The following is a rejoinder drafted by University Community for Democracy to the pamphlet circulated by Krantikari Yuva Sangathan titled “What is Ailing University Democrats”. We will first present what we see as certain basic misconceptions and flawed assumptions at work in way KYS has understood UCD, and then proceed to factually refute a number of statements made in their pamphlet.
UCD is a platform primarily consisting of students and some teachers of Delhi University. It was formed when many of us who were deeply offended by the way the University authorities had decided to evict students from their legitimate right to hostel accommodation decided to come together and protest against this eviction. In the course of our discussions, we concluded that the callous behaviour of the University administration in this instance had to be linked to a larger pattern of increasingly irresponsible and authoritarian governance in Delhi University. Hence, we decided to call ourselves University Community for Democracy. For us, democracy is a mode of governance and organisation which is transparent, open and inclusive. At the same time, while each organisation and individual harbours its own ideological worldview, the fact of coming together on this platform has not been to absolve those differences but to come together with a basic common understanding of the problem at hand. It is, therefore, a coming together of those from the Left and not elsewhere. While demanding our democratic space from University authorities we have also tried to realise what democracy can be for us in our own workings as a platform. All our meetings are held in the open (most of them have been held in the lawns of Delhi School of Economics), all decisions are taken in these open meetings, which are duly recorded in minutes put up on freely accessible internet forums. We do not claim to be saviour of anyone in the University, the downtrodden, the working classes or the poor. We have no claim to be any revolution’s vanguard, or harbingers of a future ideal society. However, each of us is actively engaging with how we want to visualise an ideal society. Ideologically some of us are committed Marxists, some are liberals, while most of us are still exploring our paths in the world of ideas and commitments. Some of us are members of other organisations. All we demand is that these not be reactionary, communal, sexist or casteist.
The KYS pamphlet demonstrates their failure to understand this basic character of the UCD. The central paradox in their formulation is that they see the UCD as an organisation. It isn’t. UCD was always conceived as a network of those who shared a basic understanding of a common problem afflicting both the University in particular and in the city in general. So when the weaknesses of UCD are pointed out, it seem to assume that UCD is an organisation with a defined manifesto in rivalry with (and thereby judged retrograde in comparison to) another organisation like KYS, whereas UCD was loosely assembled as a forum precisely for individuals and organisations like KYS and NSI to ally their valuable experience with mobilisation and work together. The very fact that KYS has criticised UCD for its politics vis-à-vis KYS demonstrates that they saw themselves separate from it, and thereby missed the spirit behind which the network was formed. Indeed, one could go on to argue that the very distinction drawn between UCD and KYS as distinct organisations confirms the strange sense of competitiveness one sensed throughout from KYS members when they consistently spoke (and Sujit reinforces this sense in his reply to Bala) of some issues, such as rent regulation, as rightfully their forte, given that they raised it months before UCD was born. The fact is that UCD was never in competition in KYS, for the efforts of KYS members was considered part of what UCD was meant to be. That is why one was rather bewildered when one found KYS drafting pamphlets on concerns that overlapped with those of the UCD without once informing or involving fellow members in the UCD. Indeed, upon being confronted on this issue, KYS members spoke of their struggle as a “separate” one that needed no prior permission from the UCD. This position seemed to miss the point entirely (no one was demanding that KYS ask for ‘permission’ anyway), for it assumed that the two groups were rivals competing for the same political claims rather than colleagues fighting in the same battle. This attitude, destructive to cooperative participation and petty, to say the least, also finds its way into Sujit’s so-called ‘critique’.
It is also for this reason that one wonders at the naïveté of those who claim that attacking the behaviour of KYS members is a ‘personal attack’, as if the ‘personal’ is somehow a pristine space cleansed of politics and ideology. Indeed, the questions being raised about KYS members’ personal maturity is an intensely political question, especially given that (and this will be understood by those who regularly attended the meetings and did the work) the same KYS members rarely leant themselves to the actual labour of UCD activity (drafting and printing posters and pamphlets, campaigning in colleges, etc). Surely one’s own physical contribution is as much a measure of one’s politics as ideological contestations about the working class. In that sense, it is not simply “fashionable activism” to ask the question of who did what, for some have consistently worked harder than others to make the UCD campaign successful, and those ‘some’ have a right to be ‘resentful’ when others who never fully contributed to that process later claim that the process was undemocratic and politically flawed. The question needs to be asked: as UCD members, what did the KYS members do to improve the process? Having had all the problems they had, at what point did they make the space their own to do something about it? Merely making suggestions at meetings for others to implement is not enough.
Speaking of making suggestions, the KYS pamphlet claims that the valuable ones made by KYS members were “swept under the carpet as mere issues of modus operandi or as divisive tactics”. Besides being factually untrue, as the minutes of the meetings show, it is rather reductive to claim that an imperative to focus on a meeting’s agenda is tantamount to undemocratic repression of criticism. Any member of any organisation knows that meetings have to be conducted with a certain discipline, and cannot simply become occasions for everyone to mouth their opinions on any matter generally concerning the organisation (we hope KYS meetings function with this discipline as well). Those larger questions are of course very important, and it was even felt that a separate meeting should be called specifically in order to discuss the ideological differences that had been raised in previous meetings. Alok, a KYS representative and member of the UCD, was categorically asked to take the initiative to decide a time for the meeting. But taking initiative is precisely what KYS members haven’t been doing in the UCD campaign, so it isn’t surprising that such a meeting was never held.
The KYS pamphlet confirms our argument when it states that “in the very beginning in UCD meetings there have been activists and organisations that have questioned the constituting logic of the forum” (emphasis added). So basically the KYS saw itself as an advisory committee whose only role would be to teach us how to conduct ourselves, to point out faults in our “constituting logic” before it had even been built! This brings us back to our earlier point: UCD wasn’t allowed to grow because KYS seemed determined to see themselves as critical outsiders rather than as participative insiders. They were quick to criticise at every step of the way, without contributing offering concrete suggestions or constructive proposals on what alternative to follow. Many members found this behaviour by KYS members disruptive, and their objections have been noted in the minutes of more than one meeting. In this regard, refer to the minutes of the following meeting:
Minutes of UCD meeting on 22nd July 2010 – pertaining to an incident on 21st July
“The meeting today began with a discussion on the issue of an incident at Hans Raj College where the KYS and CSW (who are members of the UCD) were distributing their organisational parchas and running a parallel campaign on similar issue at a time when they had committed to UCD work – they were to be at Daulat Ram college as part of the UCD college campaign. The discussion was hoping to arrive at a sense of how we will work together as a collective and proceed with our campaign in a democratic manner, without fragmenting into competing campaigns, since most people felt that the UCD is a collective for moving ahead with the issues offset by the Commonwealth Games in the city, and now, the more specific issue of hostel evictions in the university”.
“Also, while everybody agreed that there was absolutely no issue with the fact of individuals and groups will be part of separate agendas and campaigns, we did think it necessary that we must not allow this to become disruptive to our campaign’s efforts. That was raised in the context of how the KYS and CSW apart from absenting from the slotted work at the slotted time for UCD activities were conducting their own campaign on rent regulation (an issue that had come up in the previous meeting to be brought out in the next UCD parcha) and demand for more hostels, and even while they distributed their pamphlets they did not distribute the UCD pamphlets. Some members of the UCD who went to Hanraj yesterday when they came to know about it, brought up the incident in the meeting as an issue of honesty and trust of the collective which consists of individuals, groups as well as organisations. KYS did apologise for the comments by a member of their team. The latter was quoted saying that their campaign and pamphlet were better than that of UCD”.
“While members of the KYS and CSW said that their being at Hans Raj was a result of confusion, there was disagreement about this since it was seen as a breach of trust, going against the spirit of this campaign and collective. While some members assumed KYS and CSW had stepped out of the campaign already, KYS and CSW denied such a claim”.
“Finally, to end the matter a resolution was passed in the house stating that there was a case of misconduct by KYS and CSW relating to the incidents of the previous day. (Out of 24 people, 14 voted in favour of the resolution, 4 voted against, 6 abstained from voting)”.
In this regard, one could even call the KYS duplicitous, because they wore down the UCD at a time when, unlike KYS, it was still a very new campaign at an early stage of its formation. Thus, while their 5,297 words of vitriolic diatribe might sound radical to those dissociated with the workings of the campaign, we maintain that to decry a process one never contributed to help or improve is possibly the most flawed form of politics. When theory cannot give direction to praxis it is rendered meaningless.
And now we have this long litany of accusations against us, trying to prove how we are not an organisation that can lead students of oppressed classes for a joint struggle with the working class to destroy class and emancipate the world. Both the KYS pamphlet and Sujit’s reply to Bala is littered with rather self-conscious references to “petty-Bourgeois” backgrounds as somehow endangering one’s commitment to politics. Perhaps KYS has to ask itself whether experiential politics can be stretched to such an idealtypical situation that anyone who is not dalit/poor/muslim/woman/gay/tribal cannot speak, as if access to capital necessarily yields a flawed political subjectivity. Of course it is important to remember one’s class position, but there is also something to be said for those still trying to become politicised despite their privileged subject positions. Mocking these attempts the way the KYS pamphlet does is precisely what discourages fellow “petty-Bourgeois” folk from making even that small effort, and makes politics into a club rather than a movement. That is the brand of politics KYS espouses, and it is not one we endorse. Thus, when KYS accuses us of not being this or that, the irony of the matter is that we have never claimed to be what KYS accuses us of not being! Unlike the KYS, we do not use Left rhetoric merely as a means to vilify, nor are we impressed by KYS’ attempts to claim the moral high-ground by claiming to work for the oppressed and exploited of this country (itself a suspect claim). For most of us in the UCD, our work has been a discovery of the politics of democracy and protest. We are not here to wear medals for being the most radical. If we were, then KYS has already declared itself the winner, and we happily concede them the title.
***
The following section consists of a point-wise rejoinder to the slanderous allegations the KYS has levelled against the UCD. Sections of the KYS pamphlet have been reproduced in bold and our responses follow in standard lettering. We have not commented on all the factual inaccuracies, for there are far too many and unlike KYS, we have work to do for our campaign. What we have highlighted are only the sections that disturb us the most. We have also consciously chosen not to respond to the large passages in the KYS pamphlet that pontificate about the nature of the working class. There are countless critiques and counter-critiques of their position within Marxist theory, and doing so here will digress from our major points of contention. Nevertheless we thank them for their effort to educate all of us.
1. Regarding teachers and internal assessment
These teachers, acting as pied-pipers and humming the threatening tune of internal assessment, drew their hapless students to the venue by taking their classes there. Students (the majority of whom were oblivious to the issues raised), were obviously not taken into confidence when they were made to come to the “hunger strike” site.
This is a straight lie. No students were ever threatened with internal assessment. Moreover, we are offended by the cavalier recklessness with which KYS questions the credibility of teachers who have been crucial for stimulating progressive debate in the University for decades, and who have stood by the student community in countless cases of injustice against students.
2. Regarding rent regulation
Let us take the example of rent regulation raised during the “hunger strike”. Firstly, UCD began its campaign with absolutely no concrete demand of rent regulation. The forum was forced to pick up the issue of rent regulation in addition to the issue of hostel eviction because it was constantly accosted by the majority of students who had never even lived in college hostels, and had for a long time been faced with the problem of escalating rents. There was also urgency in making rent regulation an active demand of the UCD campaign because some other organisations had already launched a full-fledged campaign on rent regulation in the city. Hence, it was more in a competitive spirit than with any serious commitment and understanding on the issue that rent regulation became part of UCD’s charter of demands.
Please check our very first parcha, released on . It reads: “It (University) has thus become an accomplice in the larger processes of reckless corporatisation that the whole city is undergoing in the bid of become a ‘global city’. This has left students at the mercy of private accommodation, with its unregulated rents and precarious guarantees. Rents are rising in anticipation of the increased demand for PGs and flats, forcing many existing residents to move out and making accommodation unaffordable for incoming residents as well. The University had made no attempt to devise a mechanism to control or subsidise rents”.
Please also refer to the minutes of the following meetings:
“There were concerns shared about whether we would like to gradually broaden this to wider struggles in the city. It was accepted that we would be broadening our ideas gradually and linking it to wider struggles. This is why we have tried to form a larger forum and this is a campaign within it at the moment” (the ‘this’ we are talking about is the campaign concerning hostel evictions).
“There was a brief discussion about what our approach should be gradually, if we should focus on hostel evictions or also give more prominence to the issue of unregulated rents and problems in the neighbourhood since many students live in private accommodation”.
The very fact that KYS makes this claim despite all this history is itself evidence of the competitiveness prevalent behind the KYS’ anxiety to declare their campaign on rent regulation as the only legitimate one, and to declare all others as motivated “more in a competitive spirit than with any serious commitment”.
