The Panchjanya debate: JNU was always hospitable to conflicting ideas, the new culture of coercion is the change

By NR Mohanty ‘Intolerance’ is the buzz word today. Writers, academics, scientists, film stars et al are talking about the atmosphere of intolerance in the country under the current NDA regime. Politicians have also jumped into the fray. Congress president Sonia Gandhi met the President of India to draw his attention to the culture of fear and hatred growing under the Modi regime. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has countered it saying that Narendra Modi is the victim of intolerance exhibited by pseudo-secular and pseudo-intellectual entities. I have been asked to describe the atmosphere in the JNU campus in the 1980s when I was a student there. Before I do so, I would like to put the debate in the right perspective (right in the way I understand it). [caption id=“attachment_2494660” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] JNU campus. Image Credit: Official website[/caption] The Oxford Dictionary gives the following meaning of the word ‘intolerant’, the adjective form of the noun ‘intolerance’ – “ (disapproving) not willing to accept ideas or ways of behaving that are different from your own”. If we accept this meaning, then there are two components to this discussion on ‘intolerance’ – one at the level of ideas and the other at the level of behaviour. In a democracy, a thousand contesting ideas are welcome. Ideas are meant to be debated, and not foisted by show of authority. Even an idea that sows seeds of sedition has to be tolerated in a democratic regime. But ways of behaviour is a different ball game altogether. If one actually engages in seditious activities, then they will land in jail. But any behaviour, which is permitted under the law, cannot be curbed by coercion by a group of people just because they think that such behaviour is not acceptable to them. If the law of the land permits young boys and girls to drink and dance in a disco, then the Sri Ram Sene or Shiv Sena activists have every right to have moral disagreement with such behaviour but they have no right to gatecrash and disrupt the party. Same is the case with beef-eating. If beef-eating is permissible in law, then someone having aversion to such practice due to religious sentiment cannot enforce a ban on beef-eating by the force of a gun or a knife. If a group of people do so and get away with it, then they are perpetuating an atmosphere of intolerance and fear. It is unacceptable if we have to survive as a democracy. In this perspective, JNU of my days was a very tolerant society. It was a veritable cauldron of ideas. But ideas were meant to be debated, not to come to fisticuffs. When I joined JNU, Sitaram Yechury was the Students’ Union president. SFI-AISF combine had complete sway over the student body. Still there were avenues of debate and democratic action. In my first days of JNU, I was witness to an all- night General Body Meeting (GBM) in which more than hundred students drawn from different ideological persuasions spoke; in the early morning over a thousand students voted. The motion had been moved by a section of students expressing no-confidence in the Sitaram-led team. To my utter surprise, the motion was carried by a majority vote. Sitaram resigned and the students’ union was dissolved. But it spoke of the democratic credentials of the JNU campus that in the subsequent election, Sitaram Yechury became again the presidential candidate of the SFI and swept the polls. Because Left-leaning ideology was the dominant ethos of JNU campus then, the student organisations affiliated to the political right or centre were on the margins, they were relentlessly attacked in the post-dinner public meetings, but there was never a case of physical assault. Students of varying ideological affiliations were intolerant to each other at an ideational level but nobody tried to suppress that idea from being expressed. Voltaire’s dictum – “I may disagree with your idea but I will defend till my death your right to express it” (these may not be his exact words) – governed the principle of democratic discourse in JNU. That explains why JNU student union elections became an annual platform for ideological debates. Jairus Banaji, then a Ph D scholar in the History centre (Prof Bipan Chandra was his supervisor) carried the debate to a different level when he unleashed a high-pitched attack on the communist legacy being articulated on the SFI platform by its powerful ideological exponent, DP Tripathi, a former president of the JNU Students’ Union himself. Jairus used to go to DP tripathi’s meetings armed with a dozen books to ask him questions on the Stalinist legacy; there were heated debates. SFI supporters were an agitated lot as Jairus seemed to be stealing the thunder, but Jairus never felt the threat to his life. His scholarship and his articulation evoked secret admiration even in his open detractors. A few years down the line when I became the president of the JNUSU on a platform of Students for Democratic Socialism (a campus-based organisation that a few like-minded students created; our main plank was that student politics of JNU should be governed by the larger interest of the students of JNU, and not the interest of the political parties; our attack was on SFI-CPM, AISF-CPI, NSUI-Congress, ABVP-BJP). We challenged the entire spectrum of political forces in JNU (dominant and marginal); we joined hands with a local outfit; together we only had hoped to raise a debate on the ill-effects of the mainstream political parties interfering in the student politics. But our campaign gathered momentum as the days passed; many from the traditional student organisations, Left, Right and Centre, came forward to tell us that they were convinced by our argument – that student politics of JNU had been hijacked by the national political parties. We, the underdogs, came up trumps when the results were declared – for the first time in JNUSU history, a non SFI-AISF panel won a majority in the Students’ Council (earlier Anand Kumar and David Thomas had become president on Free Thinkers platform but they did not have a majority support in the Student Council). JNU of my time was hospitable to conflicting ideas: there were vigorous, sometimes virulent, debates but nobody tried to foist his idea by force. There was intolerance to the very idea of getting one’s way by force.