Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) remains a pre-eminent name at the vanguard of the nation’s premier academic institutions. Its renown is derived not merely from a rigorous pursuit of scholastic excellence but also from the resolute political convictions consistently manifested by its fraternity of students and faculty alike. The university has been graced by an illustrious galaxy of intellectuals, including the likes of Romila Thapar, Dr. K.N. Panikkar, Amit Bhaduri, Yogendra Singh, Imtiaz Ahmad, T.K. Oommen, Nivedita Menon, Prabhat Patnaik, Utsa Patnaik, Zoya Hasan, Uday Prakash, and Ayesha Kidwai—minds that represent the very pinnacle of social and economic scholarship, historiography, and literature in the country, who served as members of its faculty. Beyond nurturing these luminaries, JNU has bequeathed to the world a formidable cohort of intrepid activists, writers, and academicians. Perhaps its most profound contribution over its fifty-seven-year odyssey has been its role in fortifying the Indian Republic, serving as a bastion of resistance against the excesses of the Emergency and a bulwark against the incursion of communal fascism. Contrary to this however, the past decade has witnessed a systematic and orchestrated endeavour, presided over by the Central government, to dismantle the values and ideological foundations that JNU epitomises. In a concerted attempt to alter the university's fundamental character, the sanctity of the campus has been violated by the intrusion of police and partisan militias, while dissenting voices are incarcerated and the avenues for intellectual discourse are summarily shuttered. Simultaneously, a narrative of vilification is sustained through the dissemination of fabrications in the media, aimed at criminalising the institution and its student leadership. So virulent is this antagonism that certain right-wing theoreticians have gone as far as to advocate the physical obliteration of the university, framing it as a necessary measure to safeguard the nation from 'extremism'.
By consecutively appointing two academicians aligned with the prevailing state orthodoxy to the Chancellery, the establishment endeavours to expunge JNU’s identity as a fount of independent thought and student ferment. Consequently, a sanctuary of learning, once etched in the national consciousness for its milestones and intellectual ascendance, has recently been thrust into the limelight for entirely antithetical reasons. A crescendo of condemnation is currently surging both within the campus and across the wider polity against the profoundly dehumanising and casteist pronouncements recently articulated by the Vice-Chancellor, Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit. It was during a podcast inter-locution that the Vice-Chancellor voiced these egregious caste-based prejudices. Espousing the rhetoric of communal and casteist bigots—who posit that the University Grants Commission’s mandates to curb systemic discrimination and atrocities in higher education are irrational and superfluous—the Vice-Chancellor disparaged Dalits as perpetual practitioners of "victimhood". Her discourse was marked by a searing condescension: “There's a permanent victimhood and you cannot progress by being permanently a victim or playing the victim card. This was done for Blacks. The same thing was brought for Dalits here. And you know the question is, by making somebody the devil, it's not easy to progress. She said, “There's a permanent victimhood and you cannot progress by being permanently a victim or playing the victim card. This was done for Blacks. The same thing was brought for Dalits here. And you know the question is, by making somebody the devil, it's not easy to progress". According to her, it is merely the artifice of a manufactured reality. In such a paradigm, regardless of the circumstances, I remain the eternal victim and you the inveterate predator. Such a premise is utterly devoid of pragmatism.
The Vice-Chancellor’s pronouncements are articulated at a historical juncture when students from Dalit and subaltern minority communities—having ventured forth to secure academic accolades despite pervasive discrimination and the subversion of affirmative action— find their aspirations extinguished by a virulent casteist animus that drives many to abandon their scholarly pursuits or, tragically, their very existence. Such rhetoric serves as a chilling testament to the fact that the lineage of ‘Manuvadi’ preceptors has not ended, who once mandated that molten lead be poured into the ears of Shudras privy to Vedic recitations, and who demanded that the thumbs of Eklavyas be severed. This discourse functions as an ominous harbinger of the impending calamity facing every university across the Indian landscape. In a display of solidarity with the Vice-Chancellor’s stance, the saffron brigade unleashed a wave of violence against the leftist and progressive student factions who had gathered to protest these hateful declarations. Concurrently, Dhananjay, the erstwhile President of the JNU Students' Union, and Advocate Suraj Kumar Bauddh, founder of Mission Ambedkar, have petitioned the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, demanding punitive measures against the Vice-Chancellor for her irresponsible pronouncements. And on Thursday, students also mobilised a 'Long March,' clamouring for her immediate ousting and the legislative enactment of the 'Rohit Act'. Yet, in the contemporary Indian milieu, it is an exercise in futility to hope that an administration—which rewarded Professor M. Jagadesh Kumar with the chairmanship of the UGC after his controversial tenure in subverting JNU—will take corrective action against such acts.
How profoundly salutary it would have been had Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit paused for a fleeting moment, to reflect that she was occupying a chair once graced by the late Dr. K.R. Narayanan—a man who, having surmounted the most corrosive of casteist predilections, ascended to become an intellectual of global stature and, ultimately, the President of the Republic.