As I am writing this, JNUSU is about to go to polls on 22nd this month preceded by a presidential debate on the 20th.

JNU is an idea, as it is quite emphatically often repeated in Indian Progressive Circles. And it doesn’t stop at that. What comes next is the romanticisation of this idea of a university as an ideal for the entire India’s higher education as a model.

Even though nowhere it is talked about why should a university like JNU if it is to exist as a national idea be located only in the power centre of Indian nation state, New Delhi.

What then ails this idea? It is a matter of national concern these days that this idea of JNU is under attack through its student organisation ABVP in particular and BJP’s Narendra Modi Government in general. What is often cited as evidence of this attack is physical violence resorted to by ABVP students on Left Oriented Students. Although the left claims that the hindu right is tinkering with the epistemic structure of the Indian higher education in general and JNU in particular, their primary visual to be sent across India is that of physical violence perpetrated by the Hindu right on students who hail from progressive orientations as unlike the Hindu hardliners.

I would like to argue here that it is not the hindu right that ails JNU as staunchly as does and has been done by the Indian Left.

Systematic destruction of a university and it’s idea takes much more than physical violence. It’s in the realm of epistemic violence that ideas are destroyed. And what ails JNU as an idea is the very idea of JNU itself as fashioned by the Indian Left.


JNU founded in 1969 by the then Prime Minister of India was at the centre stage during prominent events India witnessed primarily the 1975 Emergency and the 1991 93 Babri Mandal era.


For much of its existence till the implementation of the Mandal Commission report JNU continued to be an elite club of upper caste students, most of them hailing directly from other elite undergraduate colleges like St Stephen’s, LSR Miranda etc.

Around the time of Mandal and Babri, India was going through a churning. The hold of congress was weakening, the BJP had begun its innings and Kanshiram had established a Bahujan imagination in the minds of the people.

The Congress was losing its ground in the political sphere at both central level and state level in many states.

At this juncture JNU proved to be of undue interest to the Indian Left as a bastion of intellectuals who held sway over whatever knowledge was being produced on and about the Indian populace. But this time it also has to take into account increasing assertion by Dalits in particular and the Bahujan struggle in general.

As a salvage and necessary collateral, JNU saw recruitment of many professors from bahujan background within the benevolent magnanimity of the Indian Left. Most of the professors recruited at that time were members of Left Student organisations at some point in their life in JNU.

This is reflected even today in the politics played by seemingly Bahujan organisations. Their form and substance is both inspired by and modelled on the Indian Left’s revolutionary ideals of Padhai and Ladai, which the Indian Left very subtly plants as a cry for praxis along with theory.

Such implants of revolutionary ideals in the minds of the young students are done without taking into consideration their material social reality. A large number of students from marginalised backgrounds who enter JNU even today are first generation learners whose parents are manual labourers or engaged in petty jobs with uncertainty and insecurity of income and no ancestral wealth.

In such a situation, these students fall victim to this love for revolutionary action being romanticised by the Indian Left. Even today you won’t find a single dalit student who has been actively associated with the Indian Left and has established themselves as an independent thinker, and by independent I mean being able to critique the ignominies of the Indian Left. One or Two exceptions cannot be denied but often they end up being appropriated and assimilated in the schema of Indian Left’s epistemic hegemony.

It is this epistemic hegemony of the Indian Left which is an eyesore for the Hindu Right and the Hindu Right is fighting tooth and nail about it.

The Indian Left has a serious challenge from the Writings of Ambedkar and Phule. I chose not to write Phule Ambedkarite tradition in academic sense as in academia it has already been co-opted by the Indian Left.

Writings of Ambedkar still remain Untouchable for academics trained in the Indian Left. In the name of adding Jai Bhim as a prefix to Laal Salam the Indian Left has already swayed over the rising assertion which could have come about from an intense reading of Ambedkar’s Literature. The academic sphere dominated by the Indian Left is so sanitised and an exclusive elite club that even the BJP gets a complex while attacking them, which can be seen in the diatribes of Modi, ‘Urban Naxals’, ‘Khan Market Gang’ etc

The danger to the Indian Left is from the literature of Ambedkar and Phule and in that tradition whatever is the lineage of untouchables and they are very much aware of it.

They now mask this danger by trying to organise the entire energies of Dalits in this imagined enemy the Fascist Hindu Right.

Much like the BJP  implants the fear and danger of a Muslim Other in the minds of the hindu populace, so does the Indian Left creates insecurity and fear among the progressive populace of an immediate danger of Fascist Hindu Right.

All the energies then are concentrated in countering that immediate danger and rest all issues concerning the nation are shown a door that will be opened post revolution, a revolution which never comes. Isn’t this the same tactic used by the Hindu Right to shift the matter of national concern to the backseat and focus on a fight for Hindu resurgence?

Both the Indian Left and the Hindu Right use the same tactics. The fear mongering done by the Indian Left is seemingly secular as opposed to a communal enemy and the fear mongering done by Hindu Right is seemingly communal as opposed to a secular enemy.

The BJP today hosts the most representative government in Indian History. And this year the Left Unity in JNUSU elections has fielded a Dalit candidate for the post of president.

The Indian Left often disparages those represented in the BJP from among untouchables and other backward classes as foot soldiers of Hindutva. It questions their representation without giving any semblance of agency to the individuals of these communities.

But when it comes to their own politics, the Indian Left claims that the representation they provide is substantive. The question remains to be answered by the untouchable and other backward classes population within the framework of Phule Ambedkarite tradition, with a very careful distance from Indian Academia.