FTII student arrests a masterstroke: They turn the spotlight away from Gajendra Chauhan

If you’ve been having palpitations ever since you heard of the police landing up at Pune’s Film and Television Institute of India and arresting five students in the dead of the night, take heart. It could have been much worse. The Chinese government massacred hundreds – perhaps thousands – at Tiananmen Square in 1989. After the protests of 1999, an estimated 1200 students were detained by Iranian authorities. In neighbouring Myanmar, to become a student leader is essentially an express route to incarceration or living on the run, and approximately 100 of those now awaiting trial were once involved in student protests.

Compared to all this, the arrest of five students is almost benign, right? Let us show gratitude that the police were operating within legal parameters, which means they didn’t arrest any women (you need a magistrate’s order to arrest women before sunrise or after sunset) and neither did they pick up people without warrants. Okay, so they shoved a few students around, but hey, photos show the cops also hung around to chat. Small mercies, ladies and gentlemen; it’s the era of small mercies.

For those who like imagining the world in simple, black and white terms, the situation at FTII deserves nothing more than a few snide remarks. There’s one point of view that imagines that the government is the modern Mahisasura and students are the embodiment of Durga and her lion. The other sees the average FTII student as the love child of pond scum and leeches, who hangs around the campus for years, doing nothing but getting high and causing trouble.

The reality of what’s happening in FTII is more nuanced and chilling. There’s no one bottom line to this controversy. Instead, the bottom keeps falling through to reveal a new line. Gajendra Chauhan was a disastrous choice for chairperson as are the other BJP loyalists who have been nominated for FTII Society. The student body politicized its strike by letting Rahul Gandhi become their champion. Academically, when graduation projects from 2008 remain incomplete in 2015, it’s evident that FTII is in dire need of an intervention. Strategically speaking, our students are verging on violence and our dear leaders are ruthless.

The official chain of events that caused the midnight crackdown is as follows.

On Monday afternoon, a group of FTII students herded director Prashant Pathrabe into his office and for hours, he was held captive there. The students were angry that Pathrabe was following the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s directive to assess diploma projects from 2008. The assessment would mean those with incomplete projects would be failed and have to leave FTII.

The students argued that the institute’s academic council had been bypassed and the decision to assess was invalid if it didn’t have the council’s approval. The protesters also alleged that this was the government’s way of weakening the student body – by ejecting older students who have been part of the 69-day strike that began after the appointment of Chauhan as chairperson of FTII.

With the mood in Pathrabe’s office becoming hostile, the police were called. Three policemen arrived but were not allowed into the office by students standing guard outside. Six more came by way of reinforcement and ultimately, the nine policemen forced their way into Pathrabe’s cabin and got the director out. By then, he’d been held captive by angry students for about seven hours.

According to reports, Pathrabe arrived at the police station at 9.30pm on Tuesday night, to file an FIR charging a number of students with multiple offences, including illegal confinement and rioting. The police arrived at FTII after midnight. They arrested five male students. Two of the names in the warrant were misspelled, which allowed those students to evade arrest.

It doesn’t matter where one stands on Chauhan’s appointment or if you think FTII is in shambles, to arrest people after midnight is unmistakably repressive. Taking students into custody in the dead of the night is not going to help FTII improve either its academic standards or discipline. If anything, these midnight arrests indicate a worrying neglect from FTII’s administration.

Even though students were being arrested, neither the institute’s director nor registrar made an appearance. Both these officials’ homes are a stone’s throw from where the students were picked up by the police. Yet they did nothing. At least the registrar should have stood between the police and the students. For better or for worse, these administrative officials are effectively the students’ guardians. Their absence suggests the institution has distanced itself from them, which means these officials aren’t doing their jobs. So long as those being arrested are students, the officials have a responsibility towards them.

One could argue that the students’ strike and gherao is good reason for them to be left in the cold. However, just as laying siege shouldn’t be part of an ideal student’s to-do list, neither is serving students up for arrest part of a director or registrar’s job profile. Even if you don’t sympathize with their politics, the students’ actions don’t give the administration leave to not do its job.

From the timing of the FIR to the hour at which the arrests were made, it’s evident that this incident was choreographed in a way that it got minimum public attention but had maximum psychological impact. This morning’s newspapers have nothing on it since the arrests took place after newspapers go for printing. Television news channels have small packages on the arrests, but prime time viewing is much later in the day.

It’s only on the internet that news about FTII has circulated. Social media remains as vibrant and unreliable as ever. Last night, Twitter alerted those awake at 1am of the arrests– Resul Pookutty was one of the first to tweet about it – and proved once again that social media is an excellent tip-off, but thoroughly unreliable when it comes to facts. Some handles wrongly claimed women were arrested, which would have been a serious violation. Until early this morning, the number arrested ranged from 40 to five on social media.

What was achieved, however, was a general sense of shocked outrage that students could become political prisoners.

Strategically speaking, the arrests are a masterstroke. They turn the spotlight away from the students’ justified outrage at having an inept chairperson foisted upon them, and on FTII’s biggest failing: the academic backlog and indiscipline on campus. The protests come across as lawless now, with a director filing an FIR against his own students. The images we see of Pathrabe show him looking hapless and harassed. The students, on the other hand, look belligerent. One video on a news channel shows a student in the police van, trying to hold up a sign that reads “Do Epic Shit”.

And just like that, the focus of attention is no longer Chauhan’s lack of qualificiations or RSS’s involvement at a certain level of decision making in this government. Instead, it’s upon the unruliness of FTII’s students.

Once, FTII was known for the talent it nurtured. Today, it has acquired a reputation for being a black hole of vice and iniquity. Students smoke joints! They get drunk! They become Communists! It’s a nightmare!

Never mind the fact that students smoke joints, get drunk and explore thoroughly dubious politics no matter where they are. The FTII students still have a long way to go before they can be in the same bracket as Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad with its violent antics, for instance.

The implications of this midnight crackdown extend far beyond the FTII campus. This incident offers an indication of the government’s attitude towards protests and opposition, particularly when it’s on a weak wicket. Everyone knew Chauhan was a regrettable choice and there are rumours that government representatives accepted off the record that his appointment is an embarrassment. However, to accept that formally would be a sign of weakness and so, the government will neither back down or accept its mistakes. Not just that, it’ll sacrifice students in the process.