Dear Reader,

I am down with some ill health and not in a position to write the rest of the post that I had started. This is only a very temporary hiatus and I should be able to start writing again and finish the posts that I have made. Please bear with me.

With thanks
Satish

The new cocktail of politics and academics: Armed with deliberately created semantic confusion and making giants out of the undeserving - Part I

Yesterday when I started out writing a piece on the mixing of politics and academics, I  had the idea about how potent the mixture of the two was becoming. While doing so I realised that my arguments would perhaps be best served if I were to give readers a glimpse into the functioning of academic institutions and to make that apodictic I decided to draw from my own experience. As I kept writing I realised that I had a great deal to say since I had decided to draw from my own experience. The post had already become pretty long and to append the actual content of what I wanted to write originally would not only make a long piece even longer, it would also confuse the two things. That is why I made that post a personal preface to this post, which should help readers understand the raison d etre behind the post that would not seem like a rant of someone who is just saying things for the sake of saying things.

Two incidents, which should have been settled in two or three days, have become national issues and have been grabbing headlines for a very long period; so long that I do not even know when they actually started. But I remember the reasons why they started and the places and specific instances that set off an unfortunate trail of events that shows no signs of ebbing. The first instance was something that happened at the University of Hyderabad (UoH) and the second just few days later was what happened at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. The first instance was supposed to have been a meeting convened by the UoH to condemn the hanging of Yakub Memon, the man who was indicted as having been involved in bomb blasts in various trains in different parts of India. The argument advanced for the condemnation of his hanging was that since he confessed to his guilt, he should have been given a sentence of life imprisonment. This was followed by a research scholar Rohith Vemula who hanged himself leaving behind a suicide note which was quite eloquent and profound and ended with a line that said that his suicide was a result of his introspection and no one was particularly responsible for that. Then a high pitched campaign began first targetting a BJP MP who had apparently written a letter to the higher ups in his party claiming that there was anti national activities that were happening on the UoH campus. Slowly the Yakub Memon issue was side tracked and Rohith Vemula's suicide had become the central issue.

There is another sub story behind this story of the suicide. Four months prior to Rohith Vemula committing suicide he along with 5 other dalit research scholars were expelled from the hostels for a period of 6 months on grounds of indiscipline and were living outside the hostel in the open. Rohith Vemula on the fateful day committed suicide and this issue which was dormant for 4 months was brought out into the open. A new twist was given to the suicide story, claiming that the suicide was a result of the harassment of Rohith Vemula by his former research supervisor Prof. P. Appa Rao. Unable to bear the harassment meted out to him, Rohith Vemula shifted from one school to another a few months ago. Appa Rao was appointed by the BJP government recently and Appa Rao was considered as a candidate for the post of Vice Chancellor since his ideological leanings were towards the BJP. Rahul Gandhi materialised from nowhere suddenly to support the striking students and heaped praise on Rohith Vemula and even went onto say something to the effect of his being a new Mahatma Gandhi. Not to be outdone in all this, Sitaram Yechury of the CPI(M) also descended on the campus to show his solidarity. Rohith Vemula became a national hero.

But all this that appeared here is only a sub plot of a deeper reason behind the interest shown by the politicians in the affairs of the UoH Campus. Lot of parallels have been drawn between UoH and JNU. The only similarity that they have is that they are both Central Universities but otherwise as different as chalk and cheese. The reason why JNU came into being was because the then PM of India Mrs. Indira Gandhi was fighting a political battle within her own party that involved Kamaraj Nadar and Nijalingappa. She sought out the CPI (M) for outside support and as a sop she gave her nod for setting up JNU and most of the faculty in the place were scholars with a Marxist leaning. JNU's politics were for long dominated by the left, read that as the Students Federation of India which is the student wing of the CPI (M). My having been a student of the university when the left was still relevant world wide, gave me a great deal of insight into the working of the SFI. I was never a Marxist but what I respected about the SFI was the culture that they had created there was quite open and it did not really matter if you were a Marxist or not if you did not aspire for political positions. The place was also vibrant with several people sitting around what were called dhabas and discuss many issues of a political nature. There was a political maturity not only among the faculty but also among students.

