attention has been paid to intragroup relations and dynamics within the community of Scheduled Caste (SC) students. This article explores the emerging differentiation and boundary- making among the SC students, thus contributing to the ongoing discussion on differences and divisions within the larger Dalit community. Focusing on symbolic boundaries, morality and socio-political backgrounds, I discuss the actual conflict between two SC students, in which they debated the moral dictate of the Dalit movement of “paying back to society.” Though both students seem to have internalized the moral demand, their perspectives on how to implement it differed. One student I shall call Raju advocated that paying back should be done through political action; the other student, Devan, argued that artistic expression is an equally legitimate way to “pay back to society.” The two protagonists also had substantively different relations with regard to the Dalit student organizations that advocated for political activism and “paying back to society.” For Raju, Dalit political activism served as a main avenue for personal upward social

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mobility, while Devan viewed political activism as a restrictive imposition limiting other legitimate means for “paying back to society.” I argue that symbolic boundaries between students cannot be reduced to class or caste distinctions, but rather that they are based on differing ideological and moral alignments. While acknowledging the influence of Ambedkarite ideology in forming students’ moral views, this case study shows that SC students do not espouse a single ideology or moral stance regarding modes of political activism, which brings out tensions that arise at the intersection between Dalit movement’s ethics and multiple individual moralities. The paper also describes two different ways students may imagine their social mobility.

INDEX

Keywords: Dalits, student activism, symbolic boundaries, moral demands

AUTHOR

KRISTINA GARALYTĖ Assistant Professor, Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies at Vilnius University

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How Campuses Mediate a Nationwide Upsurge against India’s Communalization. An Account from Jamia Millia Islamia and Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi

Jean-Thomas Martelli and Kristina Garalytė

1 We return to the notion of generational communities introduced in this special issue in light of the ongoing1 pan-Indian protests spearheaded by students against the Indian government’s initiative to define accession to citizenship on religious lines.2 Applicable to individuals who entered India prior to 2014; the recent Act of Parliament permits the authorities to grant citizenship to “persecuted minorities” from three neighboring countries while making Muslim migrants ostensibly ineligible. The citizenship reform and its strong anti-Muslim overtones are being implemented within the political context of the recent reelection of a Hindu nationalist government at the Centre. The act follows a series of the Hindu Right government’s decisions against Indian Muslims: criminalization of Muslim men practicing Triple Talaq, the abolition of the special status of the only Muslim-dominated state in the country, and the handing over of land for the construction of a Ram temple in place of a mosque destroyed by Hindu militants in 1992 (Chatterji, Hansen and Jaffrelot 2019; Singh 2020). Importantly, the citizenship reform purposely precedes the intended implementation of a measure that would make it mandatory for every Indian citizen to provide evidence of his or her nationality; those failing to show proper ancestral documentation being at risk of citizenship revocation. Already implemented in the state of Assam where the construction of detention camps is underway (Siddique 2020), the Act almost officially aims at stripping hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants from Bangladesh of their rights (Editorial Board, Economic and Political Weekly 2019). Overall, the contested Citizen Amendment Act should be understood as a “safety net” for those non-Muslim Indians who will fail to prove their citizenship in a likely future, while in contrast exposing the weaker

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sectors of Indian Muslims to the risks of administrative persecution and/or being rendered stateless(Ali 2019; Kesavan 2019). As of 31 December 2019, and in the wake of the nationwide upsurge against the government’s reforms, the national assessment of Indian citizenship is being postponed to more “favorable” times. As of 18 January 2020, in protests in the majority party led state of Uttar Pradesh, 23 Muslim died, most of them from police bullets (Jafri 2020), as those who are supposed to secure order apparently took the opportunity to ransack and loot Muslim properties in various cities.