3. Regarding the decision to approach University authorities
This is precisely why UCD’s “hunger strike” targeted the audience in Arts Faculty (a transit point for the student/ teaching community), and not any tangible authority (which in this case should really have been the Government of Delhi). And this is why the best that UCD can do on the issue of rent is to demand rent regulation from the Dean of Colleges! Quite rightly, their delegation was informed by the Dean of her incapability to regulate rents since this was way beyond the University authorities’ jurisdiction and responsibility. We return to the fundamental question: why does the University remain the centre of UCD’s resistance when authorities beyond the Vice Chancellor are to blame, and when there are many people apart from students/teachers who are adversely affected by unregulated rents?
We approached the University authorities – the Vice Chancellor – because he is responsible for ensuring a safe, affordable accommodation for the students of Delhi University. In the past (2006) there have been attempts to enlist all those PGs and private accommodation places with the University in order to centrally keep a check on rents. Similarly, on the issue of workers, being the principal employer the University is again directly responsible for seeing to it that workers are paid minimum wages and have proper housing and access to basic facilities.
4. Regarding visit to Bhalaswa
UCD now seeks to locate the working class and its struggle in a far off resettlement colony called Bhalaswa. Unfortunately, judging by recent email correspondences between UCD and students of the Women’s Development Cell (WDC) in Miranda House, the trips to Bhalaswa are being envisaged by the students more as extra-curricular activities. This indicates that UCD’s form of politics is really incapable of building a long-standing and formidable unity between the student community and working class.
It was decided in the very beginning of the campaign that UCD would establish connections with others in the city affected by the Games. It was felt that since students were not the only ones held hostage by the Games, it was necessary to forge ties of solidarity with other organisations working on overlapping concerns, while recognising that our constituency remained the University. In the case of Bhalaswa, we were extended an invitation by people working with Bhalaswa Lok Shakti Manch to come and visit their resettlement colony. The trip was not an official UCD objective, and the students who went did so in the capacity of individuals wishing to extend their support to the Bhalaswa movement.
Please refer to the minutes of the following meeting:
“Kaveri forwarded a message which came from the group from Bhulaswa who came for the protest meeting saying that people interested in visiting the Bhulaswa resettlement site could do so on Tuesday. Please leave your number so that this can be arranged”.
In any case, even if the trip had been an official UCD activity, it would still not justify the KYS’ mocking epithet “extra-curricular”. Most of us may never know what it is like to be a construction worker or a displaced adivasi, but visiting places like Bhalaswa is valuable in and of itself as the smallest of attempts to understand the plight of others, even if it can’t bring about the revolution of the working class that KYS is obviously so successful in doing.
5. Regarding workers’ protest
The same day that UCD began its “relay hunger strike”, workers down the road were protesting against their severe exploitation under various CWG construction projects. UCD failed to respond and join the struggle. The message, therefore, sent out was clear enough—we will participate only when we are in charge and not workers, and we will raise workers’ issues only as an addition to our never-ending list of “democratic” demands. Considering this, are not the issues of workers’ rights being raised in tokenism, i.e. only when it suits them?
Do not brush aside the practical aspects of the campaign. We are not a trade union. We are too small a force to claim to organise workers at the construction sites all over the University. If we were 250 people, we might have been able to attempt to organise workers, but when those actually willing to labour for the campaign number 20 or less at any given time, we cannot (it would have helped if KYS had added to our numbers of working campaigners). But as a university community we have stood against construction work in the University that violates legally sanctioned labour standards, and have integrated it into our demands. Also, the decision to sit on a relay hunger strike was taken well over a week before it began and posters had been put up. Meanwhile, the KYS/CSW workers protest was decided and its posters put up a day before. And then too, in at least three different venues we found that KYS/CSW had pasted their posters corner to corner over UCD ones. If this is not malicious what is?).
6. Regarding Gandhi Ashram
The first pamphlet printed by the UCD spoke of the need to build communes in places off campus. In fact, a team met with the management of a Gandhian trust (funded by Ministry of Social Justice) which ran a hostel near Kingsway Camp, called Gandhi Ashram. The place soon began to be promoted via e-mails etc. almost like any other private accommodation; the purpose being to provide a space for those still desperately looking for affordable accommodations and also to provide a space for regrouping when things got rough during the campaign. Ironically, the Gandhi Ashram hostel is meant for poor Dalit school students who were obviously going to be displaced if college students moved into the dormitories. No one seemed to reckon with this inevitability while the plan was still being hatched.
What we also found disturbing about the Gandhi Ashram plan was the desire of creating an isolated “democratic” space. The message being sent out was nothing but we can create our own isolated commune-like space in this big bad world. This approach stems from the sectarian University-centric politics of the UCD highlighted above, and also from a non-revolutionary conceptualisation of commune life. For many participants in UCD, the commune with its base in Gandhi Ashram was an apparent ‘pre-figuration’ of a new society, whereas it was far from that. Commune was being envisaged as a centre of ‘counter-culture’—an oasis in capitalist wilderness. Interestingly, this is a very familiar trope—it is based, both at once, on a vision of a transformed society without real hope for a process of transformation. This is because it is based on the vision that the lives of a minority can magically change without transforming the whole. This is, after all, how (phantom) revolution itself, is envisaged according to the pipe-dreams (joint-dreams?) of petty bourgeois students/intellectuals who enjoy the comforts/security of generous remittances from home—‘let us, at least, as a small privileged community enjoy revolution making’.
Of course, as pointed out by us in the meetings, it was nothing but ridiculous that UCD spoke of building a commune in a place which was actually going to be charging the students Rs. 1500 per bed and where 6 to 8 women students would have to live per room. How can a commune work within a market structure, and how can a place which gives you no control on the rules and regulations to be implemented, become a progressive, commune-like accommodation?! Despite these criticisms, UCD went ahead and would have signed a MoU with the Gandhi Ashram management, if it wasn’t for the sheer lack of students interested in the place. In fact, just so as to get students to join the bandwagon, emails were sent out exaggerating the facilities available at Gandhi Ashram. In the interest of pulling a crowd, the green lawns of the Ashram were highlighted. Meanwhile, it was downplayed that no fooding would be available at the place and that this was going to be a
dormitory system.
The lies continue. Firstly, Gandhi Ashram was visualised as a means to tackle the practical problem of students who couldn’t find safe and affordable accommodation (particularly girls, who also face the problem of safety). We never claimed it to be an isolated island of counter-culture, but yes, a space where those resorting to that accommodation could critically engage with the problem at hand, and therefore with ideas like a community kitchen. No Dalit students were going to be displaced, because the rooms being given to us were at that time unused. A member of KYS was even present as part of the team that went to Gandhi Ashram to figure out the modalities of making this arrangement. No facilities were ever “advertised”, and all that was publicly declared was the availability of Gandhi Ashram as an option (though of course, if KYS sees any form of publicisation, whether press releases to the media or circulation through emails, as part of a larger Bourgeois capitalist conspiracy, we advise them to kindly sharpen their political understanding; sophomoric regurgitations of Das Kapital isn’t going to cut it). Not once was it thought of as a final solution, but only as a temporary arrangement for students who had not found or could not afford accommodation elsewhere.. Regarding food arrangements, we were in discussion with the Ashram authorities about the possibility of expanding kitchen facilities. And as for the charge of Rs.1500 per month, that price is about one-fourth the cost of accommodation in the outlying regions of North Campus. At any rate, not once did KYS members suggest an alternative to Gandhi Ashram as a possible venue to rehabilitate students who could not afford anything else, which is ironic given their constant chest-thumping about being champions of the poor. Instead of appreciating the attempt made to lend some respite to students while carrying on the work of politicisation through the campaign, all the KYS members seem capable of doing is ill-intentioned criticism and hysterical slander.
***
We hope this rejoinder will put to rest the false allegations made by KYS against UCD. We do not have any faith in KYS’ capacity to introspect about the falsity of their claims. We only hope that the wider audience privy to this debate will learn to take KYS statements with a pinch of salt. Our experience with the KYS has been one big negative lesson, and we are glad that our work now proceeds far more productively and democratically. Anybody wishing to know more about the UCD, to really see how it functions for themselves, is always welcome to visit us on our face-book page, to join our googlegroups mailing list, or to attend our meetings. We are always open.
In the light of your publishing of the KYS “critique” on UCD, where there is a substantial section making allegations at NSI as well as AISA and campaigns and cyber space activism, we are perturbed by the fact that you have published it without clarifying with the maligned groups. Do we understand this as your endorsement of KYS’s ‘critique’?. You are of course free to publish what you wish to, but isn’t there a political issue when you are publishing such a document which questions the credibility of organisations and campaigns without first having felt the need to clarify with the concerned groups. More so, because you happen to have very easy access to these people, groups and campaign. It was understandable if your post was a part of an already ongoing debate on the nature of campaigns or any organisation in the university.
We would have appreciated if a credible website like you should have brought us in a debate rather than forcing us into a response pre-set by the tone of the KYS ‘document’ which is largely malicious. In our understanding KYS’s mail is not intended towards any debate but is infested with mal-intent as far as its take on organisations like NSI or AISA or Safe University Campaign.
Since you yourself function with credibility as a left group and mainly also in cyber space, you might have felt the need to engage with the organisations/people/campaigns to gauge the credibility of the KYS ‘critique’. Such a method of functioning, unintended though, ends up privileging one organisation.
We would appreciate if you would publish this email with the NSI response to KYS pasted below along with two NSI documents (1 and 2) attached. And a comradely suggestion that you can contribute to the UCD campaign with your solidarity as well as first hand critique.
On Behalf of New Socialist Initiative
Amrapali Basumatary
Dear friends and comrades in UCD,
Below is our response to comrades in KYS who have taken the initiative to produce a lengthy critique of NSI while critiquing the UCD.
While NSI has till now not said anything, some individuals and organisations have falsely implicated NSI without having full and proper understanding of NSI and its politics and posited the debates as KYS vs NSI battle. This is the first mail that NSI is writing to the group. We have not been asserting our group’s identity vis-a-vis UCD because we have a clear understanding that UCD is a platform of various individuals and organisations who have come together for a basic minimum programme. While some members of KYS and NSI might be old acquaintances, there has been no history of political engagement within the university between them. It is politically callous to project the issue in this binary.
Dear comrades in KYS and its fraternal organisations,
In the wake of the accusations (critique?) of UCD that KYS has posted in the UCD email group, we feel bound to respond, while respecting KYS’s ideological position that emails (cyber space) are “bourgeois phenomenon”. As it is clear that in the critique you have maligned constituent organisations of the UCD, especially NSI and AISA and resorted to falsities and misrepresentations about NSI, while also maligning campus campaigns like the SAFE University campaign. NSI is not a sectional organisation which focuses merely on the students, teachers and the university. It is a political-ideological platform constituted of people coming from different progressive radical movements. So when you say that we have “no work amongst workers, i.e., no trade union to speak of, and basically do nothing to promote workers’ self-organisation… NSI has more presence in the NGO networks than in the existing workers’ movement”, that we instrumentalise workers’ issues to appear ‘radical/cool’, it is nothing short of lies.
Here is a short quotation from the introductory document of NSI –
“It is a platform in the making consisting of comrades from different streams of life and left politics. Some of us are engaged in trade unions for unorganized sector workers, some of us are active on women’s issues, with particular emphasis on bringing class in women politics, while many other among us are active in theatre and university level discussion cum agitational groups as well as struggles for dalit emancipation and anti-communal struggle.”
Following are some of our points in response to your accusations or critique as you wish to project it as.
Foremost, we wish to ask KYS if the accusations were made consciously or under the duress of a sheer lack of knowledge/analysis and information about NSI?
Firstly, NSI is a constituent of the UCD. So if you are writing a critique of the UCD, stick to that rather than using it to get to other left organisations like NSI which is part of it. NSI does not represent UCD politics. Of course ideas are brought up and people debate, discuss and thereafter accept or reject as per the larger consensus in UCD.
Secondly, the NSI which is part of the UCD is the North Campus Delhi University unit, like your Delhi State Unit. The focus of this unit is in the university. There are other NSI units who work in different areas and constituencies with different focuses in many parts of the country. The way we understand a formation like the UCD is that it is a composite group of left organisations, individuals, liberals, progressives and other who came in specifically because of university related concerns. NSI with its committed left politics, is a part of it because it thinks the issues taken up by the UCD is intrinsically connected to larger issues of capitalism, democracy and university space.
Thirdly, UCD group mailing list is not the platform for you to thrash out your angst/anxiety/anger/enmity against any organisation. There could be a healthier way of dealing with your problems and critiques, in a polemical manner rather than intsrumentalising the UCD space.
