Spotlight
New Delhi, 25 January 2020
Of
Streets & Classrooms
THE MISGUIDED STUDENTS?
By Proloy Bagchi
It appears from what
the newspapers say or what the media shows that the entire country has become
secular in mindset and that all participating individuals in demonstrations and
rallies against the Citizens Amendment Act would go all out to uphold their
secular beliefs against all odds. They would not flinch from taking recourse to
even violence if it ever came to that.
If all this were true
there would be all the reasons to be happy. A secular mindset is always welcome
as it shuns prejudices and hatred for other communities as is normally
witnessed. It is a liberal and harmonious way of life that promotes efforts to
try and understand the opposing antithetical views.
Diversity of views is
welcomed and each is allowed to coexist along with the contrarian and
prevailing majoritarian view. Basically, it is a tolerant society that has a
place for every way of looking at things in a society. It also has to have the
majority with a very large heart that has the capacity to accommodate various
opposing viewpoints without any rancour or bitterness or heartburn.
This would be an
ideal society but unfortunately it just does not exist anywhere. Human beings
being what they are, live through their lives with all the emotions of love and
hate, likes and dislikes and all their biases and sense of fairness. Hence, if someone
were to scratch a secular person, he/she would find underneath the thin veneer
of secularism all the ills of prejudices and hatred for other compatriots.
Many of those who are
taking part in the rallies and demonstrations against the CAA and/or NCR are therefore
not secular in the true sense of the word as they are unwilling to appreciate
the contrarian point of view. A secular individual would argue it out rather
than be violent and use force to bring home his opinion.
The ongoing
agitations against the Citizenship laws have mobilised massive crowds. Worse,
various places of learning have seen violent students and others destroy public
and private property. Unfortunately, many of the students have been mobilised
by various political parties through their subaltern units in the universities
or colleges or other places of learning that exist in the shape of students’
unions. Each union toes the political line of its master causing confrontation
with the opposing union.
The places of
learning have thus become kind of war zones as exemplified by what happened at
Jawaharlal Nehru University. Students came for the “fight” wearing masks and
wielding lathis. They too were certainly not secular. In fact they came for a
“war” against those who happened to hold opposing views.
Students should not
be out on the streets, they should be in the classrooms. They should be kept out
of various societal controversies where political parties of various shades
push their agenda. Politicisation of an issue only divides the nation – more so
the student community. Such divisive actions need to be avoided.
Similar sentiments
were given expression to by the cricketing icon, Sunil Gavaskar recently while
delivering the Lal Bahadur Shastri Memorial Lecture. Hinting that it was not
for students to take sides in the current agitations against the controversial
citizenship laws, Gavaskar said, “The country is in turmoil. Some of our
youngsters are out on the streets when they should be in their classrooms. Some
of them are ending up in hospitals for being out on the streets”.
He went on to say,
“We as a nation can go higher only when we are all together, when each one of
us has to be simply Indian, first and foremost. That is what the game (Cricket)
taught us….We win when we pull together as one” Gavaskar’s advice to the
students was that they should go back to the classrooms. That is their main
duty. Pithily, he observed, “They have gone to the university to study, so
please study”.
There can be various
and even differing views on the matter but one has to consider the facts that
the parents of the students have spent their hard earned money to send them to
colleges and universities. Even the State expends large sums of money to
provide for their education. They just cannot avoid their responsibility in
this regard. No society would ever like them to abstain from the classroom and
fight on the streets against the arms of the law or vice versa.
Most of us have gone
through this stage of our lives and have now come to realise that all that
orchestrated recalcitrance and anger against the established authority were
futile and were of no use in building a good future for any of us. In no way
such conduct could be considered as doing a good turn to the parents who,
inflicting great pain on themselves, spend their last bit to have their wards
properly educated.
It is politicisation
of campuses that is at the bottom of this problem. Students’ unions have become
nothing but political arms of various political parties holding varied
ideological views, distracting students from their basic reason of being in
educational campuses. I recall the pre-Independence days in Gwalior, where the
college used to have a union of students. It used to be guided union with a
faculty member guiding it. The union generally would deal with affairs relating
to students’ welfare, their extra-curricular activities, sporting events and so
on.
The union never
indulged in politics and, since it was a princely State, organisations like
Students’ Federation of India were kept out of the campus. Yet the College
produced politicians like Atal Behari Vajpayee, who not only was a great
debater and a fiery speaker he also collaborated with the member of the family
of the same ruling feudal to form a political party and later rose to become
the country’s prime minister.
Politicians are a
bane for the campuses. They try and mould the young minds to suit their
conveniences. They vitiate the environment causing antipathies, dividing the
student community. Howsoever people might say that the campuses are breeding
grounds for future politicians, none could objectively say so. The students are
misguided and misdirected only to form the bulk for political parties, lending
them weight insofar as numbers are concerned and, worse they are used only as
their foot soldiers.
Arvind Subramanian,
former Chief Economic Advisor and currently teaching at Harvard University
writes from the US about the anguish caused to him as he saw the images of
Indian educational institutions in turmoil streamed across the globe. Quoting a
protagonist from a Mira Nair film he asks “Aren’t these our children who need
to be protected from ourselves, from our instincts to hate and harm? These
young, our college students, need to be nurtured, educated and equipped to
build the wealth and the future that we want for our country”.
Surely, students are
our human capital which needs to be nursed and cared for. Instead of
dissipating their energies in futile fissiparous warfare they need to be
encouraged to build an economically strong nation making the country proud.---INFA
(Copyright, India
News & Feature Alliance)
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