2 Since December 2019; a new wave of the wide scale student-led opposition movement has been observed,3 in particular in the aftermath of the violent police storming of two Muslim-dominated, state-funded universities: Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in Uttar Pradesh and Jamia Milia Islamia (JMI) in New Delhi (Ahmed 2019; Dubey 2019). In the midst of the agitation and the government’s attempts to suppress the protest movement, we are investigating the relevance of select campuses as privileged sites for heading such colossal mobilization, which aim at safeguarding minority rights and challenge anti-Muslim policies. We use here primary ethnographic material collected between 17 and 31 December 2019 in New Delhi’s two protest hotspots: Jamia Milia Islamia’s gate number seven and the majority-Muslim neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh.

3 We posit that key students and recent graduates in a handful of university campuses were the first to translate the nationwide concern about the government’s reforms against Indian Muslims into collective action because they had been exposed to organized political socialization earlier; they had consolidated networked nodal points attracting more spontaneous forms of political participation beyond campus; and they were already rallying around metonymic figures of non-partisan youth representing the future, the constitution, non-violence and the homeland. To understand the nature and the scale of the protests, it is necessary to move away from the idea of spontaneous —and deterritorialized—upsurges of atomized individuals and to take into account the ability of campuses to shelter early political initiators, centralize networks of aggrieved populations and convey powerful images of a nation in the making.

4 For instance, most protest coordinators of the interim Jamia Coordination Committee (JCC), which was formed after the episodes of police violence on December 13th, have a prior history of activism: 73 out of their 83 members are affiliated to a political student group (Aatikah, 29 December).4 The eight student organizations5 that make up the JCC belong to the leftist or Islamic political families; they receive strong support from a handful of campus-specific student groups and from the self-advocated “centrist” student wing of the Aam Aadmi Party, an opposition party governing the city-state (Mahir, 27 December). In the absence of a students’ union in the university, the Committee/JCC plays a central role as the main body coordinating and launching the protest calls in New Delhi (often anonymously).

5 Upon hearing that the media portrayed her as a first-time protester, Nabeela, a prominent figure of the Jamia protests got visibly irritated. She directed me to one of her Facebook comments, which read: “Were they [the media] blind to us protesting against curfew timings, sexual violence, #MeToo cases? Do they only notice protests driven by men? Women students are actually well trained in mobilizing through practice” (25 December).6 Among the respondents, numerous stories of micro exposure to politics in Jamia also surface. Ghaazi, a JMI graduate now in journalism declares: “The first movement [in 2015] which initiated and succeeded to unite the students was

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the cantine ka issue. […] I was a student, standing at the gate, facing the proctor, 6 to 12 rupees, I can’t pay. That ignorance [of the university Vice Chancellor] made us strong” (31 December). Activists recounted that the shift from campus-based issues to national issues in Jamia student politics was slow, and remembered experiencing failure to mobilize Jamia students after the suicide of Dalit student Rohith Vemula (see introduction) in 2016 (Chalani, 30 December; Ghaazi, 31 December). A former president of a student organization in JMI remembered that:

Since the Batla House encounter in 2008 [where alleged terrorists in Jamia Nagar neighborhood were arrested and killed], our student wing got stronger and stronger in Jamia. Organization is a continuity, in daily meetings, in branch meetings, organization meetings, community meetings, if you continue that, it is a painstaking process, that helped them [students] to come out as a threat to the regime, the more you organize, the more it’s like…[conversation interrupted].

Even though the JMI student union has been banned since 2006, the campus cannot be considered as ideologically “barren.” As Kapur aptly states, “[r]ooted in the political history of India, Jamia’s own campus had its brushes with warring ideologies” (Kapur 2019). Three landmark moments of campus politization seem to have prepared the ground for the active participation of these JMI students who are now highly engaged in the December protests. These took place after an anti-Muslim raid by India’s internal intelligence agency in a student residence in 2016, following an alleged case of sexual harassment by a faculty member in 2019, and as a result of the inclusion of Israeli embassy representatives in an academic event on campus in 2019 (Saadiq, 26 December). As a JCC member acknowledged,

There is always a need of initiators […] students should have to talk on issues. It was always their [initiatives], but not in terms of masses, mass[es] are not doing this. All organizations do this work of awareness, doing that together in fact. Mob lynching or any other issue, we organise a programme in central canteen, any park, any lawn. Individual calls. Circulate on WhatsApp” (Aarthi, 29 December).