We appreciate that the KYS is committed to revolutionary working class politics like the NSI and we take this opportunity to tell members of the UCD to read and know more about NSI. For a short introduction of NSI in please visit http://nsi-delhi.blogspot.com/2010/05/for-those-who-would-like-to-know-little.html#more. Any further mails about NSI or to NSI should be sent to this email rather than using the UCD mailing list. Write to us at delhi.nsi@gmail.com and read our Manifesto (title – A WORLD FOR THE WORKERS! – A FUTURE FOR THE WORLD!). We invite comments and critiques on our manifesto. We take this opportunity to initiate a polemical exchange on left politics. And hereby we are attaching two documents – a) introduction of NSI and b) NSI’s draft manifesto.
To initiate and enhance productive left political debates, please share your literatures with us.
laal salam,
NORTH CAMPUS UNIT Delhi University, New Socialist Initiative (NSI)
Editorial Note:If publishing KYS’ polemical piece amounts to Radical Notes’ endorsement of the organisation’s position, then we would be guilty of endorsing many others, including that of NSI, as we have published at least one of its documents too. We publish these materials for the importance of the questions that they raise. Since this letter is in direct response to what has been published in Radical Notes, we are obliged to publish it as it is; however we would still expect a substantial engagement with KYS’ note, touching upon the issues that it poses. Comrades from NSI would grant that the “mal-intent” and malice that they find in the pamphlet might not be visible to others, who are more interested in wider issues concerning the discursive embedding of students/university politics in larger class processes and praxes.
Delhi State Committee,
Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS)
…THE INTELLECTUALS WILL ACCOMPLISH NOTHING IF
THEY FAIL TO INTEGRATE THEMSELVES
WITH THE WORKERS AND PEASANTS…
Mao Tse-tung
NOTE: This is a review and summation of the proceedings of the forum, University Community for Democracy (UCD). UCD is constituted of different individuals who may or may not belong to organizations. Apart from some dominant tendencies which we have criticized below, the forum has some well-intentioned individuals who have increasingly become discontent with UCD’s functioning. We have prepared this piece for internal discussion within our organization, but due to requests from certain friends in UCD, we are going public with it. It encompasses many points of criticism which we often raised in UCD meetings.
Recently, some University teachers and students in the north campus of Delhi University have been running a campaign under the banner of the UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY FOR DEMOCRACY (UCD). To use the words of the campaign’s founding members, the campaign is committed to fighting against “shrinking democratic space in the University”. The focus of the campaign has particularly been on the eviction of college students from university hostels, in the wake of the Commonwealth Games. A section of “left” intellectuals and “progressive” activists can be seen allying themselves with this forum. It has become fashionable for some to be seen in its meetings and, for those who navigate more in the realms of virtual reality, to trail the forum’s activities in cyberspace.
However, in the very beginning in UCD meetings there have been activists and organizations that have questioned the constituting logic of the forum. Most of such criticism was swept under the carpet as mere issues of modus operandi or as divisive tactics. The validity of the criticism raised was often lost to many of the forum’s participants who were hostile to organization structure, and hence, to criticisms coming from organizations. Even when some of our points of criticism were noted they were hardly addressed in a manner that reassured us of UCD’s commitment to the issues raised. The following pages are a delineation of this unfortunate fact.
At a time when the Commonwealth Games (CWG) are the focus of the media, many activities of the UCD come across more as publicity gimmicks than anything else. It is important for many of the forum’s participants to be seen resisting the Games but to do that they have to mobilize people on issues close to them. With little understanding on the issues concerning different people, UCD raises them in an opportunistic vein, just so as to galvanize different issues and use them. In reality CWG is the starting point and be all and end all of their resistance. And no matter how earnestly UCD denies it, this has been their strategy because right now the Games are the highlight of the season. Even before the University opened and the campaign could take proper shape; there were overt attempts to reach the media for coverage (such as forming media coordination teams and releasing press statements).
Even the “relay hunger strike”, or rather “skip one’s lunch” strike was no exception (it is interesting to note that UCD members sat on “hunger strike” from 9am to 9pm, which basically means they did not sacrifice their breakfast and dinner—In reality a relay hunger strike is continuous, and, thereby, includes people sitting on hunger strike twenty four hours—the term relay refers to somebody ending their hunger strike and another person taking their place). Since a “hunger strike” by University students and teachers is an eye-catching story for the media, it was more important to be seen in this act of drama even if the demands of those on “hunger strike” stood thoroughly misplaced. Sadly, so as to project a significant gathering at the venue of the “hunger strike”, students were actually subjected to authoritarian tactics by teachers supportive of UCD. These teachers, acting as pied-pipers and humming the threatening tune of internal assessment, drew their hapless students to the venue by taking their classes there. Students (the majority of whom were oblivious to the issues raised), were obviously not taken into confidence when they were made to come to the “hunger strike” site.
The fact that the demands of those on “hunger strike” were misplaced reflects nothing but a sheer lack of seriousness and understanding on the issues raised. It was the form in which the “relay hunger strike” raised certain demands that was highly problematic for it reeked of sheer opportunism and sectarianism. Let us take the example of rent regulation raised during the “hunger strike”. Firstly, UCD began its campaign with absolutely no concrete demand of rent regulation. The forum was forced to pick up the issue of rent regulation in addition to the issue of hostel eviction because it was constantly accosted by the majority of students who had never even lived in college hostels, and had for a long time been faced with the problem of escalating rents. There was also urgency in making rent regulation an active demand of the UCD campaign because some other organizations had already launched a full-fledged campaign on rent regulation in the city. Hence, it was more in a competitive spirit than with any serious commitment and understanding on the issue that rent regulation became part of UCD’s charter of demands.
To further delineate the opportunism with which the issue of rent was finally raised by UCD, we would like to bring the reader’s attention to the fact that although they are now talking of rent control; escalating rents are actually being conceptualized as a University neighbourhood problem rather than a general problem for migrants coming to the city (for further illustration of this point please see CSW and KYS’s paper). This is precisely why UCD’s “hunger strike” targeted the audience in Arts Faculty (a transit point for the student/teaching community), and not any tangible authority (which in this case should really have been the Government of Delhi). And this is why the best that UCD can do on the issue of rent is to demand rent regulation from the Dean of Colleges! Quite rightly, their delegation was informed by the Dean of her incapability to regulate rents since this was way beyond the University authorities’ jurisdiction and responsibility. We return to the fundamental question— why does the University remain the centre of UCD’s resistance when authorities beyond the Vice Chancellor are to blame, and when there are many people apart from students/teachers who are adversely affected by unregulated rents? To the reader who might still believe that raising the issue of rent regulation at the University level is perhaps what is immediately feasible for UCD, we have one question—has the life of the minority ever drastically changed without a transformation in the life of the majority? For example, can an individual educated woman today feel hundred percent secure and confident in a work space when the majority of women in society are still perceived as objects of sexual consumption and undeserving of career opportunities? Friends, the answer is no and experience has taught us that.
The question of the sectarian political approach of UCD was raised several times in the meetings. As argued by us in such meetings, issues and demands should really be raised in a way that they appeal to a larger section of people affected by the state’s inaction and its collusion with private business interests. In this way we connect concerns, struggles and militancy of different sections of people who are often segregated from each other due to the functioning of the system in place. For example, the student community and workers find themselves separated by work schedules, their class backgrounds, spatial settings/norms (in terms of workers being restricted to the space of factories/work sites and students to the space of their classrooms), etc. As a result we need a politics that paves the way for a combined struggle by the different oppressed sections of society. And it is only a combined struggle that can create an effective front of resistance to the onslaught of oppression and exploitation we are witness to. However, more than a generalized struggle against recent developments in the city, UCD’s initiatives are more sectarian than anything else. In fact, their particularized (University-CWG-centric) struggle is nothing but the substitution of the generalized working class struggle by ‘middle’ class intellectualism.
Mobilization of workers and strengthening of the working class movement is essential because in our society it is the working class that is in the majority. Its labour creates profit, rent and basically all the resources in society. Understandably then, if the working class fights back the whole system is paralyzed. Apart from the fact that it is the direct object of the most fundamental and determinative form of oppression and exploitation in capitalist society, the working class is the revolutionary class also because its interests do not rest on the oppression of other classes. In fact, precisely because its objective interest for its own emancipation is the destruction of class, it can create conditions for the liberation of all human beings in the struggle to liberate itself.
Thus, contrary to the middle class intellectual’s popular perception of the working class as just another identity asserted along with numerous other identities, the working class is actually a social positioning and not an identity. It is a position which is spread over different kinds of identities, and determines how and when the different identities will assert themselves. It is ultimately through the position of the working class that different identities can be united and radicalized into a wider anti-systemic struggle that goes beyond the form in which society exists. Realizing this, ‘old’ socialism has maintained the working class as its base and has constantly assessed the dynamics of the process of class in order to pursue its politics. ‘New’ socialism on the other hand, has made students/intellectuals their constituting base. In reality, however, students/intellectuals are divided amongst different class trajectories. To put it more accurately, students abstracted from their class position have come to be envisaged as agents of ‘new’ socialism. Indeed, ‘student radicalism’ which is actively promoted by ‘new’ socialism is a by-product of making students an identity devoid of class.
It is a fact that students who join universities like Delhi University (DU), are from different classes. The trend in DU is that students from working class backgrounds generally join the peripheral and evening colleges of DU. They are mostly youth who: a) have studied in government schools, b) come from the Hindi medium background, c) who do not usually get admission to college hostels considering their 12th class schooling, d) are those who really struggle to cope with rising college fees and English medium teaching/coursework. Students from petty bourgeois backgrounds are quite the opposite—a significant number of them have studied in respectable public schools, get admission to the best north and south campus colleges of DU, and are generally the first to get admission to the limited college hostels of DU.
As a result of this abstraction of students’ class backgrounds, forums such as UCD end up raising issues of students in a manner which isolates them from the issues of the working class. This reduces the possibilities of unity between the student community and the working class. To delineate this fact it is best to highlight the issue of rent regulation again. Rather than identifying rent as a problem affecting the student/teaching community as well as workers (most of whom live on rent near industrial belts in Delhi), UCD chose to raise the problem of rent only within the ambit of the University area, and demanded rent regulation from University authorities alone. By refusing to raise rent as a generalized concern of migrants in the city, UCD has simply encouraged the student community to see this as a problem specific to them. Having effaced the issue of class struggle in the immediate locality (the immediate locality being issues of working class youth/students/construction workers, etc. in the University), UCD now seeks to locate the working class and its struggle in a far off resettlement colony called Bhalaswa. Unfortunately, judging by recent email correspondences between UCD and students of the Women’s Development Cell (WDC) in Miranda House, the trips to Bhalaswa are being envisaged by the students more as extra-curricular activities. This indicates that UCD’s form of politics is really incapable of building a long-standing and formidable unity between the student community and working class. Its politics, in fact, inculcates within students a PHILANTHROPIC approach to working class issues, and little or no realization of the significance of class struggle for the transformation of our society. Instead of unity and combined struggle, UCD’s form of politics inculcates a perception/political tendency in the student movement to i) see the working class as a “mass of laboring poor” and not as a class which embodies itself even in the student constituency, ii) to perceive the issues of the working class as markedly different from those of students, and at most, only momentarily connected/’aligned’ with issues of students.
It is not only that the ‘new’ socialists deny the class background of the student community. They also, by denying students their varied class position, end up trying to mobilize only those who come from petty bourgeois backgrounds. As a result, organizations in UCD, such as New Socialist Initiative (NSI) are never seen raising issues of Dalit students who struggle to get admission in DU, of working class students who struggle to pay escalating college fees, or basically, any problem faced by students coming from government schools. In reality, for them, issues of those studying in peripheral/evening colleges or of those studying through correspondence/non-collegiate board are supposedly beyond the concerns of student activism. It is the issues of students studying in the big north campus colleges that are the central concerns of such organizations. For example, such organizations strictly function according to the University calendar. They will be active only during the actual academic session (i.e. between July and March when classes are on), and, will be mostly seen organizing seminars—these being a hot favorite of students from petty bourgeois backgrounds, who enjoy debating theories thrown at them in class. Furthermore, their campaigns in the University are centered on certain pet issues of students studying in a select few north campus colleges. These include protests against college hostel rules; night vigils/candle-marches to ‘take back the night’ or presumably to establish a ‘safe’ university campus somehow; etc. One wonders, how such campaigns actually address the concerns of the majority of students—many of whom do not stay on campus and are denied hostel admission due to the ‘lack of merit’.
Of course, when we as participants in UCD argued how necessary it was to mobilize the working class which is in the majority of those exploited in the name of development, grand events like CWG, etc., our point was noted. UCD posters soon began to carry slogans highlighting exploitation of workers, and as a gesture workers are now talked about in some of the UCD meetings. But the form in which workers’ issues are being raised by them is fundamentally paternalistic and patronizing. In a sympathetic mode the forum speaks of workers and other vulnerable sections of society, but no workers are part of the joint forum. Neither does the forum do anything to promote workers’ self-organization, nor does it participate in workers’ struggles. Making patronizing trips to resettlement colonies in the city, just so as to “investigate” and “report” the plight of slum dwellers, are more measures to appease angry activists in UCD and clear one’s conscience than to draw a formidable, active and organic link between the University community and the working class.
