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.