This indicates, in line with our understanding of campuses as generational communities, that previous occurrences of political participation have oriented the political reading of the Citizen Amendment Act (CAA) by Jamia students, contributing to turn their political awareness into organized resistance.

6 Activists, political cadres and non-affiliated individuals who prepared the ground for the early protests in AMU and JMI mid-December were almost always students exposed to an incipient political culture, under the aegis of small but active seasoned political groups—by which initial calls against the Act were made. As police violence escalated (Ahmed 2019; Dubey 2019), the scale of the protests increased exponentially, attracting considerable indignation from various sections of civil society. Let us consider how campuses channeled grievances and served as nodal points in rallying and fostering the demonstrations. Reacting to police brutalities, student activists, especially from Muslim communities, were instrumental in mobilizing the Muslim-dominated neighborhood around Jamia campus. A JMI student activist acknowledged that “people [JMI activists] are going to localities with pamphlets. Then we give a call, mostly attended by local people. We need to convey the message to the common masses. It is our duty to convey the message” (Ikshitha, 23 December). In turn, new networks of solidarity were

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developed between students and residents of Jamia Nagar, many of whom have relatives who study or studied in JMI. Aarthi reflected on these newly formed bonds:

We haven’t seen the community people coming out for any protest…this is the only protest where the Jamia community people actually join the students. They have been very helpful [Jamia residents], when they [JMI university administration] asked us to vacate the hostel [student accommodation], they actually offered their home. They offered food. They were very helpful. Many of my friends’ parents called me to say, you can stay at our place” (29 December).

Similar bonds were created in Shaheen Bagh neighborhood in the vicinity of JMI, where local Muslim women and men occupied half of the highway connecting the capital to its main satellite city, Noida. One of the main organizers, a doctoral student in Jawaharlal Nehru University who had campaigned with both Left and Islamic student organizations for years, recounted how he convinced the first Muslim women to sit on the asphalt of the highway amidst the fear of repression, and underlined that he had been thinking about this act of defiance for a while: “Road bandh is a purana [old] idea, since childhood we have been planning to shut India down [giggles]” (Ishaq, 23 December). So, the JMI campus was the first to emerge as a durable focal protest point for socially receptive neighborhoods.

7 Furthermore, the maintenance of political mobilization underscores the ability of activist constituencies to access steady funding streams. A member of the student wing of Delhi government’s ruling party admitted that “[JMI] alumni are the backbone of the protest. […] Everyday 10 000 to 12 000 rupees is spent on the protest.” Thus, the generational community of JMI students successfully connects with older batches of graduates in order to ensure effective resource mobilization and the centralization of the donations to the JCC.

8 The student collective and its ad-hoc counterparts across India appear to consolidate three other forms of political networks. First, organizations such as JCC offer platforms for professional (and often older) young leaders such as Chandrashekhar Azad (Dalit leader from Uttar Pradesh) or Kanhaiya Kumar (Leftist leader from Bihar) to appear at protest sites, bringing further national recognition to the movement. Second, the internal task specialization of the JCC enables effective communication,7 especially on social media, drawing in “elite students” who had never attended a public protest before and thereby maximizing their participation. At venues such as Jantar Mantar (the designated official location for demonstrations in New Delhi), many students carrying innovative banners reflecting their incongruous presence on the protest ground could be spotted. A series of English-medium protest placards starting with “It’s so bad even…” reveals the need of students from cosmopolitan backgrounds to mention in humorous fashion their usual reluctance to take part in collective action. Here are few examples: “It is sooo bad, even South Delhi [affluent area of Delhi] is here!!!”; “It’s sooo bad even Amity [a depoliticized private university] is here”; ”It’s so bad, even the introverts [in caps] are here”; ”It’s so bad [I am] here with my ex”; “It’s so bad even the privileged [in red] are here”; “It’s so bad even parents are here” (December 19). Lastly, as the participation of more affluent students tends to be short-lived, ongoing political mobilization of students partly relies on the strengthening of political networks across central public universities—involving in particular non-elite sections of the students. We suggest that this process consolidates a broader national network of coordinated