In fact, the recent trip to Bhalaswa was merely a gesture—a move to forge, in haste, some semblance of an alliance with the working class. No way does such a gesture promote self-organization by workers. In the case of Bhalaswa, UCD immediately began promoting a group working in the area, of whose politics they have little knowledge. In fact, in the interest of ‘alliance making’ they have refused to interrogate whether the group really represents the voice of the oppressed in Bhalaswa or is just another bourgeois oppositional group. Similarly, UCD has not taken on the responsibility of assessing, themselves, the actual class dynamics working in Bhalaswa. It is simply assumed that all those residing in resettlement colonies/slums like Bhalaswa belong to the same class composition, whereas the ground reality is more complex. Clearly, UCD’s form of politics, i.e. ‘alliance-making’ is highly problematic. This is because it simply absolves the forum of questioning the constitutive logic and politics of the organizations/groups it is allying with. It also absolves the forum of the responsibility of organizing those constituencies of people themselves. Thirdly, such form of politics leaves ample space for a lot of opportunistic maneuvering. In other words, the forum can move in and out of such alliances, depending on their own calculated interests. An important question arises here, what will happen to these alliances once the CWG are over? Well, expectedly, they will dissipate as quickly as they emerged. The analogy of a cinema hall is perhaps apt to explain this inevitability—just like everyone comes to watch a film in the theatre, cry/laugh together and then go their separate ways, most UCD groups/individuals will move on from the momentary ‘alliances’/joint initiatives they have made during the drama of CWG. A few of them, of course, will leave with plum NGO jobs in hand, and an ‘activist’ image that they can thrive on.
Hence, the point that we are trying to drive home is, that UCD can talk about workers and claim to be radical right through, whereas students/teachers continue to run the show while workers are merely expected to follow and indulge in experience-sharing. Workers’ issues then become just another ingredient to be added to cooking pot of resistance. Friends, the fact is that the forum’s form of intervention is limited to the university community responding on workers’ issues but doing nothing otherwise to help build workers’ self-organizations. Is it not true then that the University democrats finds workers’ issues “good” when they are OBJECTS of reform and concern but not when they are SUBJECTS of the struggle against the system? Here it is perhaps best to highlight the recent struggle of construction workers at the Miranda House CWG work site and UCD’s response—or rather lack of response to it. Friends, since the beginning of August construction workers and their trade union have been protesting against the Miranda House officials for non-payment of the workers’ long-standing dues and the violation of several labour laws. The same day that UCD began its “relay hunger strike”, workers down the road were protesting against their severe exploitation under various CWG construction projects. UCD failed to respond and join the struggle. The message, therefore, sent out was clear enough—we will participate only when we are in charge and not workers, and we will raise workers’ issues only as an addition to our never-ending list of “democratic” demands. Considering this, are not the issues of workers’ rights being raised in tokenism, i.e. only when it suits them?
Interestingly, some participants in the University Community for Democracy, who openly claim their “left” leanings, have unhesitatingly claimed in meetings that there is nothing wrong in particularizing the struggle since the University is their ambit of movement and sense of being. What we perhaps need to add here is the fact that when they are particularizing the struggle to the University, they particularize it even further by only raising issues of a select section of the University community. Such an approach defers the need to generalize issues of struggle, which is why people end up raising struggles in isolation. Such campaigns lose steam, credibility and relevance since they do not tap on certain organic links between their concerns and those of other affected sections in society. Of course, the aforementioned approach is nothing but opportunistic. By keeping the campaign University specific such participants aim for greater projection of themselves in the student community and media (which prefers to highlight University issues any day). By investing all their energy at the University level such participants seek a radical projection of themselves during DUSU elections, etc. This, beyond doubt, is a calculated move by many so called left intellectuals and groups in UCD. It is reflected in the larger party politics of such groups, and also in the double standards maintained vis-à-vis the entry of NGOs in the forum’s programs.
CPI(ML) Liberation, the parent party of AISA (a “left” student organization), in the interest of electoral victories has been allying with the RJD and sometimes with the JD(U). One moment it can be seen opposing the traitor Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) in Bengal, and the next moment it can be seen allying with the CPM in the Bihar Assembly elections! The same kind of double standards was replicated when we opposed the entry of NGOs in the protest meeting held on 30th July and AISA supported us, but then went on to invite the same NGO person to their own program against the Commonwealth Games on August 2, 2010! Needless to say, with elections round the corner crowd pulling tactics become more important. We know for a fact that there are reservations within AISA’s own cadre about participating in UCD, yet it continues in the forum for electoral gains.
It is very disturbing that NGOs which are bodies hugely funded by exploitative governments or by multinational corporations, are provided space on platforms of resistance against exploitation. The history of NGOs tells us that they are compromised bodies which sway on issues depending on the terms and conditions of the funding they receive. They have become a big employment recruitment network and that’s about it, for their work amongst people is channeled more towards ‘welfare’ than towards transformation of society. Instead of using its own agencies to provide for people, the state has been retreating from the social sector, leaving the space open for NGOs. NGOs simply use the limited funding released by governments and non-government organizations so as to absolve the state of its larger responsibilities. And to do this they unhesitatingly exploit a cheap labour force. For example, NGO workers (‘activists’) on the ground receive a meager salary compared to NGO employees in the higher echelons.
Interestingly, by arguing that NGO people are “well-versed” in issues/“are radical”, and by promoting them as speakers, UCD is actually creating a hierarchy of knowledge. And this hierarchy is nothing but a replication of capitalist division of labour in which intellect takes precedence over action/organization building, and the suave, Oxfam funded NGO spokesperson replaces the ‘not so articulate’ trade unionist/ political activist.
There are two more disturbing things to note about UCD’s campaign. One pertains to its search for an alternative accommodation for evicted students, and the other to its “free left” image. In its initial meetings, some UCD members pushed forward the search for an alternative accommodation. The first pamphlet printed by the UCD spoke of the need to build communes in places off campus. In fact, a team met with the management of a Gandhian trust (funded by Ministry of Social Justice) which ran a hostel near Kingsway Camp, called Gandhi Ashram. The place soon began to be promoted via e-mails etc. almost like any other private accommodation; the purpose being to provide a space for those still desperately looking for affordable accommodations and also to provide a space for regrouping when things got rough during the campaign. Ironically, the Gandhi Ashram hostel is meant for poor Dalit school students who were obviously going to be displaced if college students moved into the dormitories. No one seemed to reckon with this inevitability while the plan was still being hatched.
What we also found disturbing about the Gandhi Ashram plan was the desire of creating an isolated “democratic” space. The message being sent out was nothing but we can create our own isolated commune-like space in this big bad world. This approach stems from the sectarian University-centric politics of the UCD highlighted above, and also from a non-revolutionary conceptualization of commune life. For many participants in UCD, the commune with its base in Gandhi Ashram was an apparent ‘pre-figuration’ of a new society, whereas it was far from that. Commune was being envisaged as a centre of ‘counter-culture’—an oasis in capitalist wilderness. Interestingly, this is a very familiar trope—it is based, both at once, on a vision of a transformed society without real hope for a process of transformation. This is because it is based on the vision that the lives of a minority can magically change without transforming the whole. This is, after all, how (phantom) revolution itself, is envisaged according to the pipe-dreams (joint-dreams?) of petty bourgeois students/intellectuals who enjoy the comforts/security of generous remittances from home—‘let us, at least, as a small privileged community enjoy revolution making’.
Of course, as pointed out by us in the meetings, it was nothing but ridiculous that UCD spoke of building a commune in a place which was actually going to be charging the students Rs. 1500 per bed and where 6 to 8 women students would have to live per room. How can a commune work within a market structure, and how can a place which gives you no control on the rules and regulations to be implemented, become a progressive, commune-like accommodation?! Despite these criticisms, UCD went ahead and would have signed a MoU with the Gandhi Ashram management, if it wasn’t for the sheer lack of students interested in the place. In fact, just so as to get students to join the bandwagon, emails were sent out exaggerating the facilities available at Gandhi Ashram. In the interest of pulling a crowd, the green lawns of the Ashram were highlighted. Meanwhile, it was downplayed that no fooding would be available at the place and that this was going to be a dormitory system. Indeed, such concealment amounts to lying.
Lastly, as we would like to point out, it is a shame that the University Community for Democracy prides itself for its “Free Left” image. It is typical for such a forum to claim its steadfast commitment to ‘democratic issues’. However, in reality, their idea of democracy is based on the empty notion of dialogue and communication. Democracy is, unfortunately, abstracted from its link with socio-economic forces which is why it becomes more difficult to build a consistent anti-systemic movement. We see this problematic notion of democracy manifested in the very first pamphlet released by UCD. What was repeatedly highlighted in it, as a problem, was the fact that recent developments in the city as well as at the level of the University were not discussed before implementation.
Ironically, despite all their claims, most UCD participants stand for a façade of democracy and democratic functioning. For example, many emails and curt replies to questions raised in the meetings reflect the emerging dogma that only “pragmatic” things should be discussed in meetings (pragmatic issues being those that will help UCD attract more people). Thereby, it was constantly demanded that the ideological issues be shunned, and in a very undemocratic way, that is precisely what happened in meetings. The question is, what is it that UCD will do with the people who are immediately attracted to its campaign. Aren’t they supposed to work on these people and ideologically bring them closer to progressive politics? What does one read into this persistent impatience with ideological issues? Why do they behave as if the campaign is running against time? One can only presume that they want their whole show to be unfolded before CWG! In that case there is really no long term commitment to the issues being raised, and those that join the UCD campaign are just being perceived as faces/numbers to be posited against the Games, rather than thinking human beings who have the potential to link their immediate concerns with long term politics.
Furthermore, due to its “free left” image, we find that most UCD participants enjoy asserting their “individual” form of participation vis-à-vis an organizational one. As a result, UCD has succeeded in joining a lineage of platform and forum hopping so common to bodies that are dominated by individuals. The simple fact is platforms will be unsteady as long as “radical” individuals refuse to put their “radical-ness” to the test and bring themselves under the discipline and responsibility of organization/party structure. Left fronts and left organizations cannot make individuals their fighting force and leave untouched/un-mobilized the majority of those exploited, i.e. working class. After all, what is the best form of protesting against the Commonwealth Games? Is it not by organizing the large number of workers employed under CWG projects and mobilizing them to stop work at the numerous construction sites? Indeed, this is the most effective way of exposing the Games for what they are, and certain organizations and trade unions have been doing this since the very beginning of CWG construction work.
Having said this, it must begin to seem obvious somewhere to the reader why UCD has raised the issue of workers’ rights more in the spirit of opportunism. What else can be expected when there are group’s dominating UCD, such as New Socialist Initiative (NSI), that have no work amongst workers, i.e. no trade union to speak of, and basically do nothing to promote workers’ self-organization. In their book of strategy workers issues will always be raised so as to appear radical/cool in front of impressionable students than to actually organize workers. Their politics will, in fact, promote workers’ rights and NGOs in the same breath. It is a fact, that NSI has more presence in the NGO network than in the existing workers’ movement. This is because most of their members work for NGOs, and hence, have an objective interest in promoting them. This is why on the day of the protest meeting on 30th July NSI took additional effort to put together a program in Ramjas College, inviting a now well known NGO person. Of course, we didn’t see that kind of effort put in when it came to extending solidarity to the construction workers’ struggle in Miranda House College. The fact is that groups such as NSI have work only in the University and are inactive in any other constituencies of people, especially the working class. At a time when there is an uproar regarding the Commonwealth Games, their attempt to oppose the Commonwealth Games is doomed to be student-centric and University specific. And even when they do raise the issues of the university community it will be done so opportunistically, and the issues raised will be those that cater to a select section of the university community.
Friends, ask yourself—would you rather stand by opportunistic and sectarian politics that takes for granted the issues/concerns of the majority, or would you rather stand by the combined struggle of workers and students? Friends, it is high time we recognize that NGO-ised, petty-bourgeois dominated campaigns are more enemies than friends in the struggle for emancipation. It is time to stop doing the fashionable and to be seen doing the productive. It is time to play the role of the harsh critic and to organize a formidable combined struggle against the oppression and exploitation prevalent in our society.
JOIN THE STRUGGLE TO KEEP THE SPIRIT OF EQUALITY AND JUSTICE ALIVE! LONG LIVE REVOLUTION !!
