The death of higher education in Modi and Mamata's India

What is now happening in educational institutions across India, especially those that have been historically difficult for ruling parties or their student wings to capture, is hardly surprising. Clearly, all actual or potential forms of dissent must be crushed. If this is true for the Central government, we have no reason to expect less from the lesser fascists in West Bengal, as the replication of violent assaults on the FTII students in Pune at Presidency "University" in Kolkata shows. The TMC were BJP allies before, and they will be again. In a state where violence, rape, murder and intimidation have become everyday occurrences, more of the same is to be expected. In both cases, at FTII and at Presidency, protestors demanded the resignation of incompetent administrative heads, the chairman in the case of FTII, and the vice-chancellor, in the case of Presidency, a demand that was eventually met with success at Jadavpur University not so long ago.

One thing has been made clearer by the violent suppression of the protests. It is not possible to collaborate with or hope to steer clear of conflict with a regime that is based not on providing education but on suppressing all forms of student autonomy, whether this is likely to become dissent or not. Many of the students of Presidency "University" have made that mistake in the past. So have many members of staff, and former members of staff. They are paying for it now. Those that remain are in large measure incompetents who cannot hope to be hired elsewhere, the chronic alcoholics or regime apologists with nowhere else to go.

The early warnings were there when the old Presidency College was wound up, with the new "University" starting off with rigged appointments, irregularities in appointment panels, victimisation of politically active students in the form of inexplicable failing grades appearing from the exam office. Those who claimed to have the future of education at heart, including the former head of department of history in the old college who hated the Left so much he gladly collaborated with the fascist; or the director of a research institute in Kolkata which is the regional centre of the Indian Council for Social Science Research; or indeed a number of the professors who have just resigned, actively helped with all of this. No one seemed to think that procedures set up by the University Act or rules that the University Grants Commission had prescribed to make a university a university, needed to apply to an institution that was merely being run as legitimation for a third-rate political regime without any intellectual legitimacy, desperately searching for that legitimacy by capturing an institution with which was bound up by the intellectual snobbery of an established Bengali middle class, and the aspirations to social mobility of newly arrived classes.

Politically active students, on their part, made a number of fundamental mistakes: at first relying on exchanging pleasantries with an administration that successfully played them off against one another, rather than making clear and strong demands and sticking to them. This made later attempts at radicalism look feeble and childish. They were also unable to rely on the solidarities of fellow students: in a neoliberal world in which students see themselves as buying their degrees, no one wanted to rock the boat: questioning the institution would devalue the degree being bought.

Now, it becomes clear that the institution cannot be "rescued", "saved", "revitalised", etc. The old Presidency College has ceased to exist; the new "University" merely occupies some historic buildings. The neoliberal logic of institutions has failed in one respect: if students are buying degrees, paid for by parents, then why are the customers not rebelling? I mean of course the parents, because it should be clear to them that institutions that are politically manipulated have lost their credibility to provide proper degrees. Is it that they believe they must not call the bluff, instead encouraging their wards to dress up in fancy costumes and collect their devalued degrees?

Outside of the academic bubble - and this probably applies to all the institutions now under attack in India - students have successfully been isolated. They have no links to other movements, and are easily depicted as unreasonably democracy-hungry elites in a country where there are more important things to think about. Meanwhile, what has happened to the famed "Bengali intellectuals"? In the past few months, we have heard from a few of them about how terrible "extreme student politics" is. Oh, dear, and you were such good boys when you were young, and you never felt the need to protest when your fellow students were molested or beaten up. It appears that what passes as an intellectual is easy to bribe or blackmail (or bribe and blackmail) into silence.

As we abandon the idea of education as intellectual freedom worldwide, what's left of educational institutions now take the form of providing spaces where students congregate. These spaces are seen as dangerous in and of themselves, if they are not policed. This is not altogether new; previous regimes have acted on this assumption. But in the absence of any concern for what is actually taught, what sort of intellectual engagements actually happen in a place of learning, the only purpose of having them at all is to go through the motions in good order. Universities, it is well known, reproduce, more or less, the ideological consensus of their times. But they do this while performing a sort of dissenting function that makes the consensus appear more solid, more well-thought-through. This no longer happens. And as Indian places of learning are seen more as law and order problems by governments, it's irrelevant what goes on in them as long as order can be maintained.

And as the lack of content of this "education" increasingly locks up Indian students in Indian spaces, the vicious circle of self-reproducing ignorance-as-power game continues. This is not to suggest the problem is particularly Indian (or Bengali). But will anyone have the intellectual tools to make the connections to anything else?