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political bridges among generational units. Between such universities political ties sustained by branches of various student organizations exist; they are further consolidated by institutionalized political socialization within each of these campuses. Manshoor, a leftist member of JCC provided glimpses of those political links:

Jamia [JMI], Delhi University, JNU [Jawaharlal Nehru University], Ambedkar [University], Aligarh [Muslim University], BHU [Banaras Hindu University], Jadavpur University, Hyderabad Central University, Pondicherry University, Garhwal University… most central universities, like Allahabad [University]… central universities’ [students] come from marginal backgrounds, popular backgrounds, and most of them have a student union, they are already political campuses, it makes it easy to coordinate with such organizations. Private universities like Amity they don’t protest. They pay 5 lakhs or 10 lakhs for their graduation. That’s the difference. They don’t give such interest in the politics. BHU is like Jamia, as there also there is no student union. BHU is in UP, they don’t want any dissenting voice to emerge. They arrested eight comrades, all non-Hindus. […]AISA [c.f. note 2] took out an initiative, to launch an all India coordination committee, around 80 organizations from 60-70 campuses have committed. There was a press conference at the press club of India two or three days before on this. All over India [on December 24th]. The idea is to coordinate.

Further ethnographic research is required to unveil how mobilizational idioms struck a chord among non-campus constituents, achieving “resonance” with Muslim populations, so-called liberals and a variety of political opponents to the current government. However, two converging sets of possible explanations can already be formulated. First, students used future-oriented metaphors of the nation in order to challenge the populist-cum-nationalist discourse of the ruling party. A JCC member fiercely stated: “It is very important. You don’t attack on the students, [if so] you attack on the future of the country. You attack on the future economy of the country. All depends on the students” (Rahman, December 30). By successfully claiming the incarnation of an India in the making, student protesters and “non-hostile” media effectively portrayed police brutalities as assaults on the future of the country. Demonstrating tactical maturity, various student groups also excelled in obliterating markers of political divides, replacing them with positive and inclusive idioms articulated around the values of the Indian constitution. Rahman went on declaring: “Constitution is liberty, equality, fraternity. This is not a protest of Muslims, it is a protest of constitution” (December 30).

9 The protestors at JMI gate number seven—the epicenter of student protests in New Delhi—eluded partisan statements about Indian secularism and instead preferred to stress catchy patriotic tenets (e.g. placards reading “#I am a Desh Bhakt [a worshiper of the country]”), gender representativeness and advocacy of Gandhian non-violence. They propagate posters and online hashtags saturated with constitutional symbols (#CAA Against Constitution, #Jamia For Constitution, #Save Constitution), sing the national anthem and read India’s constitutional preamble in public. The scant use of secular language is not only an indication of its lack of popular appeal, it compensates for the fact that the JCC also tries to minimize the use of Muslim-specific slogans, in particular those articulated by Islamic student organizations. A student activist of the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind admitted that he strategically refrained from chanting Insha Allah and Allahu Akbar:

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I go to others and tell them not to raise those slogans [to Muslim carders of Students of Jamia (SOJ) in particular]. I go to them on behalf of the forum, you should be responsible. Out of campus, for SIO cadres [Jamaat student wing], then such slogans are available. People say it is a communal slogan. Our constitution permits them, to live according to religion. But for our people only.

Hence, statements specific to Islam uttered by a few Islamic organizations became more discreet as protests gained national prominence. As a result, Labiba, one of the four social media poster-girls of the JMI mobilization withdrew from Facebook a divisive post a few days after posting it: “At this point we are clear; we don’t hold any burden of chanting secular slogans and may not fit your secular vocabulary. Our engagement and approach altogether is different from you and is the fundamental difference. So, please don’t dictate us” (December 13). This Left-Islamic “unholy” alliance is not unprecedented as campus alliances like those in the University of Hyderabad demonstrate, yet the ability of the nexus to reach pan-Indian prominence is unprecedented.