CAMPAIGN FOR RENT REGULATION & MORE HOSTELS
A Joint Campaign of Centre For Struggling Women (CSW) and Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS)
Over many years Delhi has become a city of migrants. Students in search of a decent education and unemployed people in the desperate search for work have poured into the city in large numbers. The Government conveniently attributes the city’s growing crime rate, stress on resources, its ‘landscape degradation’, etc. to this movement of people. It adamantly refuses to acknowledge the fact that the condition city-dwellers find themselves in today is actually the creation of its own anti-people policies and the protection it provides to the landlord/rentier class in the city. To elaborate, the Government’s account of the challenges before the city clearly conceals the fact that the major crisis for city-dwellers, i.e. lack of housing and the need to pay high rents, is the result of landlords owning properties in excess and overcharging those who cannot afford their own housing. Precious little is done by the Government to check the excesses of these property owners in the city. Initiatives to collect property taxes are taken back almost as soon as they are launched and, pro-tenant clauses in the Delhi Rent Act are openly flouted.
The state’s collusion with landlords and the builder mafia is apparent in many ways. This is best reflected in a policy approach supportive of slum demolition, the lack of rent regulation, selling of government land at throw away prices to builders, little or no investment in the building of students’ hostels, highly priced government housing schemes (such as those introduced by the Delhi Development Authority), and in fact, the sheer lack of sufficient housing projects being launched by the government. Due to this undeniable nexus between the interests of the state and that of landlords, it is students and workers who suffer. Migrant labourers who come to the city are forced to live in sub-human conditions in slums or, to crowd into small rented rooms, paying most of their earnings as rents. Students coming from afar are also compelled to live on rent since most colleges in the city provide little or no hostel facilities. They too cut rent costs by sharing small rooms with each other—an atmosphere hardly conducive for study. In other words, the majority of students’ and workers’ monetary subsistence (money received from home and wages, respectively) is appropriated by landlords in the city.
It is important to note that the number of workers and students living on rent is no small number and that, it in fact, constitutes the majority of city dwellers. The magnitude of exploitation in this regard is hence, far from insignificant, and is extremely disturbing. Is this really what a city should be like—a place where most are either homeless or, are slum dwellers living in the constant fear of being ‘relocated’ (displaced), or are those forced to reside in private lodgings for high rents? It is time we locate the root cause behind the pathetic living conditions of students and workers in the city. This piece aims at providing a perspective that shows how things are connected and work to exclude the majority of people from resources and opportunities, and the right to a good healthy life. It is being circulated in the context of our launching a city-wide campaign for rent regulation and the provision of more hostel facility for students who come to study in the city. This Campaign, in fact, is part of ongoing struggles that CSW and KYS have been organizing in the past. These struggles have focused on the concerns of tenants, and basically, the most oppressed section of people working and living in the city. As a youth organization Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS) has extensive work in working class colonies across Delhi. It has collectivized women and youth of these working class areas on issues such as lack of water and electricity supply, the poor condition of government schools in these neighbourhoods, and the apathy of the local administration/police with respect to heinous crimes committed in such colonies. Similarly, Centre For Struggling Women (CSW) has been in the forefront in organizing militant struggles in the University of Delhi for basic infrastructure like hostels. Due to struggles launched by CSW in the recent past, prestigious colleges like St. Stephen’s have had to provide hostel facility to their women students. It is to be noted here that colleges like St. Stephen’s provided the hostel facility only to men students—something which encouraged many women students to give up taking admission in the college. Of course, with the extension of this facility to women students, the age-old chauvinistic culture that prevailed in the college was put to the challenge—in 2005 CSW’s member, Maya John, became the first woman President of the college. The current Campaign For Rent Regulation & More Hostels derives inspiration from CSW’s struggle to provide hostel for all and their earlier Campaign For More Girls’ Hostels, Safe Neighbourhoods And A Safe City.
We hope that what is argued below convinces all who read it, of the need for collective struggle. Indeed, it is only through collective struggle that we can actually expose and challenge the system in place.
WHY PEOPLE MIGRATE TO DELHI:
Why Students: The reason why students migrate to Delhi in large numbers is that there is an acute shortage of government funded universities in India. Those that exist are in a poor condition and fail to accommodate the ever growing number of students aspiring for higher education. The reason behind this shortage of government universities and the poor condition of those that do exist is the paucity of government funding. Investment in education is less than 3% of the GDP! Furthermore, educational policies of the Indian state have been geared towards commercialization and privatization of education. Successive central and state governments have, for example, unhesitatingly recognized private colleges/universities. As a result, private educational institutions have spread everywhere, outnumbering affordable government-run colleges/universities. By strengthening the presence of private colleges/universities vis-à-vis government ones, governments have made education so costly that it has become inaccessible to the majority of Indian people. As a result students flock to the handful of government colleges/universities located in cities like Delhi.
The poor investment in education by successive governments has also led to the deterioration of regional universities, and hence, encouraged the creation of centres of excellence like Delhi University, Jamia Milia Islamia and Jawaharlal Nehru University. It is only with balanced and inclusive development of different regions, that students will have well-established regional universities to study in. For this, of course, our governments need to spend more on education and the social sector as a whole.
A large number of educated youth also flock to Delhi in the hope of securing government jobs. The city is now “home” to many who crowd into small rooms just so that they can receive “coaching” for various competitive examinations. However, most of these youths are forced to go back empty handed after 5 to 6 years of such preparation, simply because there just aren’t enough government jobs to be had.
Why Workers: Unbalanced and non-inclusive development of different regions in the country has also affected employment opportunities of people drastically. In regions across India (Orissa, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Bihar, Bengal, Maharashtra, etc.) the Indian state rules in the interests of Indian and multinational companies that seek to plunder natural resources and to raise a cheap supply of labour from the ranks of displaced tribals, agrarian labourers and poor peasants. Government after government, in its collusion with private business interests has snatched agricultural land, forests and other resources from poor peasants and tribals. Half hearted attempts at land reform and the withdrawal of various agrarian subsidies have brought ruin upon poor peasants, pushing them to commit suicide or to join the ever increasing rank of agrarian labourers. Even in “well developed and rich” states like Gujarat, Delhi and Punjab, exploitation is rampant and, industrialization and corporate farming (the usual indices used to calculate such states’ development record) are based on the ruination of the most vulnerable sections of rural society.
On being denied their lands, rivers and forests, those displaced are compelled to turn to cities like Delhi where employment at construction sites, factories and sweatshops, restaurants/bars, etc. can be found. Needless to say, the wages earned are abominably low and are a cause of much distress.
HOW THE MAJORITY OF TENANTS LIVE IN THE CITY:
With their limited monetary resources, both students and workers compromise with their health and well being when taking up lodgings in Delhi. So as to pay the escalating rents students crowd into small rooms just so that they can share the rent with others. This uncomfortable living is complemented by poor fooding since most students try and survive the day on one or two meals alone. In such living conditions students find it difficult to concentrate and study properly—something which impacts their class performance greatly. One has only to visit places like Nehru Vihar, Gandhi Vihar, Christian Colony, Sangam Park, Gurmandi, Munirka, etc. to come face to face with students living like this. Of course, there are some students who take better places on rent but there too students face problems such as harassment by landlords/neighbours. Rents are arbitrarily increased and landlords get students to vacate suddenly on the pretext of something or the other.
For women students such private accommodations are even more precarious since landlords and male neighbours feel free to sexually harass them. This is why almost every woman student staying on rent has a horror story to narrate and feels vulnerable in such places. Some students, like those from the Northeast, are deliberately charged higher rents by landlords and, women northeast students are made victims of the worst incidents of sexual harassment. A very large number of students and youth in search of work come from places like the northeast. This migration clearly indicates the sheer lack of investment by the Indian state in these regions. Due to lopsided development in states like the Northeast, students are compelled to come to metropolitan cities like Delhi to study. Similarly, the paucity of jobs in these regions compels many to migrate in search of employment. For example, a large number of nurses who work in hospitals across Delhi come from the northeast states. Once here they earn a limited amount as salaries, most of which then goes to pay off rents.
The fact that a large number of students are compelled to live in off-campus housing is not only because a large number of them come to Delhi to study, but also because most colleges of Delhi University (D.U.) do not provide hostel facility. Shockingly, out of D.U.’s 76 colleges, only 11 provide hostels for outstation students! Considering this, most students who come to study in institutions like this can be found living in private accommodations. Affordable and comfortable hostel facility rather than being a fundamental right has become a privilege for which only a select few are eligible. It is worse for women students since they are denied hostel facility in many co-educational colleges which only provide this essential facility to their men students.
Just like students, workers who migrate to the city desperately search for affordable housing. Most end up living in slums where basic amenities like water and electricity are scarce. Safety and hygiene are a distant dream in such settlements since most of them have come up along the slopes of open drains and empty land beside the Municipality’s garbage dump-sites. These slums are either being pulled down by builders who want cheap land for their real estate business or, are burnt to ashes since fire fighting authorities take their own sweet time in reaching places where the poor reside.
Many workers also live in cramped accommodations in colonies near industrial belts of the city. Earning only between Rs. 2500 and Rs. 5000, they are forced to part with a large amount of their meager earnings as rent. What they pay for is a small room in which they and their five to six member family, resides. Needless to say, in these cramped conditions, discomfort breeds, tempers fly and unhappiness grows. Here too as tenants, workers and their families are devoid of basic facilities like water and electricity. It is a fact that in many such colonies, people are forced to queue up for water and the electricity supply is cut for nothing less than 6 to 10 hours a day. Undeniably, private power distributors in Delhi practice very selective load shedding, often choosing working class colonies over other posher areas. In working class colonies like Baljit Nagar where KYS has been extensively working, water reaches many houses every third day! In this regard KYS has spearheaded a militant struggle against the Delhi Jal Board Authorities as well as the water (tanker) mafia that operates in the locality. Similarly, in the same locality women’s lives were reduced to hell when rumour of a serial killer, i.e. Hammer-man, made its way into the public domain. Realizing the discontent and fear prevalent in the youth and women in the locality KYS carried out an investigative inquiry, following which it organized a huge protest outside the Delhi Police Headquarters. Through its inquiry the organization proved that rather than a serial killer on the loose, who attacked women and miraculously escaped the notice of other family members crowded into the small rooms/houses in Baljit Nagar, the assaults (and in two cases, murder) were actually incidents of domestic violence. As a result of the pressure applied on the Delhi Police, arrests of guilty family members began to be made shortly after.
Apart from high rents, workers and students’ problems are compounded by the poor condition in which the public transport system exists. With the acute shortage of Delhi Transport buses most of the time commuters are travelling in crowded buses, endlessly waiting for buses at stands/depots, etc. As a result, the travel to and fro from their workplaces/institutions to their homes is nothing short of a nightmare.
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS THAT HAVE MADE IT WORSE FOR TENANTS:
Recently, over the past two years as Delhi’s authorities have hurriedly prepared for the Commonwealth Games, conditions for tenants in the city have worsened. The preparation for the Games has, indeed, allowed the state to crack down on the most vulnerable sections of society. Construction workers, most of whom are migrants, are being overworked and underpaid at the various Commonwealth sites. The homeless, labourers, hawkers, and now students have had to pay the brunt for the massive construction work and subsequent redirecting of funds. Slums have been demolished and ‘relocated’ overnight, street vendors have been denied their rights, and now students too have been recently evicted from their college hostels in the wake of the Commonwealth Games!
The face of the Commonwealth Games is really less about the games, and more about the herding of poor people into ill-equipped resettlement colonies (in the hope of concealing the city’s poverty), cracking down on rickshaw-pullers and street vendors, evicting students from college hostels, and the brutal exploitation of cheap labour for the massive construction projects. It is time for introspection—when this country has little to boast of in terms of a mass sports culture, why should we sacrifice and celebrate these Games?! It is a fact that the same Indian state that is pouring funds into the Commonwealth Games’ fund, does little for its sporting community. So far governments have done little to build new stadiums and have invested precious little in the upkeep of existing sports infrastructure. New stadiums are built, old ones are renovated and Indian sportsmen are provided world class training only around certain “spectacular” events like the Asian Games some years ago and now on the occasion of the Commonwealth Games. In other words, a consistent and dedicated investment in sports is missing.
It is also a fact that till today sporting facilities are missing from the majority of government-run schools, killing the potential of so many young people to learn and specialize in sports. We find no sports centres in most colonies built by the government, especially JJ (Jhuggi-Jhopdi) colonies. The result of this is that only a select few (those who happen to study in good private schools or, live in posh localities that run sports clubs), indulge in sports. The majority of Indian youth learn to play in dry drains and the narrow streets of working class colonies. They cannot even dream of being professional sportsmen.
