The recent fracas in Ramjas College of Delhi University leading to violence that allegedly started after the right wing Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) were against the seminar invitation of a JNU student who was allegedly charged with sedition in 2016. The incident left many students and professors injured, and has evoked more protests from the other colleges against the ABVP. The ABVP and its functionaries are frequently in the news for protests against persons who according to them are misusing the freedom of speech and going against their brand of nationalism. On the other hand there have also been allegations that the colleges were mostly dominated by left-wing student unions and so the right wingers never got any platform to discuss their ideas for many years.
Over the years, the colleges in India were always the training ground for young recruits of almost all the major political parties, both the national and the state parties. Most of the political parties have its own student union bodies that are aligned to the party and such unions work for the interest of the political parties in proxy among the youth, especially in the colleges and universities. India since independence is slowly turning into a nation of the youth with increasing number of young people every year. The power and the force that the youth wields is a fact and it is immensely exploited by the political parties across the country. It became even more prominent after the minimum voting age was reduced from 21 to 18 years in 1989. The elections to the students unions of the colleges and universities were also slowly infiltrated by the political parties and candidates were also sponsored by it.
What started as the usual brickbats between the student supporters aligned to different political parties has now become full blown ideological war at present. The earlier debates between political parties and subsequently the unions aligned to the respective parties were more on welfare schemes, reservation issues, corruption, goondaism and to some extent the militancy issue in the country. The accepted maxim was that all forms of extremism and armed militancy across the country were a result of a few misguided people and at times just the handiwork of foreign hands. However the government of India in order to bring peace has slowly engaged or at least tried to talk to all the groups giving some form of legitimacy to the demands of the groups for the first time. This inturn may have provided a platform and emboldened the supporters of these movements to openly speak, and where better to do this than with their peers in the colleges and universities. These are seen as a threat to the nation by the right-wing backed activists.
The educational institutions of the present are like the Greek Agoras of the past where ideas and thoughts are shared and discussed. Such discourse and debates on opposing views are the basic ingredients required for the progress of a nation in all fields of study. However such incidents of attack on academic institutions are regressive and affect the intellectual growth of the institutions and its community of learners and teachers. Not only this recent incident but the series of political activism in the colleges across the country with incidents of violence has made a big dent in the image of India as the largest democracy in the world.