On the other hand the reason why the UoH came into being was totally different. At the end of the first separate Telangana agitation which was crushed by again Mrs. Gandhi, she doled out a sop to develop the area by sanctioning the setting up of a Central University in Hyderabad. I must say as an aside that this was really a trick, since setting up of a central university in Hyderabad hardly could create a situation where it would serve the people of the region because by definition a central university cannot play a regional role and to say this new university would play such a role can only be considered to be chicanery. However, to describe the place further in its incipient phase is necessary. Most of the students who went to this university were apolitical and very studious and being far away from the Hyderabad City in those days (now it is a central and happening location) meant that students rarely ever came out of the campus. In fact, the institution was not even served by the regional transport corporation and as a result the University acquired a couple of buses of its own to ferry students from and to the campus. A part of the campus was in the middle of Hyderabad, in the precincts of the Golden Threshold which was once the residence of no less a person than Mrs. Sarojini Naidu and the building got its name from one of the poems written by the great lady herself. The place was shunned by local people who belonged to the lower castes because they felt that the standards were much to high there in educational terms and most of the faculty were non Telugu speaking people who came from different parts of the country. The students too were from places in the present day Odisha and some of the southern states. The reservation category seats were filled up by students from the Coastal region of the then undivided Andhra Pradesh. The place therefore did not really have too much of a local content because Osmania University then was still a functional place with competent faculty and students of Hyderabad felt more at home there.

But things began to change in Osmania University (OU) post the failure of the first separate Telangana movement. A Presidential order was made which is now referred to as the Article 371 (D) which later on became the 32nd Amendment of the Indian Constitution and as per this 85% of the seats in educational institutions were reserved for local people. This did not apply to the faculty selection but some of the academic Dons decided that this rule would be used in recruitment of faculty as well. And that sealed the future of Osmania University. Already a number of good faculty members went to JNU and some to UoH which was coming up and in order to drive out non Telugu (read that is a Telangana Telugu people) people, Telugu was introduced as a medium of instruction especially in the constituent colleges where the elite students went for their under graduation education. Nizam College (which was always an English medium college and older than OU before it was made part of OU, was affiliated to the Madras University)  and the Women's College at Koti which also was merged into OU saw the introduction of Telugu Medium. This produced the effect of driving some people out (teachers that is) and recruitments that happened post the end of the first Telangana agitation were purely for people from the region initially and from within the university later. The striking quality of this recruitment was that it was made with a view to keep out the urban people of the region and to recruit incompetent people deliberately so  that the sovereign fiefdoms that emerged within the University would be safe in the future as well. The people thus recruited came from all castes and that is important to know. The lack of a properly educated faculty made its presence felt by the time it was the 1980s and locals turned to the UoH for their post graduation education.

I realise that this has become a very long post as it is and I have not yet reached what I really want to say. So I will say this is part one and sign off with to be continued......

P.S: Not proof read and hence I  request you to go easy on me for all kinds of terrible mistakes of spelling, grammar etc.

The new cocktail of politics and academics: A personal preface

I have not posted for a long time and I have decided to post now for a reason. That is because the level to which politics have fallen to a new low and how politics has co-opted academics to create a heady concoction which is making a mockery of the education system in general and the University system in particular.  First let me express my reasons for not posting regularly. The Indian political landscape has changed dramatically in the last couple of years, that is to put things mildly and ambiguously. The real way to put it would be to say that, the process of lumpenisaton of politics which began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has now attained a critical mass, strong enough to stymie "free speech" out of fear of becoming a target of the wiles and guiles of the lumpen elements of politics from any party. That is a potential headache that can be avoided if the pursuance of a relatively peaceful life is important. I was not ready to  be the fool who steps in where Angels fear to tread. But this is probably a reason that I make to convince myself that there is good reason for not posting. The other reason was a feeling of despondency at the way in which things are happening  in my country and the lack of any perceptible change even when I have written to a minister who has studiously ignored the mails that I have written to him. The lessons I have learnt is not to believe what the politicians say, for they are after all the products of the very system that people like me  would want to change. Therefore it is like approaching a child with the request to destroy its own mother which has carefully nurtured the politicians into becoming what they are. I understood that the approach is all wrong (from my side that is) and accept that things will move in a certain direction when they have reached a certain speed; a dynamic inertia. And trying to intervene is akin to trying to stop a deluge with the palm of a hand. However this is just a preface which is personal, so I will write one post that tells the reasons why I have become what and that is related to how my confidence was shattered and my academic life seemed to be in tatters and rags.

I said  this post is related to personal reasons  but totally related to the the academic system. . I said that I was affected by the way things were in academics and the impact on my personal life. So I shall lay bare the experiences that I had while I was on lien from Osmania University and working for Tata Institute of Social Sciences when it began the process of starting its campus in Hyderabad. In all fairness, I must first tell you that those people who demonised me later were actually very kind and understanding of my personal and academic profile and capabilities. That  was how it was for less than one year and things began to change rather suddenly and alarmingly. The very people who were interested in progress and my dedicated pursuit to the cause that I was recruited for, turned against me and made a misery of my life. Yet I plodded along purposefully since the student community saw me as someone who was contributing to the widening of horizons because I approached their perceptions with an absolutely open mind, hear them out and accepted if there was something right in their arguments or logically  demonstrated to them the reasons why their arguments were inaccurate.