Of course, under the garb of the Commonwealth Games, landlords have hiked rents considerably. They had done so earlier too, when the Delhi Metro reached certain areas of the city. As expected, nothing was done then and nothing is being done now to control the fleecing of tenants. In its hurry to meet the deadlines of the Commonwealth Games, both the central and Delhi government have turned a blind eye to the growing problems of tenants. In fact, they have added massively themselves to the problems of workers and students by, consistently increasing the prices of essential commodities (pulses, vegetables, milk, petrol, diesel, electricity and even water) and taxes like V.A.T. By conveniently quoting the rising prices of water and electricity, landlords in the city have further dug into the pockets of workers and students living as tenants. They have also come up with disgusting practices like compelling their tenants to buy provisions from provision stores run by them in the locality!
On average rents have gone up two to three times this past few months. For students paying a rent of Rs. 3000, are now being charged an extra two to three thousand rupees. If they resist they are asked to vacate the accommodation. Realizing that students from colleges affiliated to D.U. have vacated their hostels temporarily, landlords have hiked rents, knowing there will be plenty of takers for their lodgings. Needless to say, these events are going to have long term repercussions for students even when the Commonwealth Games are over. The escalated rents are here to stay, as no PG is going to come down from a hiked rent of say Rs.8000 to Rs.5000, post the Games.
OUR APPEAL:
Since the problem of high rents, eviction, displacement etc. is a general one and affects not just one group of people in the city, it is important to address not a particular set of persons but the majority of city dwellers. Issues and demands should be raised in a way that they appeal to a larger section of people affected by the state’s inaction and its collusion with private business interests. In this way we connect concerns, struggles and militancy of different sections of people who are often segregated from each other due to the functioning of the system in place. For example, the student community and workers find themselves separated by work schedules, their class backgrounds, spatial settings/norms (in terms of workers being restricted to the space of factories and students to the space of their classrooms), etc. Of course, groups that can and should unite also find themselves segregated by wrong kinds of politics. By following initiatives that seek to particularize and defer the need to generalize issues of struggle, people come to raise struggles in isolation. Their militant campaigns lose steam, credibility and relevance since they did not tap on certain organic links between their concerns and those of other affected sections in society.
Hence, rather than particularizing the struggle against recent developments in the city, we must link up with connected concerns so as to expose how the “particular” (be it in terms of experiences, mobilization, etc.) is a false or exaggerated projection of the reality. The demand for rent regulation and affordable subsidized housing for all is a call that addresses all those living as tenants in the city. It is a potent cementing force in this regard. Of course, apart from raising common general demands, we must actively and consistently reach out to all those who are affected. Our action plans should include concrete mass mobilization of the different affected parties rather than mere information-gathering exercises, occasional meetings with them, etc. The latter is more patronizing in its approach to groups being reached out to. It cannot be our strategy to connect with the larger audience of people affected. Hence, the Campaign for Rent Regulation and More Hostels is working towards raising common concerns actively amongst different sections of people living as tenants in the city. We seek to encourage the student community in universities like D.U., not to raise the issue of rent, eviction, etc. within the limited sphere of the university alone, but also to become active participants in ongoing struggles raised by others faced with the same problem. We also aim at encouraging the student community to connect problems they face with larger questions of poor resource allocation, denial of opportunities by the system, etc. This is why we believe that demands such as provision of more hostels for students, housing for all, the removal of draconian economic policies like privatization of education and Special Economic Zones Act (2005), etc. are crucial for the Campaign. By raising these issues students are fighting the actual source of their exploitation and are strengthening the working class movement. Indeed, by supporting long standing demands/concerns arising from the working class movement, initiatives taken by students no longer remain sectarian (particularistic) in nature.
Friends, it is time we object and fight against people’s labour becoming someone else’s profit. By raising the issue of escalating rents we should realize that we are tapping on widespread social discontent. As tenants in the city, we, workers and students, cannot continue to watch our hard earned wages and limited monetary resources, line the pockets of greedy landlords in the city. It is time for collective struggle against landlords. We must realize that no longer can our individual battles with landlords bring us relief. We must step forward to give our individual struggles a collective form. It is only through collective struggle that we can pressurize the local government to administer its duties and regulate rents in the city as well as provide subsidized housing.
THE WAY AHEAD:
Indeed, our struggle against the rentier economy must not limit itself (in terms of ideas, visions and action) to certain immediate goals that are set. Our collective struggle must see this popular discontent and despair as stemming from the inequalities that capitalism breeds. Our fight is, hence, against a system that allows private business interests to control the economy and social life. The Campaign For Rent Regulation and More Hostels is just one of the forms our struggle against the system shall take. Through this particular struggle we must realize the significance and need for other larger struggles.
Of course, to fight a system we need a road map, and it is here we believe that the movement for socialism, both in the past and the present, will be our best guide and source of inspiration. This collective struggle by students and workers can draw much inspiration from socialist societies that built cities where homes were provided to all and where living spaces were redesigned so as to emancipate womankind from the burden of domestic chores (responsibilities that were earlier considered solely those of women). Socialist societies, despite several failures, have constantly endeavoured to provide the majority a home to live in and have developed community life in ways never imagined. In countries such as Cuba, the now dissolved USSR, etc. properties held in excess were confiscated and distributed to those who had lived as tenants for years as well as those who were homeless. Furthermore, socialist states invested heavily in construction of housing complexes, community/sporting/recreational centres, schools, colleges, hospitals, and entire cities—the driving force being the desire to accommodate the needs of all, as well as the desire to provide the majority the best of opportunities. It was in these very housing complexes built in socialist societies that individual kitchens (where women slaved away at back-breaking housework), were removed and community dining halls were created for each such housing complex. For certain segments of the society, such as students, endeavours were made to inculcate commune living and lifestyle.
We cannot create these progressive changes in our immediate social world but we can aspire for them and pave the way for their development and acceptance. For this we must begin to desire holistic and systemic change. We must realize that the actual resolution of the housing question lies within the struggle for and creation of a new socio-economic structure. In this light the Campaign For Rent Regulation and More Hostels is one step in that direction.
We Demand
• Rent Regulation by Delhi’s Rent Controller
• Provision of Hostel facility for students in every Delhi University college
• Funds allocated for renovation of existing hostels, be used for building larger capacity hostels.
• Construction of more working women’s hostels
• Provision of subsidized housing for all
• Institution of a judicial commission to inquire into the condition of tenants in Delhi
• Provision of more affordable public transport (U-specials, L-Specials, etc.)
• Public audit of the Commonwealth Games’ accounts
We Condemn
• Slum demolitions
• Hike in rents by landlords across the Delhi
• Eviction of current hostellers from college hostels
• Promotion of private accommodations
• The plunder of collective resources by private business houses.
• The anti-people policies of the Indian state
Down with eviction of students from College Hostels!
Onwards to students self-activity!!
The current administration of Delhi University has attempted to reshape the University through a series of sinister agendas – be it the introduction of semester system, the European Studies Programme or the biometric identification system. All of them have shared one thing in common: the thwarting of democratic debate on proposals for change, and the routine violation of regulatory protocols.
The latest episode has been the eviction of students (2,000 students according to reports) from a number of hostels in Delhi University in order to make them available for the Commonwealth Games. Hostels are being renovated and beautified for the officials and visitors of the Games, while students are scrambling around for their own accommodation. The students, like the 40,000 families on the Yamuna bank, are now among the many that have been displaced in the name of national glory. What comes into question is the fact that the University has agreed to avail of 20 crores of rupees from the Commonwealth Games project without taking any cognisance of how and where such resources are generated. It has thus become an accomplice in the larger process of reckless corporatisation that the whole city is undergoing in the bid of becoming a “global city”.
This has left students at the mercy of private accommodation, with its unregulated rents and precarious guarantees. Rents are rising in anticipation of the increased demand for PGs and flats, forcing many existing residents to move out and making accommodation unaffordable for incoming residents as well. The University has made no attempt to devise a mechanism to control or subsidise rents. The inflated prices that students pay are in effect the costs they bear for the cosmetic surgery DU is undergoing, and by extension, the hidden burden they carry for the Commonwealth Games. Some newspaper reports even indicate that hostel fees may increase after the hostels have been “upgraded”. Moreover, the lack of a viable and safe alternative has compelled many girls seeking admission in DU to rethink their decision. The University has also failed to consider living conditions around campus, especially from a gender-sensitive perspective. We can only begin to imagine what it must be like for those with physical disabilities to navigate around dug-up roads, unmarked holes and hazardous construction material.
The students are told that their eviction is “for their own good”. It is “for them” that the authorities are “improving student infrastructure”, making “world-class” hostels. Where was this concern for well-being when the college authorities took the decision to evict students? Not once was there any dialogue with students about this “upgradation”, or about the best and most suitable way to go about it. Instead, the whole decision-making process was shrouded in mystery, leading to utter chaos and confusion: while Hansraj made its hostel residents sign a bond last year declaring they had no objection to being evicted between July and October 2010, Miranda House students have still not been officially informed about the eviction!
We cannot allow the University to get away with such deliberate and avoidable irresponsibility. We make the following demands from the University:
• We demand the provision of alternate accommodation for evicted students.
• This accommodation should be at par with the hostels, both in terms of prices as well as qualitative conditions such as basic amenities and safety.
• We also demand, as conscientious members of a larger community, that this provision not be met at the cost of another section of society.
On our part, let us work towards creating another space, a commune perhaps, an imaginative and practical alternative that is self-governed by members of the university community, a cooperative living space that meets its own needs and conducts itself in a responsible and democratic fashion.
If you are angered by what you see around you in the University, and indeed, in the city, if you want to speak out against the shrinking of democratic space and are ready to reclaim what is rightfully yours, please come and join us!
We should not ask for the university to be destroyed, nor for it to be preserved. We should not ask for anything. We should ask ourselves and each other to take control of these universities, collectively, so that education can begin.
- From a flyer found in the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, originally written in the University of California
Since the massive student revolt in France, in 2006, against the Contrat Première Embauche (CPE), and the ‘anomalous wave’ in Italy in 2008, student protest has mounted in almost every part of the world, suggesting a reprise of the heady days of 1968. It reached a crescendo in the Fall and Winter of 2009 when campus strikes and occupations proliferated from California to Austria, Germany, Croatia, Switzerland and later the UK. The website Tinyurl.com/squatted-universities counted 168 universities (mostly in Europe) where actions took place between 20 October and the end of December 2009. And the surge is far from over. On 4 March, 2010 in the US, on the occasion of a nationwide day of action (the first since May 1970) called in defense of public education, one of the coordinating organisations listed 64 different campuses that saw some form of protest. (Defendeducation.org). On the same day, the South African Students’ Congress (SASCO) tried to close down nine universities calling for free university education. The protest at the University of Johannesburg proved to be the most contentious, with the police driving students away with water cannons from a burning barricade.
At the root of the most recent mobilisations are the budget cuts that governments and academic institutions have implemented in the wake of the Wall Street meltdown and the tuition hikes that have followed from them, up to 32 percent in the University of California system, and similar increases in some British universities. In this sense, the new student movement can be seen as the main organised response to the global financial crisis. Indeed, ‘We won’t pay for your crisis’ – the slogan of striking Italian students – has become an international battle cry. But the economic crisis has exacerbated a general dissatisfaction that has deeper sources, stemming from the neoliberal reform of education and the restructuring of production that have taken place over the last three decades, which have affected every aspect of student life throughout the world.(1)
The End of the Edu-Deal
The most outstanding elements of this restructuring have been the corporatisation of the university systems, and the commercialisation of education. ‘For profit’ universities are still a minority on the academic scene but the ‘becoming business’ of academe is well advanced especially in the US, where it dates back to the passing of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, that enabled universities to apply for patents for ‘discoveries’ made in their labs that companies would have to pay to use. Since then, the restructuring of academe as a money-making venture has proceeded unabated. The opening of university labs to private enterprise, the selling of knowledge on the world market (through online education and off-shore teaching), the precarisation of academic labour and introduction of constantly rising tuition fees forcing students to plunge ever further into debt, have become standard features of the US academic life, and with regional differences the same trends can now be registered worldwide.
