Terms of Trade: Are universities as radical as they were 50 years ago?

Hindustan Times

19 hours ago

This column was written on a day which marks 50 years of Jaiprakash Narayan's call for Sampoorn Kranti (total revolution) in Patna (June 5). While JP's clarion call in 1975 was targeted at politics at large, students played a big role in the agitation which would eventually force Indira Gandhi to declare the Emergency. The JP movement prepared ground for the Congress losing power in India two years later and changed Indian politics forever. The student leaders who led the agitation in Bihar, and in many other parts of the country, went on to become successful and important politicians in India.
2025 marks 50 years of the Emergency and there is bound to be a lot of writing on the event and its implications for India. Among the best things to read is Srinath's Raghavan's latest book, Indira Gandhi and Years that Transformed India, which this columnist hopes to write about in detail very soon.
This week's edition of the column is not about the Emergency. But it is on a related subject in more contemporary times. Are universities as important centres of political rebellion as they were 50 years ago in India? To be sure, political activism and agitations in universities are not just an India specific phenomenon. Europe saw a wave of such agitations during the anti-fascist and pro-communist phase in the 1930-40s and both the US and Europe during the anti-war protests in the 1960s and 70s.
A cursory look suggests universities continue to remain epicentres of agitations and are therefore also attracting the ire of the powers that be.
In India, the arc of university-based agitations seems to have traversed from the left leaning protestor-par-excellence Jawaharlal Nehru University to the privately owned Ashoka University. The latter has been built by a joint corpus contributed by some of India's most successful post-reform capitalists. In the US, it is none other than Harvard, the crème de la crème of Ivy Leagues, which is fighting what can be described as an existential battle with the Trump administration. Trump's latest attack has been to suspend Harvard from the international student visa programme which, unless reversed, will deal a crippling blow to its finances as well as academic excellence.
This is not just about a handful of institutions. There are students and faculty members across universities who are putting a lot of things, including their professional careers, at stake for defending the values they hold dear; be it the cause of Palestine in American campuses or secularism and nuanced debates around it in India. These stylised facts will tempt many to say that music in the cafes and revolution in the air prognosis still holds for educational campuses in the world.
This column, in keeping with its circumspect tradition, would like to argue that there is merit in taking a more critical look at the unambiguous celebration of radicalism in university campuses. Such a view is required not because one has to necessarily agree or disagree with the causes being espoused by the agitating students and faculty. The bigger reason why this argument needs engagement is because the criticality emerging out of universities has suffered a rupture with larger political-economy outside these campuses, both in the advanced world as well as countries such as India. The reasons for this rupture is that universities and their protestors have failed to come to terms with the political implications of the economic developments in the last 50 years.
The divergence is easier to explain in the US. One of the biggest differences between Trump's and his opponents' political bases in the last three presidential elections has been the gap between voters who went to college and who did not. An opinion page piece in the Wall Street Journal on June 3 says that 'the Republican Party had increased its vote share in three consecutive presidential elections in 1,433 counties, nearly half the national total' and 'in not a single county in which the Republican Party increased its share of the vote did a majority of adults hold a college degree.' This is in keeping with Trump's 'I love the poorly educated' retort to Hillary Clinton's suicidal jibe against him in the 2016 elections. Why the poorly educated loved Trump back should not be rocket science to anyone who has basic intelligence. As the world embraced globalization, more and more blue-collared jobs moved out of the US to countries such as Japan, South-East Asia and eventually China even as highly educated workers, American or foreign born, amassed large fortunes in the knowledge economy dominated by things such as finance and technology and the ecosystems they created or supported.
The neoliberal order in America, which had bipartisan support until Trump arrived on the scene, consistently tilted the balance of power and prosperity in an unprecedented manner against the non-educated and in favour of those who went to elite universities. Most of the Ivy-Leaguers did nothing to protest against this growing divide. As Trump trains his guns on the elite universities, he does not have to worry about a political blowback from their stakeholders. They were never with him to begin with and Trump's actual voters see the highly educated as having been oblivious to their increasing predicament. That knowledge creation might become a collateral damage in this process is just an incidental outcome in Trump's scheme of things.