10 As the student-driven mobilization will necessarily routinize, experience fragmentation and decrease in scale, campus spaces, in particular in central public universities, will most likely continue to thrive as bases for generational communities politicized against a set of contested values—in this case Hindu majoritarianism. The relative shift of such political communities away from a focus on only campus-specific material demands is likely to perdure, enabling key campuses to function as abeyance structures for future mobilization. Turning cohabitation, common experiences and biographical availabilities of students into active political capital, public universities represent metaphors of a prefigurative Indian nation, constitute hubs for protest networks, and circulate political idioms from one student cohort to another through the socializing effect of small groups of ideological campus activists. Contrary to the apprehensions of regional and national parties over the loss of vote shares when opposing the presumed communal sentiment of a consolidated Hindu block, less frightening educational spaces and the anti-establishment activism they shelter constitute ideological and physical battlegrounds8 where challenges to “Saffron India” will continue to emerge.

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NOTES

1. As of December 31st, 2019. 2. Fieldwork was conducted by the first author in the vicinity of two protest sites in New Delhi, namely the gate 7 of the university Jamia Milia Islamia and the Shaheen Bagh neighbourhood. This constitutes an early appraisal of the December and January protests; it confirms the relevance of student politics in understanding the socio-political jolts of contemporary India and South Asia at large. 3. In India, students occasionally spearhead opposition movements, as it was the case for the Bihar movement in 1974 (Jaffrelot 1999:255–77; Shah 1977) and during the Anti-Mandal protests in 1990 (Datta 2016). Both mobilizations targeted the then-Congress government and displayed early signs of the strengthening grip of the Hindu nationalist political agenda among Indian youth. With the coming of age of the anti-Emergency generation, student protestors turned political (Karnad 2018). 4. Respondents’ names have been anonymized. 5. Following is a non-exhaustive list of student organizations active in JMI campus. On the left side of the political spectrum can be found AISA (All India Students’ Association, the student wing of CPI(ML), the Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist Liberation), DISSC (Dayar i Shauq Students Charter Jamia, JMI-based student group) and SFI (Students’ Federation of India, the student wing of the Communist Party of India Marxist). Islamic student outfits are: SIO (Students Islamic Organisation of India, the students’ wing of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind), MSF (Muslim Students Federation, the student group of the Indian Union Muslim League), Fraternity Movement (the student branch of Welfare Party, also affiliated to Jamaat-e-Islami Hind), CFI (Campus Front of India, affiliated to the banned Popular Front of India) and SoJ (Students of Jamia, a JMI-centric collective). CYSS (Chatra Yuva Sangharsh Samiti, the student wing of Aam Aadmi Party) as well as JSF (Jamia Students’ Forum, a JMI-specific cross-organizational platform) is also active in the university. Groups such as Pinjra Tod (independent feminist student organization) and United Against Hate (collective comprising activists from several student organizations) participate only sporadically to JMI student politics. 6. The comment is a repost of a newspaper interview of another JMI female activist, Salma. Several national and international media reports reflect on the invisibility of Muslim women as

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political actors in India and highlight exceptionally active women’s participation in the present- day anti-government protests (Yadav 2020; Raman 2020; Dixit 2019; Kapur 2020) 7. JMI student activist Reza stressed on this aspect: “They [Jamia Coordination Committee] are working very systematically, we have media committee, program committee, graphic committee, ground committee, mike committee, traffic and control committee: there are different groups who are assigned different work” (26 December). 8. The violent attack from masked pro-government youth in another university in Delhi (Jawaharlal Nehru University), as well as the gun-shooting episodes near Jamia in February 2020 give renewed opportunities for those who want to polarize and target anti-government student activism. In a context of extreme communal tension—who has by the end of February 2020 evolved into murderous anti-Muslim pogroms in New Delhi (Gayer 2020)—the collective actions of generational communities might assume a significant role in reshaping the political trajectory of contemporary India.

INDEX

Keywords: protest, student politics, Jamia Millia Islamia, NRC-CAA, India

AUTHORS

JEAN-THOMAS MARTELLI Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), Politics and Society Division, New Delhi

KRISTINA GARALYTĖ Assistant Professor, Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies at Vilnius University

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 22 | 2019