In Europe, the struggle epitomising the new student movement has been against the ‘Bologna Process’, an EU project that institutes a European Higher Education Area, and promotes the circulation of labour within its territory through the homogenisation and standardisation of schooling programs and degrees. The Bologna Process unabashedly places the university at the service of business. It redefines education as the production of mobile and flexible workers, possessing the skills employers require; it centralises the creation of pedagogical standards, removes control from local actors, and devalues local knowledge and local concerns. Similar developments have been taking place in many university systems in Africa and Asia (like Taiwan, Singapore, Japan) that also are being ‘Americanized’ and standardised (for example, in Taiwan through the imposition of the Social Science Citation Index to evaluate professors) – so that global corporations can use Indian, Russian, South African or Brazilian, instead of US or EU ‘knowledge workers’, with the confidence that they are fit for the job.(2)
It is generally recognised that the commercialisation of the university system has partly been a response to the student struggles and social movements of the ’60s and ’70s, which marked the end of the education policy that had prevailed in the Keynesian era. As campus after campus, from Berkeley to Berlin, became the hotbed of an anti-authoritarian revolt, dispelling the Keynesian illusion that investment in college education would pay down the line in the form of an increase in the general productivity of work, the ideology of education as preparation to civic life and a public good had to be discarded.(3)
But the new neoliberal regime also represented the end of a class deal. With the elimination of stipends, allowances, and free tuition, the cost of ‘education’, i.e. the cost of preparing oneself for work, has been imposed squarely on the work-force, in what amounts to a massive wage-cut, that is particularly onerous considering that precarity has become the dominant work relation, and that, like any other commodity, the knowledge ‘bought’ is quickly devalued by technological innovation. It is also the end of the role of the state as mediator. In the corporatised university students now confront capital directly, in the crowded classrooms where teachers can hardly match names on the rosters with faces, in the expansion of adjunct teaching and, above all, in the mounting student debt which, by turning students into indentured servants to the banks and/or state, acts as a disciplinary mechanism on student life, also casting a long shadow on their future.
Still, through the 1990s, student enrollment continued to grow across the world under the pressure of an economic restructuring making education a condition for employment. It became a mantra, during the last two decades, from New York to Paris to Nairobi, to claim that with the rise of the ‘knowledge society’ and information revolution, cost what it may, college education is a ‘must’ (World Bank 2002). Statistics seemed to confirm the wisdom of climbing the education ladder, pointing to an 83 percent differential in the US between the wages of college graduates and those of workers with high school degrees. But the increase in enrollment and indebtedness must also be read as a form of struggle, a rejection of the restrictions imposed by the subjection of education to the logic of the market, a hidden form of appropriation, manifesting itself in time through the increase in the numbers of those defaulting on their loan repayments.
There is not doubt, in this context, that the global financial crisis of 2008 targets this strategy of resistance, removing, through budget cut backs, layoffs, and the massification of unemployment, the last remaining guarantees. Certainly the ‘edu-deal’, that promised higher wages and work satisfaction in exchange for workers and their families taking on the cost for higher education, is dissolving as well. In the crisis capital is reneging on this ‘deal’, certainly because of the proliferation of defaults and because capitalism today refuses any guarantees, such as the promise of high wages to future knowledge workers.
The university financial crisis (the tuition fee increases, budget cut backs, furloughs and lay-offs) is directly aimed at eliminating the wage guarantee that formal higher education was supposed to bring and at taming the ‘cognitariat’. As in the case of immigrant workers, the attack on the students does not signify that knowledge workers are not needed, but rather that they need to be further disciplined and proletarianised, through an attack on the power they have begun to claim partly because of their position in the process of accumulation.
Student rebellion is therefore deep-seated, with the prospect of debt slavery being compounded by a future of insecurity and a sense of alienation from an institution perceived to be mercenary and bureaucratic that, in the bargain, produces a commodity subject to rapid devaluation.
Demands or Occupations?
The student movement, however, faces a political problem, most evident in the US and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. The movement has two souls. On the one side, it demands free university education, reviving the dream of publicly financed ‘mass scholarity’, ostensibly proposing to return to the model of the Keynesian era. On the other, it is in revolt against the university itself, calling for a mass exit from it or aiming to transform the campus into a base for alternative knowledge production that is accessible to those outside its ‘walls’.(4)
This dichotomy, which some characterise as a return to the ‘reform versus revolution’ disputes of the past, has become most visible in the debate sparked off during the University of California strikes last year, over ‘demands’ versus ‘occupations’, which at times has taken an acrimonious tone, as these terms have become complex signifiers for hierarchies and identities, differential power relations, and consequences for risk taking.
The contrast is not purely ideological. It is rooted in the contradictions facing every antagonistic movement today. Economic restructuring has fragmented the workforce, deepened divisions and, not last, it has increased the effort and time required for daily reproduction. A student population holding two or three jobs is less prone to organise than its more affluent peers in the ’6os.
At the same time there is a sense, among many, that there is nothing more to negotiate, that demands have become superfluous since, for the majority of students, acquiring a certificate is no guarantee for the future which promises simply more precarity and constant self-recycling. Many students realise that capitalism has nothing to offer this generation, that no ‘new deal’ is possible, even in the metropolitan areas of the world, where most wealth is accumulated. Though there is a widespread temptation to revive it, the Keynesian interest group politics of making demands and ‘dealing’ is long dead.
Thus the slogan ‘occupy everything’ – building occupation being seen as a means of self-empowerment, the creation of spaces that students can control, a break in the flow of work and value through which the university expands its reach, and the production of a ‘counter-power’ prefigurative of the communalising relations students today want to construct.
It is hard to know how the ‘demands/occupation’ conflict within the student movement will be resolved. What is certain is that this is a major challenge the movement must overcome in order to increase in its power and its capacity to connect with other struggles. This will be a necessary step if the movement is to gain the power to reclaim education from the hands of the academic authorities and the state. As a next step there is presently much discussion about creating ‘knowledge commons’, in the sense of creating forms of autonomous knowledge production, not finalised or conditioned by the market and open to those outside the campus walls.
Meanwhile, as Edu-Notes has recognised,
already the student movement is creating a common of its own in the very process of the struggle. At the speed of light, news of the strikes, rallies, and occupations, have circulated around the world prompting a global electronic tam-tam of exchanged communiqués, slogans, messages of solidarity and support, resulting in an exceptional volume of images, documents, stories.(5)
Yet, the main ‘common’ the movement will have to construct is the extension of its mobilisation to other workers in the crisis. Key to this construction will be the issue of the debt that is the arch ‘anti-common’, since it is the transformation of collective surplus that could be used for the liberation of workers into a tool of their enslavement. Abolition of the student debt can be the connective tissue between the movement and the others struggling against foreclosures in the US and the larger movement against sovereign debt internationally.
George Caffentzis is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. Together with the collective, he has co-edited two books, Midnight Oil: Work Energy War 1973-1992 and Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles in the Fourth World War. Both were published by Autonomedia Press.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the students and faculty I recently interviewed from the University of California, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and Rhodes University in South Africa for sharing their knowledge. I also want to thank my comrades in the Edu-Notes group for their insights and inspiration.
Footnotes
(1) Edu-factory Collective, Towards a Global Autonomous University, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2009
(2) See, Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, Alidou, Ousseina, A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000, Richard Pithouse, Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006 and Arthur Hou-ming Huang, ‘Science as Ideology: SSCI, TSSCI and the Evaluation System of Social Sciences in Taiwan’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 10 2009, Number 2, pp. 282-291.
(3) George Caffentzis, ‘Throwing Away the Ladder: The Universities in the Crisis’, Zerowork I, 1975, pp. 128-142.
(4) After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California, 2010, Accessed at www.afterthefallcommuniques.info.
(5) Edu-Notes, ‘Introduction to Edu-Notes’, unpublished manuscript.
On 9th April, 2010, ‘JNU Forum against War on People’ organised a cultural programme titled ‘A Cultural Evening of Protest against Operation Green Hunt’ at Godavari Dhaba in JNU to oppose the sate-military offensive on tribals of Eastern and Central India. The programme included, as its pamphlet clearly states, a play called ‘Sadak’ written by Habib Tanvir, screening of documentary and songs, poetry, performances by students from JNU, Jamia and Delhi University. As soon as the programme started, a group of miscreants led by ABVP and NSUI leaders tried to disrupt the event by shouting slogans and abusing the organisers. Apprehending an attack on the performers, students present in the audience formed a human chain around the stage. However, the ABVP and NSUI hooligans broke this human chain forcefully, physically assaulting and injuring students, to clear their way to the stage. They disconnected the electricity, destroyed audio-visual equipments, vandalised the dais and beat-up anyone, who dared to come on their way. Number of students were injured in this attack and had to be taken to AIIMS for medical help. While ABVP-NSUI-YFE goons went on the rampage, the chief security officer of JNU, who was present at the spot, remained a mute spectator. The next day, when students were protesting against this incident, once again some ABVP-NSUI-YFE miscreants started pelting stones at the protesters and tore down the posters of ‘JNU Forum against War on People’.
In Delhi University we have seen similar attacks by fascist forces on students’ events as well. Two months ago, a mobile book store by ‘Janchetna’ was attacked by ABVP hooligans, where they tore books and damaged the van before students came out in numbers in protection of their own space. It is evident from these incidents that the fascist forces are afraid of any kind of pro people programme. They want to rob our democratic spaces by force. They want to silence any voice, which raises question on people’s misery, state repression and dismantling of democracy.
The JNU administration, instead of taking steps against these lumpens, is trying to propagate all sorts of misinformation about the incident. First, the administration raised the issue of prior permission for holding a meeting, knowing fully well that the cultural programme was hold at a ‘dhaba’ and there is no provision for and precedence of administrative permission for such events. We have experienced similar selective administrative harassment in Delhi University as well. It has become a standard practice of the university administration not to clamp down on the perpetrators of such incident. Instead these incidents have been used as an excuse to snatch away the remaining limited democratic space through official-legal measures. JNU administration has gone a step farther on this occasion by joining the ABVP-BJP-NSUI- YFE chorus of branding the event as an ‘anti-national’ protest. It is perhaps a cruel joke (and indeed a fascist strategy) that the architects of Operation Green Hunt, which has resulted in loss of life and livelihoods of millions of people, are claiming to be ‘patriots’ today!
Worldwide, universities have traditionally been a crucial space for freedom of expression, the exploration of ideas and critical debate. They have always been, and should always be, sites where even the strongest critique of the state can be – in fact, must and should be – made possible. This is an essential character, not just of the university as an institution, but of the democratic principles of the society it exists in. The JNU incident, once again, reveals the systematic way in which the democratic spaces are taken away by a nexus of fascist goons and the university administration.
We, ‘Campaign against War on People’, a community of students and teachers of Delhi University, unequivocally condemn ABVP-NSUI-YFE for the attack. We also condemn the JNU administration for their vicious propaganda campaign and for failing to take steps against the miscreants. We demand the following measures be taken immediately
1) Disciplinary actions must be taken against these goons, who are destroying the democratic fabric of our universities.
2) JNU administration must apologise for their misinformation campaign.
Is the semester system good or bad? If we say it is bad then why do we say so? I would say, and many might concur that privatization of the educational sector is also bad. Why do we say that? In the final session, we will discuss ‘politics in the university;’ why do we need a politics at all here? To begin to answer any such questions a more fundamental question needs to be addressed. What is the university and what do we do here?
The university is a workplace, where students, teachers and the karmcharis work. What is work about? It is about production – human beings are creative, and we create in our workplace. As creative beings we find fulfilment in what we create; what we create is an extension of ourselves, through which we reach out to others who are also part of society. In the university knowledge is produced; we study, teach, research and discuss. As creative beings involved in the production/creation of knowledge it is through the knowledge we produce that we put forth ourselves, our identities to the world. To truly find fulfilment, to be happy in other words, we would like to determine what we create, how we create and with what we create; this holds equally for teaching, learning, researching and by extension discussing. Although some could argue that the work place, in this case the university is not that important a site in our lives, home is more important. But honestly, we spend so much of our time and energy here, that it would be foolish to argue that it has no bearing on our happiness; some amount of thinking should make this seem self-evident. So then assuming that for happiness it is necessary for this space in its capacity as a workplace be fulfilling, we can contend that: it is important for us to have a say in the decisions that determine its running. So if new changes are being imposed into its structure, we as the people who work here, and to whom by extension this place belongs, have the right to not accept these changes, and even to remodel older structures. What determines our likes and dislikes is the ability or inability of these structures to gives us space for the fulfilment of our creativity.
In this framework of ‘those who work’ in the university, students are an uncomfortable fit. When the teachers view them, or the administration, the students are either consumers or products. They are paying for a commodity, education, which they should get – so if teachers go on strike, they break the producer-consumer pact. Or it is the task of the teachers to prepare students for the market, so if they go on strike, they are hindering production. When individuals situated in the university, as subjects, look at the university, they see that while for those who “work” here it is the permanent site of labour, for the majority of the students, it fails to have any connotations of finality. Studenthood is a temporary state, a purgatorial interlude that precedes entry into the heaven of work and salaries. When one tries to “politicize” this space, one of the main problems one faces is that students do not feel that they have much to gain by its improvement – “I’m here only for one more year.”
A substantial number of professors have been cribbing about the semester system, but there is not much they can do. They are afraid to go on strike, because they themselves feel that by hindering production and by breaking the consumer pact they will be ‘harming careers’ and might bring the wrath of the ministry on them. On there own, they cannot stop these developments. They need to communicate with the students, establish a bond altogether different from the pedagogic one that exists right now. They need to be able to think about students differently, students as part of the same continuum as they, working in the university, desiring fulfilment, affected by what affects the teachers. In a system where value is eternally deferred, the formal manifestation being exchange value, even when they start getting salaries they don’t get fulfilment. What is common to the time when they will get salaries and now, is that in both realms they labour, work, make use of their creativity, and in circumstances that they do not determine.
