(On the occasion of 31 March, Chandrashekhar’s 11th martyrdom anniversary, Kavita Krishnan situates Chandrashekhar’s legacy in the context of contemporary debates and assessments of the Indian student movement. – Ed/)
“In our freedom struggle we have seen how students came out of the universities in large numbers. They should come out because in certain ways we are privileged. We come to universities, educate ourselves, gain knowledge, get to know the world, are better equipped to understand and analyse our realities. So it is our responsibility to disseminate this knowledge. Whatever we have taken from society, we must give it back.”
- Comrade Chandrashekhar, in an interview
Chandrashekhar was both a product and an architect of the student movement of his times. The richness of the insights and experiences he imparted to the student movement of the 90s was generated by the heritage of past generations of revolutionary student movements. Chandrashekhar saw a living link between the student movement of the 90s and the AISF of the freedom struggle. For Chandrashekhar, Bhagat Singh was no icon for worship; he was a challenge calling to be fulfilled. And it is not difficult to trace the running thread that linked Bhagat Singh martyred at the hands of the British; the hundreds of students and youth inspired by Naxalbari, gunned down on the streets of West Bengal in the early 70s; and Chandrashekhar who was shot dead in Siwan.
And yet, the decade of the 90s, to begin with, seemed very far away from the mood of the high-points of the Left and democratic student movements of the past. It was heralded as a decade of triumph by the neo-liberal intelligentsia, media and ruling class. Triumph over communism (in the wake of the Soviet collapse and discrediting of communist China among youth after the Tiananmen massacre); the triumph of all-out ‘globalisation’ as dictated by the IMF-World Bank. In the early years of the 90s, most commentators in the media completely discounted the Left as a force with any appeal among students. The only two trends of student stirrings, according to such opinions, were either the anti-Mandal frenzy, or the fanaticism of the Hindutva variety. The dominant left mood itself was one of capitulation; of demoralisation over the Soviet collapse; of suppressing its own identity in order to back the so-called ‘social justice’ ruling class formations in North India. This mood was hardly one that could ignite any appeal in the minds of students. Chandrashekhar is an enduring symbol of a creative radical student movement that disproved all those myths and struck strong roots in the hearts and minds of students of the Hindi heartland at precisely that time.
Chandrashekhar, already an activist and a Bihar state leader of the AISF, was dissatisfied with the AISF’s defeatism and its surrender to the ruling class options as the only alternative, in the name of secularism and social justice. He sought a platform that would directly evolve a creative Left language with which to confront and challenge the discourse and forces of right-wing economics and politics. Like many others of his generation, he found AISA as an answer to that quest.
AISA was boldly willing to confront communal forces both ideologically and politically, quite directly. Challenging the ruling classes who were consigning youth to the flames of anti-reservation passions, AISA from its very birth defended the Mandal recommendations of reservations for OBCs in education and jobs. At the same time, AISA mobilised students to demand education and employment as against job cuts and privatisation of education. The latter policies were not only undermining the potential of the Mandal recommendations; the extreme insecurity caused by shrinking educational and job opportunities were creating fertile ground for anti-quota prejudices to be sown.
The CPI(ML) in Bihar and UP was not willing to hand over the task of defending secularism and social justice to the likes of Laloo and Mulayam, and AISA was determined to emerge as a Left student force with a strong mass following among students. AISA, in contrast to many of the ML or Left-of-CPI(M) groups, did not accept cliquishness and sectarianism as the inevitable fate of radicalism in student politics. Rather, AISA was determined to reach out to every democratic impulse, every fighting voice in society.
It was these qualities in AISA which drew Chandrashekhar along with many others towards it. And it was this character that Chandrashekhar himself enhanced immensely through his own initiatives. Like Bhagat Singh, like the student martyrs of the Naxalbari, who left prestigious colleges to join the revolutionary struggles of poor peasantry, Chandu, in his life, as well as his death, broke the barriers between academics, student activism and peoples’ struggles beyond the campus: the struggles of the people of Bhojpur, the resistance of the tribals of the Narmada valley, the blood spilt by the police in the Uttarakhand movement at Muzaffarnagar, the lives of the people of Siwan… He forged bonds of solidarity, life and death with all these struggles.
AISA’s successful victory in the campuses of BHU, Allahabad University, Kumaon University and JNU, defeating the ABVP head-on, was precisely because it was able to light the spark of Left radicalism in students, offering a bold ray of hope in those testing times. The ‘official’ Left groups - CPI(M)-affiliated SFI in particular - could not grasp the reasons for the appeal of AISA in the Hindi belt where SFI could make no headway, neither for AISA’s appeal in SFI’s bastion in JNU. In fact, a National President of the SFI, writing in the PD just after Chandrashekhar’s tenure as JNUSU President and prior to his martyrdom, had derided and dismissed Chandrashekhar’s “so-called revolutionary activities in the grassroots”.
