A day after students and teachers from JNU were joined by students and teachers from different universities in the city, made a historic walk on foot from JNU towards the Parliament, students across the United States took part in a demonstration, The March For Our Lives, in Washington D.C., to demand an end to gun violence.
I know of this protest, and the sheer numbers in which people joined in, only because I was flooded with notifications from every international media channel I follow online. Sitting in my hostel room, I had access to live streams from a march that no one I knew personally participated in, simply because there were correspondents from news networks like the BBC and The New York Times on the ground covering that march. Now imagine being able to follow a live stream (by a popular news network) of student protests that happen in this country without being subjected to sensationalised commentaries in the background by excited newscasters, being able to see things as they are and as they turn out. Can you?
I have been a student of DU before I joined JNU as an MA student last year. In my three years at DU, there have been quite a few protest marches I have participated in, and each time was marked by the conspicuous absence of mainstream media channels to cover those marches from start to finish (barring a couple of channels like NDTV, which did so only to be marked out as “commies” and “naxal sympathisers” by the general public), much less report live from the ground and give their viewers an informed account of what the students were protesting against and why.
When we left campus, in lines of two, on Friday for the ‘Long March to Parliament’ on Friday, not one mainstream media channel was present there. But they were surely there to run programmes with headlines like “students protest for ‘right to bunk'”, the moment things were made to turn violent, filming from angles that serve their narrative, safely perched behind the police, and the water cannons, some of which used murky sewage water on the protesting students.
One finds no records of the sheer number of students that took to the streets on March 23, in one of the most well-organised marches till date. You will not find photos in newspapers of peaceful demonstrators covering the almost 2.5 km stretch of Africa Avenue end to end, you will not be able to see that incredible sight or hear the roads echoing with the slogans, songs, and cheers in a march that did not hold up traffic, where we stuck to one half of the road, letting cars pass by. You will not be able to experience the energy in the streets where we engaged with people on the road, the passers-by and the children, people coming out of their cars and actually being interested in what we had to say, being wanted to be handed ‘parchas’ that volunteers had been distributing the entire while.
What you will find record of in public media accounts is protesters trying to breach barricades put up by the police near the Sanjay Jheel area, more so when we had explicit permission to walk on till the Parliament. You will see Congress MPs and Communist Party leaders coming and talking to us when we refused to move out from there till the time the students who were unlawfully detained by the police, were released, simply because it suits the narrative they have maintained so far.
But you will still not find records of the police lathi-charging on these very students, unprovoked, or dragging one of the auto-drivers who accompanied us out of his auto and thrashing him mercilessly on the street. Nor are there any records of the police beating up students, male police officers assaulting female students, tearing their clothes off, or the police forcing the students they detained, to pose for mugshots at the police station.
Hindustan Times ran an article the following day where it focused on how journalists got injured despite the police maintaining that they did not resort to lathi charge, and how Brinda Karat was present at the march, with the clear implication that it was a politically coloured march with a huge involvement from the left.
The Indian media’s insistence on projecting everything that takes place in JNU in terms of party dynamics gives the administration (and the government by extension) just another excuse to discredit all legitimate complaints and grievances. It keeps on invoking images of Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid, from videos that have since then proven to have been doctored, maintaining that the “few” protesting students affiliated to Kumar turned things ugly. This, at a time, when ironically, Kanhaiya is not even an active part of politics on JNU campus anymore.
To counter the narrative that the mainstream media has been building on, the non-representation and misrepresentation, students of various centres at JNU have come together to source video interviews of students involved in the protests and strikes, to make video accounts and blogs and share them as widely possible on the only platform available to us: social media.
One such Facebook page, SAA Talks Back, ran a series of video parchas the day after the thwarted padyatra to give an account of events as they are. The caption to one of their videos went as:
“Throughout the whole day today, we’ll debunk the #RightToBunk perspective being used by some media channels to discredit the movement happening in JNU. First up, our favourite muse Times Now, who argued that “over 2000” (by even the most conservative estimate above 5000) students and teachers marched to defend the ‘Azaadi to Bunk’. There’s no use citing JNU’s high attendance figures because these people don’t care about facts. But we’re still amused to think that “over 2000” lazy-ass people who won’t attend classes still found the energy to walk from JNU to the Parliament, and braved Delhi Police’s brutal torture.”
