Last week, I stumbled upon what was essentially one of the best things I have ever read about the university I studied and lived in for five years. Jamia Millia Islamia, it said, had made it to the top place in the central universities of India. No matter who ranked it, how it was done, why at this point in time; it was something to celebrate. Even though a few departments and centres of the university have been the best in their respective fields for decades now, one could not have even imagined the varsity in its totality being at the top until it actually came out in the news.
In fact, as absurd as this might sound, my first reaction was, “Have other central universities been degraded to the point that Jamia is on the top now!”
I mean no offence to Jamia, but that is how things have been in public universities in India lately. There is hardly any news to cheer about. Wait, let me rephrase: The news is mostly bone-chilling.
From rusted knives and other metal weapons to teargas canisters and live bullets, the campuses have seen it all. The focus has now shifted to summoning, harassing, detaining, and arresting students, academics, and activists alike – to the point that rankings released by the government seem to be a futile exercise at best.
However, ironically, if there is anything that these rankings reaffirm, it is the fact that student activism and academic excellence go hand in hand.
The Jamia Model
Thirty years ago, they say, Jamia was not much more than a couple of old buildings forcibly held together. Professors who lived on campus had to live in what were shanties at best. This despite being 70 years old at that time. Tagged a madrassa by its haters and lovers, for altogether different reasons, the university could only boast of a Mass Communication Research Center. Even after being made a central university by ‘an act of parliament’ in 1988, not much changed immediately. After all, India does not have a lot of money to spend on its universities.
When Professor Mushirul Hassan took over as the Vice-Chancellor in 2004, infrastructure was still pretty much the same. Securing funding from outside benefactors, he went on what can only be termed as an infrastructure-upgradation-spree. So much so that by 2010, the campus had become every architecture lover’s wet dream.
A world-class sports facility, state-of-the-art gallery and outdoor café, upgraded laboratories, a high-end multistoried central library, new buildings for different upcoming centres, almost a dozen sleek gates: the campus was now a diverse model of Arab, Persian, and Modern architecture.
With and following the infrastructural upgradation, Jamia started to focus on its Centers of Learning, diversifying its courses to meet the needs of the twenty-first century. Sarojini Naidu Centre for Women’s Studies (2000), Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution (2004), Centre for Early Childhood Development and Research (2010), Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research (2012), Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Centre for Coaching and Career Planning, FTK-Centre for Information Technology, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, MMAJ Academy of International Studies, and Centre for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology are just a few examples.
Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary in their approach, these centres interested students from diverse socio-economic and academic backgrounds to enrol in the university. However, during the same time, student politics was stamped out and the union banned in 2006.
2019-20
For years now, the university administration in Jamia has tried to tame, mould, and contain student activism. From outright bans to not-so-subtle show-cause notices, Jamia has in effect been a police state for most of its modern history.
Which is not to say that students of Jamia have been apolitical, or even asleep. Because unsurprisingly, it was only a place like Jamia that could give birth to a movement like PinjraTod.
And in the same spirit, when the Citizenship Amendment Bill was passed in the parliament in December 2019, students of Jamia came out on the road dividing the university campus, demonstrating against the unconstitutionality and inhumanity of the Act, trying to march to the parliament. The march was stopped, and teargas canisters lobbed into the campus. Several students sustained injuries. Two days later, after a march organized by the locals of Jamia Nagar, the men in uniform barged into the campus, teargas-shelled it, gassed the library, damaged the property, and hit anyone they could find there. All this is documented in video footages.
Over the next months, the university became the site of resistance. A campus which had banned students’ union, now saw protest meetings on a daily basis; a campus where the walls had been clean for too long, now had graffiti and murals painted all over them; a campus where it was next to impossible to stand up and speak over a microphone, now had activists coming in from all over the country.
And once that subsided, once the Covid-19 spread, once the protest sites were cleared, students who had participated in the protests were called in and detained, in ones and twos, an ongoing process, an open case, trying to link them to the horrific violence of February in Northeast Delhi.
Got me thinking, what are these rankings then? A consolation? Or a reaffirmation?