Comrade Shyam Narain Yadav, martyred along with Chandrashekhar, had been an SFI leader and had joined the CPI(ML) along with 30 other SFI members. What led young revolutionaries like Chandrashekhar and Shyam Narain to look beyond the confines of the ‘official’ communist parties? What accounts for the appeal of AISA in the 90s and for its renewed appeal in the present phase? These are questions that the CPI(M) is unable to answer.
Contrast the living, inspiring reality of Chandrashekhar’s legacy with the text of a recent CPI(M) document on the student movement. This document, titled ‘Student Front: Policy And Tasks’ and adopted at the March 31 to April 02, 2007 meeting of the CPI(M) Central Committee, is full of distortions and silences regarding important chapters and questions of the Indian student movement.
Writing of the 1960s and 70s, the document says, “In the seventies, the dominant trend in the student movement was against corruption and authoritarian political tendencies, which culminated in the emergency….During this period, since the mid-sixties various shades of ultra Left tendencies also arose amongst the students. Seeking to divorce the student movement from the general democratic movement, advancing the slogan of “student power”, such forces strengthened anarchic trends disrupting and weakening the united student movement.”
The Naxalbari movement of 1967 unleashed a wave of revolt amongst students. The timing coincided with the ‘New Left’-type trends of the late 60s in the West; but the pro-Naxalbari trend amongst students was very distinct and different from any romanticised slogan of ‘student power’. Far from being a bid for ‘student power’, the Naxalbari movement was marked by masses of students leaving prestigious campuses to join the peasants’ struggle in the countryside. It was the peasants’ revolutionary bid for power, betrayed by the CPI(M), that students all over the country came out to support. It was these students who bore the brunt of the ‘white terror’ of the early 70s, and were the heroic martyrs killed in cold blood on the streets and police stations of Kolkata. Rather than being out of tune with the mood for democracy, they were at the forefront of the struggle against the authoritarianism of the early 70s that was a rehearsal for the emergency. Gorakh Pandey’s lines from Khooni Panja about the Congress’ regime of repression captures this reality: “Sattar mein kasa kalkatte par, kuch jawan umangon ke natey/Kas gaya mulk ke gardan par, pachhattar ke atey atey…” (The bloody hand gripped Calcutta in 1970, to crush some young dreams/Its grip tightened on the nation’s neck by 1975).
The CPI(M) document also fails to locate the roots of the phenomenon of anarchy and violence in North Indian campuses. It says, “The outside environment of criminalisation of politics and antisocial activities impacts on the campuses. This violence also affects the democratic rights of the students and in most of the campuses, students union elections are not being held for a very long period.” Elsewhere it says, “The legitimacy of the demand for holding students union election also stands questioned due to the growing violence which takes place around them.” The CPI(M) thus blames the bans on student union polls on anarchy, lawlessness and violence, and tacitly legitimizes the ruling class justification for such bans. This is because the CPI(M) is unwilling to confront the fact that ‘anarchy’ and ‘lawlessness’ is not something restricted to student politics; rather it is enmeshed in the commercialized and corrupt culture of college and university administrations and their political masters. The bans on student politics are not so much a response to campus violence but are intended to crush the potential for student movements against fee hikes, privatization and other anti-student policies; and the bans on student politics in turn foster anarchy. The CPI(M) document, like SFI’s practice in North India, completely fails to recognize this and therefore depoliticises the issue of bans on student unions. It is AISA which, in the campuses of Bihar and UP, has posed a challenge to anarchy and lawlessness by offering a popular platform of a student movement demanding campus democracy.
The CPI(M) document mentions “a new challenge” in today’s times: “The blind opposition to the state is acting as a complement to neo-liberal offensive against the state. This is leading to broad anti-Left umbrella platforms emerging where they extreme Left and the extreme Right cohabit. This also compounds the problem of depoliticisation.” This theorization, on the face of it, appears strange. Where on earth does the CPI(M) find extreme right student groups displaying any ‘blind opposition to the state’?! Don’t all right-wing groups like NSUI and ABVP create consent for the state? But the accusation that ‘extreme right and extreme left cohabit’ gives us a clue to what the CPI(M) is implying. The accusation of ‘a ultra-left and right mahajot’ is a familiar one leveled by the CPI(M) both in West Bengal and in JNU too, where the CPI(M) policies are increasingly discredited in the wake of Singur and Nandigram and the SFI has suffered electoral reverses, and in the case of JNU, total rout in the Central Panel. All those on the Left who oppose the CPI(M)’s support for corporate land grab are branded as ‘blind opponents’ of the state, of development and progress; as ‘anarchists’; as promoters of ‘depoliticisation’.
The real live political impulses of students - be it their response to the call of Naxalbari or their rallying with the protesting peasants of Singur and Nandigram, Kalinganagar and Khammam, the same impulses that Chandrashekhar best represented - are a direct refutation of the CPI(M)’s feeble attempts to wash the enduring and continuing legacy of Naxalbari out of the history of the Indian student movement.
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