Incidentally, the Department is going to celebrate fifty years of its existence this year under the Headship of Prof. Rekha M. Shangpliang, who is the first woman to head the department. I wish the department success in whatever it does.
This article is not about the challenges which the university is currently facing in terms of how it is managed. I understand that the present administration is handling the situation in the best way it could. Much credit is to be given to it for managing the university under very difficult circumstances. This is about a much larger issue. It is about why NEHU, despite the fact that it has been in existence for more than fifty years, has not been able to occupy a significant part of the national imagination. Except in some academic/university spaces, any mention of NEHU in non-academic and non-university spaces invites curious questions such as where it is located, whether it is a public university or not etc.
However, this does not mean that the contribution of NEHU can be undermined. Its products have done and are doing quite well in academics, state civil services, media, politics etc. An impressive amount of data on social, economic and political reality concerning the north-east has been collected by the university. It offers a conducive academic atmosphere. This writer himself has benefited from that and whatever publications he has to his credit are largely due to that. Still one would wonder why it has not been able to get the recognition one would have expected any public university to get at the national level.
One response could be that it is located in a 'remote' part of India and hence goes unnoticed. But Cherrapunji is also located in Meghalaya, yet it is a very popular tourist place in the country. The reason being that there is something unique about it as having recorded the highest rainfall. What one is trying to indicate is that there has to be something unique about a place, an institution or organisation to get the recognition that it craves for. So where does the uniqueness of a university lie? In my understanding it lies in its willingness and readiness to reflect on burning issues confronting the society at large. Failure to reflect and articulate its position on issues of the day, however unpalatable they may be, would make it irrelevant to the society. Routined academic activities such as holding of classes and examinations, awarding of degrees etc. are something which happen in every university and they alone do not add any uniqueness to a university. A university which stands for critical imagination, alternative forms of thinking, questioning of dominant and hegemonic narratives and the ability to take a position however, disagreeable it may be to the power structures becomes unique in that sense. It is then that it begins to capture national imagination.
Perhaps comparison with Jawarharlal Nehru University, arguably the most prominent public university in the country, becomes illustrative. The total population of JNU may not be more than 10, 000 or so. Some colleges in India are much bigger than that. Despite its smaller size, why is that JNU is the most talked about university in the country? What is so unique about it?
My understanding is that historically it has enjoyed enormous ideological dominance which is based on its refusal to justify and legitimize the status quo, its readiness to question every dominant and hegemonic idea and policy, its willingness to embrace alternative possibilities, its power of resistance, its consistent espousal of foundational principles of Constitution such as equality, justice, democracy and secularism. Its history of speaking truth to power has become legendary. That is why it has become a very powerful ideological site. By taking positions on different issues, it seeks to engage with the society at large, arousing its curiosity about the nature of the university and what it actually represents. It is a cumulative process which results in the university capturing the national imagination.
Let us look at some of those happenings in the country where JNU took a very clear and strong position virtually dominating the discourse about them. When Emergency was declared in 1975 by the then Prime Minister of the country, Indira Gandhi, JNU bore the brunt of attacks from the government. It was because many students and teachers of the university were deeply involved in raising protest against what they considered a very authoritarian move by the government. It shot into national fame almost overnight. It had been established only a few years earlier (1969) but it began to be talked about in public spaces, to borrow an expression from Habermas ( a great social theorist who passed away recently). JNU symbolised the most trenchant critique about a step which Indira Gandhi took which shook the foundations of the Indian Republic.
Or let us take another development i.e. destruction of Babri Masjid and the Ayodhya movement which also constituted an attack on the foundational principles of our Constitution i.e. secularism and democracy. It was the then JNU historians' statement released in 1989 titled The Political Abuse of History contributed significantly to the debate that surrounded the Ayodhya controversy. It had been praised and critiqued in equal measure but the point is that JNU historians led by an eminent historian Romila Thapar tried to present an alternative viewpoint which they tried to show that it was based on evidence not faith. This significantly impacted the nature of debate which was going on at that point of time about the Ayodhya issue.
Further, when under the pressure from multi-national companies , the government led by Manmohan Singh introduced liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation (LPG) programme, the strongest critique offered by economists based in JNU captured the national imagination. Perhaps it was the clearest and most unambiguous critique offered on the programme, the basis point of which was that it would lead to deepening of socio-economic inequalities, a fact which has subsequently been corroborated by a number of studies.
More recently, when the UGC introduced equity regulations seeking to end discrimination based on caste, creed, language, religion, gender, disability in university campuses, there was a protest against those regulations and the matter went to the Supreme Court which stayed the implementation of the regulations. JNU students demanded their immediate implementation as they are meant to end discrimination in university campuses which is an everyday structural reality. Of course, they had to face the wrath of the law as some of them were arrested and later released on bail.
In the last decade or so, when universities were sought to be hegemonised and forced into submission, it may not be an exaggeration to say that JNU stood tall, questioning and resisting every attempt to silence it. Organised and sustained attacks on minorities, dalits, gender have frequently become the subject of heated debates at JNU. Genocide in Gaza and the current assault launched by America-Israel combine on Iran have also been critiqued. The examples mentioned above are only illustrative in nature, not exhaustive.
There are a number of other issues where teachers and students of JNU took a clear oppositional position much to the chagrin of the powers-that-be. On most of the major issues of the day confronting the society, the silence of NEHU has been quite disappointing, to say the least. The contribution of NEHU to major debates in the country is not something one would really be proud of. However, there have been some attempts in the recent past to make its presence felt at the national level. The recently edited volume on The Idea of a University : Possibilities and Contestations has sought to critique the way universities are being hegemonised and it is gratifying to note that it has been taken note of at the national level having been reviewed in important national journals. Also, it was pleasing to see some of our colleagues from NEHU taking an active interest in the ongoing critique about the NEP and presenting an alternative paper on educational reforms as part of a larger gathering at the national level. But such attempts are few and far between.
The point is that a university is the space where different issues are critically interrogated, dissent expressed and silence not normalised. It is the space where critique of exploitative institutions and practices is supposed to be encouraged and where every attempt is made to safeguard the foundational principles of equality, justice, liberty and fraternity. If the university does not do that, then it really can not complain about the society not taking it seriously.
(D. V. Kumar is former Professor, Dept of Sociology, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong)