Indian universities, over the past several weeks, have become the dedicated laboratory space for testing the limits of a chhappan-inch variety of jingoism. That the university should be targeted isn't particularly surprising – since it was increasingly evident from electoral patterns that the voice of a formidable political opposition (both numerically and principally) was no longer to be found in the houses of the Parliament. The university has been among the last few surviving spaces which continues to evolve a dissensual conscience, however enfeebled by administrative diktats and assaults on academic autonomy. The routine installation of puppets of the establishment, such as Gajendra Chauhan in Film and Television Institute of India, Pune and Sudershan Rao at the Indian Council of Historical Research, seemed to have only strengthened resistance and solidarity between and beyond the otherwise-ghettoised citadels of knowledge-professionals.
The organised witch-hunt of individuals and clampdown on spaces of dissent in the past two years came to a head at Hyderabad Central University with the institutional murder of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula on 17 January 2016. A frenzied attempt to hush up the role of the government in the case gave birth to a sensational media-trial surrounding anti-national slogans in Jawaharlal Nehru University. The 'traumatic wound' of the slogan was opened up and then sought to be immunized with home-made concoctions of medicinal value – namely, that of 'nationalism'. State-mandated first-aid doles included the measured flutter of the national flag on university campuses and the suggested display of army tanks within the university in close proximity to academic blocks. To exorcise the 'seditious' germ from the body of the university, the ruling party has alternated between the tactical and the antic – alongside threats of withdrawing grants and fellowships for research, we have now seen a numerical calibration of anti-national morality in the alleged numbers of condoms and meat bones found within the campus.