Ever since the Modi-led BJP formed the government at the Centre way back in 2014, one key aspect of national, primarily centrally funded (and prestigious) higher education institutions (HEIs) has been the focal point of its attention: the (largely left-wing) politics of their students and their organisations.
From the beginning, the central government has tried repeatedly and aggressively to change the framework of students’ politics in different ways in these HEIs. Sadly, very often, it has succeeded.
However, there is one constant and one troubling aspect of students’ politics: every year, new students are admitted to these institutions. These students have their own ideas about their institutions. Further, since these students are young, not all of them have lost their innocence; not all of them are cynically focused on making a career.
Inevitably, there are some students who want to challenge institutions, want to change them, and want their dissenting voices and concerns to be heard and want to make them visible.
Outsized visibility of select institutions
Even as these institutions only cater to a minuscule number of students, they have an outsized impact and visibility among students and society across the country. (For example, think of JNU: just one university with a few thousand students and a few hundred teachers, and yet it has singularly haunted this government for almost a decade!)
Clearly then, for the present ruling dispensation, which is uniquely obsessed with ideological control over politics and society, these HEIs and their students need to be constantly monitored and controlled, if not silenced altogether.
For this purpose, the central (and BJP-ruled state) government(s) have repeatedly intervened in appointments of administrators, vice-chancellors and other senior officials in these HEIs to ensure that they actively align with their politics and constantly harass and trouble dissenting students and their organisations. They see it as a threat to be contained and, if possible, eliminated.
And yet, amusingly, the present regime is also, simultaneously, obsessed with being seen as a ‘democratic’ regime. It is this central contradiction that has forced this regime and its supporters to constantly search for novel ways to somehow dilute the democratic thrust of students’ politics in these HEIs.
Changes at TISS and dissolution of union
It is in this context that we need to place the recent drastic changes regarding the students’ council (replacing the earlier Students’ Union) introduced in the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.
(In any case, in recent years, in TISS, Mumbai, its centrally appointed vice-chancellors and their administrations have been in a constant tug-of-war with dissenting students and their organisations.
Students have been punished for organising events that the administration does not agree with; the administration has filed police cases against its own students and has invited the police to attack and arrest them; students have been burdened with bureaucratic procedures and protocols to organise even the smallest of talks and events; students have also been threatened and expelled for ‘defiance’ of administrative diktats.
In other words, in the past few years, a renowned place of learning, debating and discussing social and political concerns of people has turned into a place of ‘siege’ for its students, where they are ‘under watch’ all the time! It needs to be remembered that, frustrated with its lack of control over its elected Students’ Union, the TISS administration dissolved the Students’ Union in 2024, and elections were put on hold.)
New framework for student representation
Under the new framework, the biggest changes relate to two aspects: one, how students are elected and represented in decision-making bodies of the institute; and the second, a new mandatory undertaking for candidates requiring them to declare that they are neither affiliated with any political party or organisation nor with any student wing of a political party (previously, candidates had to only declare that they had no criminal record, that the information submitted was accurate, and that they would abide by election rules).
Previously, students directly elected a seven-member executive body with office-bearers: the president, vice-president and general secretary. The president and general secretary then represented students in key institutional bodies like the Academic Council, Disciplinary Committee and General Complaints Committee. Now, students are allowed to directly elect only their class representatives.
Ostensibly, this change would ‘democratise’ the campus governance by expanding students’ participation through a much larger number of students in different bodies.
However, in practice, the new framework has made students’ representation nominal by eliminating a central students’ body and the direct participation of its office-bearers, the president and the general secretary, in the institutional decision-making process.
Further, the new framework assigns a central role to the administrator: the Office of Student Affairs (OSA). The OSA will not only place elected students in different committees but will also have the power to bring in even non-elected students in committees where it feels that students’ representation is inadequate.
Mandatory undertaking and organised politics
The second big change regarding the undertaking is even more shocking. Apparently, the administration wants students to have no experience of organised and activist politics at all. It is as if, in the administration’s view, all organised politics is deeply contaminating and is best avoided altogether.
(This in a country where the voting age is 18; TISS is a post-graduate institution, and across HEIs, the most powerful, disruptive and feared students’ organisation in the country these days is ABVP, the student wing of the BJP.)
Even as TISS students have protested against these drastic changes, it is unlikely that the administration would listen to them. Thus, the new framework marks a decisive and regressive break in the manner of students’ representation and participation in the institutional bodies of TISS.
Vrijendra taught in a Mumbai college for more than 30 years and has been associated with democratic rights groups in the city.
