There is some truth in describing a university as a ‘breeding ground’. Universities are, after all, supposed to breed ideas.
The uncomfortable question is: what kind of ideas has Jawaharlal Nehru University been breeding?
The social-media poster doing the rounds calls JNU a breeding hub for ‘anti-nationals’, ‘cockroaches’ and ‘dimagi Naxals’. The language is crude. But the sentiment behind it did not emerge from vacuum.
For decades, JNU has been a showcase for Left politics, with campus slogans often becoming political manifestos and student leaders moving into mainstream politics.
Kanhaiya Kumar, JNUSU president in 2015-16, eventually joined the Congress and is now its NSUI in-charge and a permanent invitee to the Congress Working Committee.
So perhaps the poster deserves a question rather than merely a laugh: what exactly has JNU been producing?
It isn’t only the students
A student does not create a university’s intellectual ecosystem. Professors do. They teach, mentor, recommend reading, decide which ideas are intellectually respectable and influence the political vocabulary of young minds.
That is why blaming everything on impressionable students is too convenient. If successive batches emerge from the same institution displaying similar ideological instincts, perhaps we should examine the environment in which they were educated.
This is not an argument against Left-wing professors. Universities need ideological diversity. Marxists, liberals, conservatives, nationalists and people belonging to no political camp should all have their place. But ideological monopoly is not intellectual diversity.
Questioning India is not democracy
There is a world of difference between saying, ‘The government is wrong’ and saying, ‘India is wrong’. The first is democracy. The second is something else.
The February 2016 JNU controversy remains the watershed. An event was organised around the hanging of Parliament-attack convict Afzal Guru, followed by allegations of anti-India and separatist slogans.
Delhi Police subsequently filed a chargesheet alleging that Kanhaiya Kumar and others supported or participated in the alleged sloganeering.
However, a JNU inquiry said the provocative slogans were raised by outsiders, and the episode remains contested. A chargesheet, obviously, is not a conviction. But that does not make the episode irrelevant.
The ‘azadi’ slogans and the controversy over ‘Bharat tere tukde tukde honge’ and ‘Afzal Guru hum sharminda hain’ became symbols of a political culture that many Indians found profoundly alienating.
Criticising poverty, caste discrimination or government policy is dissent. Romanticising separatism is something else.
What about Sanatana Dharma?
This is where ‘secularism’ sometimes becomes an elastic word. Criticism of Hinduism is legitimate. So is criticism of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Sikhism or any other religion.
But if contempt for Hindu gods, Hindu traditions or Sanatana Dharma is passed off as intellectual sophistication while equivalent irreverence towards other faiths is regarded as unacceptable, that is not secularism. It is selective irreverence.
A university should teach students to question every orthodoxy – including their own.
What does JNU produce?
JNU has also produced distinguished scholars, diplomats, administrators and politicians. Its alumni include External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee. JNU itself lists them among its distinguished alumni.
That cannot and should not be denied. But it is precisely why the university’s other legacy deserves scrutiny.
If it produces scholars who demolish governments with facts, excellent. If it produces citizens who expose corruption and injustice, even better. If it produces fearless political critics, democracy needs them.
But if sections of its academic ecosystem normalise separatist rhetoric, romanticise extremism or turn hostility towards India’s civilisational identity into a badge of intellectual sophistication, then the institution has a problem that cannot be dismissed as youthful rebellion.
Students graduate. Professors remain. That is why the responsibility cannot be placed entirely on the students.
No university deserves immunity from scrutiny simply because it carries a prestigious name. If an institution funded substantially by the public repeatedly fails to distinguish legitimate dissent from political radicalism, the answer cannot be: ‘That’s just JNU.’
Reform the curriculum. Examine the ideological ecosystem. Enforce campus discipline. Demand accountability from faculty as well as students. Ensure that political freedom does not become an excuse for violence or separatism.
More political radicals than lawful citizens
And if, after all that, the institution proves incapable of serving the educational purpose for which it exists, India is entitled to ask an uncomfortable question: Why preserve an institution at any cost if it is producing more political radicals than responsible citizens?
JNU once had the intellectual confidence to challenge the establishment. The tragedy would be if it became so captive to one ideological establishment that challenging India itself came to be mistaken for intellectual courage. A university should expand the mind. It should not narrow it into an ideological tunnel.