This popularity of mine (I later came to know was the very reason why the persecution of me began) was what kept me going despite the fact things were being done to sabotage my work and throw me out of the place, since I was put on contract even after a promise that my services would be made permanent. As the days towards the end of my lien were approaching, the attacks on me were also taken to students who were considered to be particularly close to me and also an attempt was made to build a group of students who were against me. Let me cut a long story short. My computer and email were short circuited, complaints (all imaginary) were brought to my notice about my lack of sincerity and dedication. It became impossible to continue there when an attempt to show me as having harassed a new recruit who was from the Dalit community was being made. I realised that I was looking down the barrels of not one but two double barrelled sawed off shotguns. I bailed out and went back to Osmania University. But I was made persona non grata in TISS, which is okay. But when lies and canards were being spread about me by TISS people in other institutions like the Council for Social Development and in some departments of the University of  Hyderabad, I began to question the necessity to do anything like writing blog posts on politics. I said it all began very nicely in TISS and I must also add that I was discharged very politely by giving me a relieving letter as a response to the letter I had written asking to be relieved (I did not write any letter on the that was cited as having written the said letter) but I appreciate this because ultimately somebody did consider me as being worthy of a dignified departure from the place. All the paper work post my relieving order from TISS was also done without any hindrance and in fact it was done very quickly so that I could go back to OU with all paperwork in place. I have to be thankful for this, for making it look like I wanted to leave myself.

This pushed me into a very deep depression something that I did not want to acknowledge publicly since I started thinking the truth that I was jettisoned from my job would come out if I said or did anything. But as the temporal distance distance grew from my being fired, I began to think that I did not do anything shameful so why should the actual truth be hidden and why should I feel humiliated when I had done no wrong? Now I tell the story as it is. Back in OU things had changed for the worse, when I thought nothing could get worse. But I must say that OU is one place where as a person I received a lot of love and caring from colleagues and very often students as well. I realized that what OU has given me, I perhaps cannot get anywhere else. The biggest plus point of OU I realized is that it is still a place which has not lost all consideration of humanitarianism and sympathy. I will be speaking less than the truth if I were to say that I am over what happened at TISS. I feel betrayed and a victim of politics of hatred, all for my just doing what was expected of a good and diligent teacher. It brought into light the fact that you can get into the way of the ambitious by just doing your job. At TISS I was made the Chairman of the Centre for Policy and Governance. I wanted to do something with that position, so I designed an MA course in Public Policy and Governance. For this I took the help of some of the best minds in the country who were known to have a solid base of knowledge in that area and created a draft syllabus which was later approved by the Academic Council. But to ensure that no traces of my presence existed there, even before the first batch had reached the third semester, the course was completely redrafted and the Centre was converted into a school. So it is now School of Public Policy and Governance which should have a Dean in place but has a Chairman. I could go on but I won't. Unfortunately the place is full of jackals and some of them took this opportunity to kick out a deaf and dumb employee who was the son of a well known Academician of international repute who thanked me profusely for finding employment for his son. He died while the son still had the job, but my conscience kills me about this. His only big sin was that he was someone who was there because of me.  All I want to say is that the demonisation that I faced while I was there was continued. I became Snowball and Napoleon (characters from Orwell's Animal Farm) took care to see that I was not allowed back and Napoleon's canines are there to carry news of  Snowball still trying to play politics with that institution.

I thought maybe by laying out the experiences that I had at TISS, Hyderabad,  I can put my experiences and feelings of being shattered in the public domain, I would feel that I have junked what has been a bewildering experience and that someone now knows the story. But that is possibly a palliative or something that would have a placebo effect on my mental self. Maybe I have got it all wrong but I am going ahead because all this came out when I was actually trying to write a piece on how politics and academics are getting intertwined in Universities of India, specifically the more prestigious ones where the left wants to prove that they are right and the right is doing its best to see that it does not get left out of the process. For today, I will stop. I will write the original blog I had started writing today but will make a proper post out of it tomorrow. I also realise that there is a second part that I have to write on justice, so maybe I will do that too. This is to say that  I am trying to get back to regular blogging again, starting today. All that is required is a rebuilding of my lost self esteem and confidence, which will hopefully happen as I start writing again.

P.S: Haven't proof read, so it is likely to be full of syntactical and semantic problems apart from the regular problem of half baked sentences.