If I were to translate ‘creativity’ in the register that agitational politics usually makes use of: it is nothing but our capacity and need to labour. Understanding creativity like this would allow us to elaborate upon the nature of the said continuum. When Marx says ‘working class,’ does he mean only the ‘male, white, industrial proletariat?’ Maybe. But what was the logic behind designating somebody a worker? The working class is that section of the people on which work is imposed; the people who are alienated from their creativity, who are forced to create in circumstances that they do not want to create in, and who as a result will have to fight to be able to determine these circumstances. There was another concept, that Marx often made use of: the collective worker. The collective worker is this continuum, a continuum beyond localized time or space, of the working class subjectivity. The collective worker is a universal, common to all those on whom work is imposed. Work is imposed on the collective worker: the collective worker is made of various people on whom work is imposed in various ways; in a different way in the factory, in a different way in agriculture, in a different way in the university, in a different way in the household. So work is imposed on the professor in one way. We propose that work is imposed on the student in another. Studenthood is a phase in the life of this ‘collective worker.’ It doesn’t matter if some students come from rich households, if some will go on to become factory owners, or vice chancellors, at the moment of studenthood they are part of the collective worker. Professors and students are part of the same continuum. They together occupy the university, and in fighting for self-determination they are essentially on the same side. So in opposition to the student as a consumer, and the student as a product, is the student as worker. That the student does not create ‘value’ does not matter, because capitalism decides what is valuable and what is not: but this does not change the fact that work is imposed upon the student.
Anyhow, we need self-determination for happiness, and for self-determination we have to fight. The tribal in Chhattisgarh might need to fight the police, multinationals, and the armed forces for self-determination, the factory worker will need to fight the factory owner, we have to fight the administration, the vice chancellor for instance. If students, teachers and Karamcharis work in the university, what right has any random person to determine what will happen here? The Vice Chancellor and his pals are not elected representatives; they come in through mechanisms in which we have no say. Today we might be fighting the semester system, or the service regulations, or against the attendance rule, fee-hike or for timely payment of karamchari salaries, but we also need to fight the arbitrariness with which these problems impose themselves upon us. It is not enough to say that the vice-chancellor should not bring in the semester system, we have to ask why the vice-chancellor should do anything at all? If there has to be an administrative body, then we should elect it, and have the power of immediate recall, if what we don’t want to happen happens. Of course all this is a long way off, but are we even ready to think our problems through? If we don’t push further than questioning a move here or a move there, we should know that till there is an administration, such things will happen.
What about political students’ organizations: essentially left organizations. How do they see the university and the students? They too seem to not think of the university as a valid site for struggle. For them it seems, the struggle is always somewhere else: in the forest, or in the factory or in slums? Of course it is there. It needs to be fought there. But it is also here. And it needs to be fought here as well. The university is not a place where activists are to be made to go and fight elsewhere. Unless we bring the struggle home, fight the particular forms of power that we face, transformation can never happen. I don’t intend to be vituperative; these are not charges. It is just an appeal to rethink the aims of struggle in the university.
Someone could ask, ‘what if we do get this right to determine what happens here? What if we are allowed to elect our own administration? Does this mean our problems are over?’ No, of course not. If we struggle merely for power to regulate, it won’t take us anywhere. Once we gain it, instead of the current administration some of us will be mediating between the market and the university. The outside, which will continue to be a problem, arbitrary, based on the idea of profit, not human happiness, will still determine us. Self-determination will not be complete in this localized fashion. Our demand for self-determination at a local level can only be tactical, not the final end. People everywhere face the problem that we face here, in different forms, in different degrees; but essentially the same. True self-determination, true democracy can only come when the structure that centres this dynamic is destroyed. People struggling in their respective circumstances, for self-determination, will finally need to come together to push the struggle to its culmination. But this is a somewhat larger matter. We start with what we face, with the local structure through which power tries to determine our lives. In the process we will of course, as Laclau would say, solve a number of small problems, make our lives in the university a little better, bring a greater degree of democracy here, but we must keep in mind that these small things are not the end, because the end is that which seems impossible right now; this impossible can be made possible, through an act which will retroactively make its own impossibility the condition of its possibility, shifting the horizon of possibility altogether.
DATE: March 4, 2010
VENUE: Hindu College, Delhi University
Session 1 (11 am to 12: 15 pm) – Academics, Politics and the University
Chair : Sunil Dua
[Department of English, Hindu College]
Speaker 1: Pothik Ghosh ………………………………………..11 AM to 11. 20 AM
[Editor, Radical Notes (radicalnotes.com)]
Speaker 2: Abhijeet Phartiyal…………….…………………..11. 20 AM to 11. 40 AM
[Correspondence (Group)]
Chair’s comment and Discussion…………………………….11. 40 AM to 12. 15 PM
Tea Break……………………………………………………….12.15 PM to 12. 30 PM
Session 2 (12: 30 PM to 1: 45 PM) – Deconstructing the “semester system”
Chair : P. K. Vijayan
[Department of English, Hindu College]
Speaker 1: Harriet Raghunathan …….…………………………12:30 PM to 12: 50 PM
[Department of English, Jesus and Mary College]
Speaker 2: Shomojeet Bhattacharya.…………………………..12: 50 PM to 1. 10 PM
[Department of Economics, Kirorimal College]
Chair’s comment and Discussion……………………………….1. 10 PM to 1. 45 PM
Lunch Break……………………………………………………….1.45 PM to 2. 15 PM
Session 3 (2: 15 PM to 3: 30 PM) – Education in the Era of Late Capitalism
Chair : Neshat Qaiser
[Department of Sociology, Jamia Milia Islamia University]
Speaker 1: Malay Firoz ……………………………………..…..2: 15 PM to 2: 35 PM
[Department of Sociology, Delhi University]
Speaker 2: Ravi Kumar……………………………………..…..2: 35 PM to 2: 55 PM
[Department of Sociology, Jamia Milia Islamia University]
Chair’s comment and Discussion……………………….……….2: 55 PM to 3. 30 PM
Tea Break………………………………………………..……….3: 30 PM to 3: 45 PM
Session 4 (3: 45 PM to 5: 45 PM) – Rethinking Politics in the University
Chair : Paresh Chandra
[Correspondence (Group)]
Speaker 1: Delegate from Disha Students’ Organization
Speaker 2: Delegate from Students’ Federation of India
Speaker 3: Delegate from New Socialist Initiative
Speaker 4: Delegate from All India Students’ Association
There is mass unemployment among India’s graduates. What can be done for them?
In 2005 I spent time with a student named Rajesh in Meerut College, in Uttar Pradesh. Rajesh was in his early 30s and had been studying in Meerut for 13 years. Like many long-time students there, he described himself as “unemployed”, someone “just waiting”.
There are many like Rajesh in Meerut and across northern India. Behind the image of tech-savvy IT specialists in India lies a dispiriting picture common throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America: a multitude of educated but unemployed young men.
The sources of this problem are not difficult to identify: rising education rates have led to higher aspirations around the world. At the same time, governments have often cut the public sector jobs upon which educated people formerly depended. The result in numerous places has been the “overproduction” of educated people: the “men hanging out on the street” that seem to feature in so many travel accounts and contemporary anthropologies of poorer countries.
Over the past 15 years I have been doing research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council on the problem of educated unemployment in Uttar Pradesh, whose 190m people make it India’s most populous state. Many parents in Uttar Pradesh are able to finance school and university education for their children. But these graduates find it impossible to obtain salaried jobs.
The sheer scale of the problem of youth unemployment is staggering. There are regularly more than 10,000 applicants for a single government post in Meerut. Students there tell me that to get a job it is now necessary to possess “source” (social connections) and “force” (the money for bribes).
Students’ anger is compounded by their fury at educational decay. Lack of investment in higher education and widespread corruption in many universities has undermined the value of students’ degrees. Things came to a head in 2006 when it emerged that, as an economy measure, the registrar of a prominent university in Meerut had been sending masters theses to be marked by school pupils, some allegedly as young as eight. When students discovered what had happened, they came into the streets to burn their degrees.
Some young people in Meerut give up on the search for salaried work and return to farming or manual labour. There are MAs, even PhDs, working in the fields of Uttar Pradesh. But like Rajesh, many students respond to unemployment by simply remaining in education, collecting degrees, and hoping that their luck will change.
What are the social and political implications of this mass unemployment? At the family level, the impact is marked. Those unsuccessful in finding decent, permanent jobs often face parents who resent scrimping and saving for their sons’ education. Parents often complain about the sacrifices they made to educate their children. Moreover, young women sometimes work in the field to keep their brothers in college – and this has led to many tensions between siblings.
What of political unrest? Commentators in the past have tended to imagine these men as either politically apathetic or violent threats to civilised society. My research – which involved years of interviewing and hanging out with young men – has tried to move beyond these stereotypes. To be sure, some unemployed young men have been involved in violence, such as the Hindu/Muslim riots and pogroms that erupted in India in the early 1990s. But the reality may be more mundane. Jobless young men have adopted one of two strategies in contemporary Uttar Pradesh. Some use their free time and skills to advocate on behalf of the poor. There are many such “social reformers” in Meerut, who often voice critiques of the Indian state, but tend to avoid violence.
A second group work as political entrepreneurs at the local level: they call themselves “fixers”. These men traded on their knowledge of how politics works at the local level, to sell places in private universities, extract bribes from government officials, or steer contracts towards favoured businessmen. These men do use violence and their actions encourage the further proliferation of corruption in Uttar Pradesh.
Mass unemployment among the educated in India may have contradictory implications. On the one hand, it may lead to the emergence of a set of people who can play key development roles in the countryside and small towns. These bright young “social reformers” are keen to find outlets for their zeal. On the other hand, there are many young men whose joblessness has provoked aggressive individualism and an “anyhow” mentality when it comes to making money. The Indian government and international organisations need to get much better at enrolling the first group into processes of planned development, and persuading the second group to redirect their energy in more positive directions.
The time is also ripe for a broader discussion of mass unemployment among educated young people across the world. What do they have in common? How do their responses differ? How might governments and others address the problem? The answers to these questions are likely to reveal a great deal not only about youth the world over, but about the chance of progressive social change in places like India.
A public meeting was organised by Campaign Against War on People in The Faculty of Arts, North Campus, DU on the 13th November. In spite of BJP’s Delhi Bandh call, and DUSU’s call for a University Bandh, slight rain, and posters for the event having been mysteriously torn up, over a hundred and fifty people attended the meeting. Representatives from many organisations including PUDR, AISA, Disha, DSU, Jan Hastakshep, Correspondence, JNU Forum Against War on People and NSI addressed the gathering. The group also launched its signature campaign against the state’s offensive addressed to the Prime Minister, which will be circulated in the university during the next few weeks. The event also included musical performances. Videos of the event will be put up soon.
Today is the time of economic crisis. All national and multinational companies are feeling the effect, especially, the workers in them. Millions of workers have lost their jobs throughout the globe. This is not the first time that the workers are facing such problems. Several times in the last century similar problems have been created for workers. In the beginning of this century, after the 9/11 attacks, there was a similar period. Production of workers, i.e., students coming out of universities have outnumbered, by more than a hundred times, the intake capacities of companies. The only solution that has been offered is competition. Study hard… compete and get better appropriated than your fellow mates. There can be just one solution – the “better” students/workers, i.e., those who are compliant to the bosses’ interests and demands, will get or sustain their jobs; and, in that case there will be a growing brigade of unemployed and underemployed (underpaid, casual and temporary) workers, still expecting and competing to get accommodated. All this is because something needs to be sustained in the companies, namely, high profits. That can’t be compromised or shared with workers!!!
Some of us are over-optimistic about getting out with an MBA degree and joining some company in a highly paid managerial post. This section needs to realise that the intake capacity with regard to these posts in companies is much more restricted than that of workers proper. They share the same fate in a much larger magnitude. When there is a reduction in the number of workers, managers who “manage” them will be more and more redundant.
In this process of profit realisation, the sufferer is the student and/or the worker community. They compete and struggle amongst and against each other, weakening themselves ‘as a whole’.
It is high time for this community to get organized and cooperate in their struggle for liberation, rather than compete against each other. It is high time for them to ask themselves what they have lost in the process of competition and assess the magnitude of what they are going to lose if they continue competing blindly. It is high time they get organized and ask the big bosses of companies and the governments as to why ‘we’ have to lead a life of subjugation so that the profit is maintained. It is high time for them to choose between this alternative path of questioning the present state of affairs and the path of blind competition.
Science-Technology-Students’-Workers’ Union (STSWU) is an organization that provides this alternative platform to students and workers to meet the challenges of their class – locally, nationally and internationally.