In India the biggest intellectual political indictment of the student movement came at the turn of the 1990s when the Mandal-Kamandal binary erupted. India's upper-caste dominated higher education saw a large (even if reactionary) rebellion against the imposition of Mandal Commission recommendations which brought in reservations for the Other Backward Classes in education and government jobs for the first time. The political constituency for Mandal was much bigger than the opposition to it in the universities and it has never looked back in its struggle for expanding the realm of affirmative action since then. The announcement of a caste census and (the likely-to-follow) expansion of the OBC quota is yet another advance in this long march. Indian universities today are far more socially representative than they used to be in the 1990s. However, this progressive turn of events has been eclipsed by a right-wing tilt in Indian polity, namely, the rise of Hindutva which started from the Ram Temple movement in the late 1980s.
While the high priests of Indian academia, especially its progressive spectrum, lost the chance to be vanguardist on the question of social justice to those outside their sanitised boundaries, they went horribly wrong in claiming vanguardism in the fight against communalism. This crisis and mistake were the most prominent in the initiative by historians of the Jawaharlal Nehru University who tried to counter the Ram Temple movement and the BJP by making it a debate on historiography, which is something this column has written about earlier as well.
Despite the best efforts of many political commentators to portray the Mandal and Kamandal projects as fundamentally antithetical, there is clear evidence to argue that the two have been talking to each other in the last three and a half decades and been able to find common ground. It is this mismatch between theory and practice which has led to an absence of large student agitations – there have been flash points for sure – against the current regime. The entrenched organisations would like to marry caste and communalism but the former's larger constituency is more interested in advancing its own agenda and settling some intra-group scores than fighting a pitched battle against Hindutva.
To be sure, the fall in militancy of the student movement in India is not just a result of a muddled discourse on caste versus communalism. It is as much a function of class. When students rebelled en masse during the Emergency, attending public universities in the hope of landing a plain vanilla government job was pretty much the only game in town for Indians in higher education. Economic reforms changed all this as millions of students started going to private vocational educational institutions. While the education or training was not necessarily great here, these places worked wonders for young graduates who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Challenges presented by a rise in economic inequality and a failure to achieve a larger economic transformation notwithstanding, India's higher education became extremely promising even if expensive for a vast majority of young students who did not necessarily come from privileged backgrounds. Radicalism was the last thing on their minds when the world was awash with private sector jobs. This is also why India could never really develop an anti-neoliberal movement among its educated even though there has been a consistent pushback from the really poor in terms of demands to expand the welfare net.
While it is early days, there are signs that the global economic turbulence, rising protectionism in the advanced world and rise of things such as AI will land a big blow to the buy-a-degree-and-get-employed model of education in India. What will perhaps make this crisis worse is the fact that today's youth have aspirations which go beyond the basic roti-kapda-makan for the youth of the 1970s. This mismatch between aspirations and reality likely transcends ideological boundaries on things such as religion and caste. While more and more politicians are pretending to cater to these growing anxieties by talking about things such as more government jobs and possibility of reservations (not necessarily caste based) in the private sector, young people know that they are hardly a call to change the system or overhaul it fundamentally. The periodic precipitations in universities, elite and non-elite, have so far failed to strike a chord with this latent anxiety which is building among India's youth.
That universities are essential not just for making people employable but also the battleground of ideas is an argument one often hears while criticising regimes cracking down on academic institutions or protestors belonging to them. The moral imperative of such an argument must confront the reality that present day democracy works in the confines of capitalism which, if one were to paraphrase Marx's famous quote in The Communist Manifesto, is committed to making ideas of the ruling ideas of any age the ideas of the ruling class. Does this mean the idealism around student movements is misplaced? A lesser-known quote from Marx can answer this question. 'The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter', he writes in the introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. 50 years after India's students led an agitation and braved far more severe repressions than what is happening today to overthrow the strongest party in the country from power, it is worth asking whether today's student movements, both in India and abroad, and their advocates, are being able to grasp the 'root of the matter' or falling victim to Marx famous warning against philosophers, who are always only interpreting the world rather than changing it.
Roshan Kishore, HT's Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country's economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa.
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