How government is hitting #OccupyUGC below the belt

Dark clouds hovered over the office of the University Grants Commission [UGC] as students primarily from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi University (DU) and Ambedkar University continued to stand resolute on the eighth day of the "Occupy UGC" movement (#OccupyUGC). While the weather in the national capital on Wednesday had an uncanny resemblance to the turbulent times ahead, the occasional chilly breeze passing through the city, perhaps, carried prophesies of a new zeitgeist where the regressive policies of the Indian state will not be passively tolerated. Instead, it will be extensively discussed, debated and if required protested in a public sphere that will fully wield the power of democratic ideals.

This is exactly what the protest movement against the scrapping of non-Net fellowship is representative of. From a movement fighting for the rights of the research community, it is soon metamorphosing into a movement that condemns the commercialisation of education that the government of India is hoping to bring in through the signing of the GATS-WTO pact in December this year. The pact allows for education to become a tradable commodity in India; something that will be provided by the "educational traders" of the world who would come to India to offer "services in education" to students who will inevitably become its prime customers. While the government argues for a "world class" education made accessible on merit through the pact, what is often downplayed is the ruthless profit-maximising tendency that such a privatised educational regime would necessarily uphold, turning education into an exclusive elitist domain of the rich. Moreover, even at exorbitant rates, guarantees of "world class standards" in educational services dictated solely by market imperatives appear skewed and can at best be concluded as poor rhetorical argument used by the government.

In India, the pact will specifically target higher education and in this light, the sudden decision to do away with non-Net fellowships available as stipends of Rs 5,000 and Rs 8,000 per month respectively to MPhil and PhD research scholars cannot be viewed in isolation. It has to be seen within the larger aim to privatise education by a government no longer interested in providing funds for higher studies. Moreover, it needs to be understood that the Net scholarship supports only a minority of research scholars. Owing to this, non-Net stipends, in their current meagre amounts, exist as minimum wages that research scholars, as workers of the universities, have a right to. An attempt at scrapping it hence has to be seen as a blatant violation of human rights.

As "Occupy UGC" refuses to dissolve, the Indian government has started to use a variety of tactics, some of which are outrightly violent as evident by students being lathicharged by the Delhi Police to the point of injury. Other tactics tend to be, if I may say, those of psychologically deluding the protesters into passivity. The best instance of the second tactic came perhaps in the timely announcement of the continuance of non-Net fellowship by the ministry of human resource development (MHRD), which intended to spread a sense of the psychological relief of early victory amongst the protesters.

But what has interestingly, refused to leave the minds of our young activists is the autocratic nature in which the Indian state has come to function of late. The decision to convene a "review committee" on the part of the MHRD to dictate the fate of research fellowships behind closed doors is an instance of limiting the usage of the public sphere as the domain of discussion and dissent. The recurrent thrashing of peaceful protesters by the police and multiple barricades instituted in front of the UGC are representative of the impotency of the democratic ideals of our state. At a time when student movements in other parts of the world like South Africa have successfully led protests against unjust fee hikes in universities, the emergence of "Occupy UGC" in India presents a unique public platform for Indian citizens to democratically voice their protests against what the students see as the regressive and draconian ways of the Indian state and its many institutions.

#SaveNonNetFellowship