The country’s show-piece Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU, estb.1969) sited on a 1,000 acre campus in the heart of New Delhi which has 7,369 postgraduate students mentored by 614 faculty and offers 148 study programmes, is limping back to normalcy. For the past three months since a steep hike in hostel fees — albeit on a rock-bottom base unchanged for decades — was decreed on October 28, this top-ranked public university heavily subsidised by Central government (annual budget: Rs.200 crore), has become the theatre of violent clashes between the leftist JNU Students Union (JNUSU) and ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad), a pan-India students organisation affiliated with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the Centre and especially with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu majoritarian cultural mentor organisation of BJP. Weeks of protests and counter-protests on JNU’s scenic campus culminated on January 5 when a posse of 30-40 masked men mysteriously entered the campus at night and ran amok targeting JNU Students Union (JNUSU) leaders and office-bearers. JNUSU president Aishe Ghosh suffered head injuries and several union members were beaten up. JNUSU alleges that the perpetrators of the violence and destruction of property were ABVP members and/or co-conspirators who were let into the campus by the anti-JNUSU management and ABVP members while the Delhi police controlled by the (BJP) Central government, turned a blind eye to the campus mayhem responding to emergency calls after three hours. With many students fleeing the campus and JNUSU demanding the resignation of vice chancellor Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar (a controversial BJP appointee) the campus was in effective lockdown in January. Passing an order on a petition filed by JNUSU president Aishe Ghosh and other office-bearers, challenging a fee hike in the new hostel prices manual of JNU on January 24, Justice Rajiv Shakdher of the Delhi high court opined that government is obliged to fund education. “Government has to fund public education. The burden of paying the salaries of workers is not on students. Someone has to find the funds.” The single judge decreed that provisions contained in the old manual will prevail with students required to pay pre-revision tuition and hostel fees pending final judgment of the petition by a larger bench of the court. The JNU administration didn’t challenge the interim order. The trigger of student protests which has resulted in unprecedented violence, turmoil and disruption of JNU’s academic calendar was a decision taken on October 28 by the Inter-Hall Administration (IHA) to steeply increase hostel fees. Even though it is the duly elected students’ representative body, JNUSU was not invited or party to the decision. For the breakdown of student-management communication at JNU, students’ union spokespersons squarely blame vice chancellor Jagadesh Kumar, a former professor of electrical engineering at IIT Delhi, who was appointed vice chancellor in January 2016 by the BJP/NDA government. Immediately after his appointment as VC, he constituted a committee to examine room rents and utility service charges in JNU’s 18 hostels to bridge a recurring annual deficit of…
