Left?s narrow-mindedness coupled with its monopolizing tendency is at the root of repeated acts of violence in JNU

Here are some basic facts one must know before commenting on the JNU. First of all, it should be understood that JNU has 8000 students, out of which only 1000 students are active in leftist organizations and about an additional 1000 students support them in elections. These figures can be easily deciphered from the election trends in JNU. Except of these 2000 students, the remaining 6000 students are non-leftist. That is, about 75% of the students do not support the Left. A good number of these students do openly support the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, which is the largest single organization on campus. All the Leftist organizations contest elections by forming a common coalition against ABVP. Given the scenario, if a leftist uses the JNU as a platform to speak against the nation and its culture, it can’t be considered as the view of the whole of the JNU. And by the application of same logic, all those who criticize such anti-national views can’t be considered detractors of JNU. Those who are criticizing the leftists organizations and their people for doing destructive politics by abusing JNU as a platform, they are certainly criticizing the leftists only and not the JNU. It is important to understand this distinction clearly because the leftist organizations are very skillfully trying to show their criticism as the criticism of JNU.

Secondly, the criticism of Left’s politics being administered from JNU is not a criticism of JNU, the JNU is not the private property of the Left. It is a public university established on the land of the country by the Government of India with the taxpayer’s money. The JNU’s reputation of being one of the best institutions in the country has been made possible by students of all classes, regions and ideologies. No organization or ideology can claim that they have single-handedly worked hard to achieve this reputation. In order to maintain this reputation, thousands of students are still willing to study and research in JNU day and night. But they were forcefully prevented by the Left cadres from going to class and from giving their exams. And now it is established evidently that they used violence to stop the students from registering for the new semester. Leftists could do all these acts because they consider the entire university as their personal property, possibly due to their long dominance in the politics of JNU.

The third point is concerned with the philosophy behind the Left’s ideology. Communism can’t tolerate disagreements and presence of other ideologies by its very design. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Leftists consider JNU as an ‘inviolable republic’ of their ideological monopoly. Prof. Bhagwan Josh from JNU is considered an expert on Communist movement in India. Prof. Josh established through his work that the Left organizations are structurally incapable of giving place to disagreements, because the Left works only by considering its ideology as the ultimate truth, and all those who do not believe in its ideology are often considered as the ‘un-enlightened’ ones or less intelligent ones and sometimes even fascists.

According to Prof. Josh, a Leftist organization is structurally like a unicellular organism called amoeba. Just as an amoeba can have only one nucleus, similarly a left wing organization can have only one interpretation of its ideology. As soon as the second nucleus develops from the nucleus in the amoeba, immediately the amoeba itself gets torn apart, but never lets two nuclei remain together in a single amoeba body. In the same way, leftist organizations also break up after disagreements arise within themselves. For this reason, there are more than a dozen of Leftist organizations only within the walled campus of JNU. All of these organizations together target people who do not believe in Left’s ideology.

Human history cannot forget the massacres perpetrated by Leftists in Soviet Russia, China, Eastern Europe and Latin America to suppress disagreements. In India, the level of political violence is unnaturally very high in those states where the Left has been dominant in politics. In Kerala, Bengal and Tripura, the tradition of killing the activists of nationalists organizations is a gift of the Communist brand of politics. The Leftists, who had occupied the academia in India after entering into political compromises with Indira Gandhi’s Congress in the 1960s, have unethically ruled over the Indian academic space. They have used Universities instrumentally to play their politics when the need arises.

The leftists of JNU see this university as a metaphorical tree which was planted for them. Therefore, they believe that they have an exclusive right over its shade. Only they can eat the fruits of it, and whenever they desire they can climb this tree to shoot arrows that would injure the unity of the country. After committing all the immoral acts, the leftists also want to use this tree for themselves as a cover to shelter them. Left making all these expectations from JNU appears more dull when we see that they are not allowing JNU to run as an educational institution. For the last two months, Left has been proving that they are against the JNU. They closed all the classes of JNU with sheer muscle power, they disrupted the examination and now they resorted to violence to stop registration. The students from remote villages and towns of the country come to study in JNU and fulfill the dreams of their family, by denying them the right to register, the Left also proved that they are against education and research.

JNU also witnessed violence in years- 1974, 1981, 1983, 1996, 2000,2005, 2010, 2013 and 2016 due to left’s dogmatic nature . The violence of 1983 is particularly notable. JNU leftists attacked the residence of the then Vice Chancellor P.N Srivastava and looted his savings of 35 years. The Left, blinded by its monopolizing tendency created so much violence in JNU that Indira Gandhi’s government had to shut down the university for a year and it had to forcefully vacate the hostels and deploy CRPF in the campus. Interestingly, it was Indira Gandhi, who had established this university after her father’s name in 1969 as a quid pro quo for political and intellectual support she started receiving from the Left. She was given full political patronage to Left in establishing their stranglehold on academia in general and JNU in particular . Enjoying the privileges of that arrangement since 1960s,the Leftists are spreading anarchy and violence by using their immorally obtained domination in higher education. They are using a group of students of JNU and Jadavpur University a pawn in the game of their ideological agenda. Since the leftist command over the media sector is also equally healthy, they do not take much time to spread their propaganda.

The leftists see JNU as their fiefdom. When Left starts losing its grip on the JNU’s student community, they fall back to their default reaction i.e. violence. In the recent episode, they have beaten the students who went to register themselves for the next semester despite the strict prohibition orders issued by Left.

The Left believes that the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, an organization of nationalist thinking students is its principal enemy. The idea of ​​Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad emerges from the philosophy of this land which does not consider anyone as the ‘other’.It doesn’t consider anyone as an enemy. Neither does it wish to harm anyone nor does it wish to eliminate anyone. This organization never works in reaction to anyone. Taking everyone together and inculcating the sense that- ‘we are one’ – is the working principle of ABVP. The aim of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad is to bring together all the people associated with the field of education and facilitate them to contribute freely for the society and the nation.

The philosophy of the Left does not accept diversity. For the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, diversity is the natural result of unadulterated manifestations of human thoughts and actions, which is an essential for creativity. Diversity is necessary for the development of the JNU in which natural expressions of the students have been suppressed so far by using political methods and propaganda. Therefore, the left has to give space to all. Left’s chanting of the slogans like- ‘JNU laal tha, laal hai, laal hi rahega’ (JNU was red, it is red and it will remain Left always) does reflect acceptance of disagreement and diversity. The Leftists must remember that – In order to be a part of the diversity, one has to accept the diversity first.