At this point, I would like to break down things for you so that you know what it is we are fighting against. These are issues that have found no mention in any news report so far; so much so that people not associated with the university have hardly any idea of why these protests and movements have been taking place in the university for weeks and weeks now:
– The overnight granting of autonomy to JNU (along with 60 other universities and colleges), which focuses mostly on a revised fee structure wherein institutions are made to raise money on their own. This will invariably result in higher fees, making the institution inaccessible to a whole section of people, and would act as a push towards privatisation of higher education. Moreover, this gives greater power to the university administration to completely flout all social justice norms that it has so far already undermined.
– The failure to suspend Atul Johri who has been accused of sexual harassment by as many as eight students and failure to raise an inquiry into similar complaints against two other professors, Mahendra P. Lama and Rajesh Kharat.
[Johri still holds a few of his administrative posts; continues to hold his teaching post and is still a guide of the students who came out against him; is still a warden of one of the hostels and continues to live on campus.]
– The overnight dismantling of an autonomous GSCASH (Gender Sensitisation Committee Against Sexual Harassment) with elected representatives and replacing it with a fully nominated ICC (Internal Complaints Committee) that has no student representatives.
– Flouting of reservation rules during admission since last year, wherein 90% of reserved seats were not filled, and results of entrance exams not made public.
– Seat cut across departments, where the total number of research seats dropped by a whopping 83% in the last couple years.
– Faculty appointments and promotions that have been illegitimately made, based solely on political affiliations, and not based on recommendations and interviews.
– Fudging of Executive Council and Academic Council meetings to pass controversial rules.
– Making compulsory attendance mandatory for students from BA through to MA, MPhil and PhD, with the minimum requirement ranging from anywhere between 75% to 80%.
[Why it is problematic for any higher educational institution (not just one like JNU) to have a scheme of compulsory attendance is a matter for another article, and much has been said about it already.]
– Illegitimate removal of Chairpersons and Deans of centres and schools that have been opposing the arbitrary rules/circulars and replacing most of them by people from other departments.
– Arbitrary withdrawal of fellowships and framing students under a barrage of false complaints, FIR and proctorial enquiries.
[“On this note, the JNU administration has collected over Rs. 15 lakh in fines (fines can be levelled for anything between making Biriyani to having an electric kettle in your room) making us believe that the new Engineering and Management schools will be built on our blood and sweat” – reads the SAA Talks Back post]
The fight that has been initiated in JNU has been touted by many as the last battle. A failure of our movement will inevitably signal the beginning of public education in higher levels being cut off from the masses; where women will be pushed back into the confines of the kitchen and home; where prestigious institutions will only be available for the elite few who can afford it; education campuses will be dominated only by people with a certain political disposition; and students from an SC, ST and OBC background being denied a right to engage at the same intellectual level with students from the privileged upper castes and shoved to the margins again.
Why is the media reluctant to report anything that might show JNU in a positive or sympathetic light? Why are the most popular news channels like Republic TV, Times Now, Zee News, India TV, ABP News and the like intent on fomenting hate? Why do they continue to misreport events to vilify and alienate us students further from the masses? Are they so blinded by their narrow political interests to not realise that the hurt this assault on public education is causing will not leave them unharmed in the long run?
In a country like India, where public opinion is controlled by what the media projects to them, it is high time journalists step out from their studios where they create virtual simulations of bathtubs to assess if a Bollywood celebrity could have drowned in it, and fulfil their duties and responsibilities of letting the people form an informed opinion, encouraging them to question and hold the government they elected into account.
Sensationalism, rhetoric, and labelling anyone who steps into this university as an “anti-national” and “naxal” will only get them so far.
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