NLSIR On Line #7: A Conversation with Dr. Nivedita Menon on Higher Educational Institutions and Student Politics and the Law

Q. You have recently warned against characterising the pre-2014 era as being a utopian era for academic freedom, while also recognising the shift that has occurred since. In your assessment, do higher education institutions have the necessary institutional autonomy and academic freedom? Has it been encroached upon? What are the implications for learning, knowledge, and the wider political democracy?

Post 2014, there is absolutely no autonomy, even for public universities. I emphasise on public universities because it was possible for them to establish democratic practices.

The structure of the university was inherently hierarchical from the very beginning, long before 2014. The structure involves the head of the institution, namely the Vice Chancellor (VC), who was always a political appointee. The VC is always appointed by the government, and the VC has the final say. So, democratic practices that worked, worked because of the VC being a liberal individual. When the VC was not a liberal individual, none of the democratic practices in place would work.

The big shift that has happened since 2014 is related to the way in which the ruling government has, over the last 12 years, collapsed all institutions into itself. There is actually no space for any institution, be it the ED (Enforcement Directorate), the CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation), the Election Commission of India, to function as an independent and autonomous institution. They work as employees of the government.

Given all this, it is very clear that universities have lost whatever possibility of autonomy they had. Faculty appointments are the major way in which universities are being transformed, because procedures are not followed while making these appointments. They’re all actually illegal. For example, there are rules for who will be on the panel of experts of the constitutional selection committees, and none of these rules are followed. The structure of courses has been changed through the NEP (New Education Policy). The NEP has two very clear objectives, which are being fulfilled: (i) the end of public education, and (ii) the neo-liberalisation of education, which entails  the creation of a workforce for capitalism that is not trained in critical thinking, but to perform certain functions at various points in its life. The NEP clearly says that we want to train students to hold three to four jobs in a lifetime. If someone wishes to hold three to four jobs in a lifetime, that’s a different matter. But we have an educational system that is geared towards producing people to fulfil what David Graeber called ‘bullsh*t jobs’. Students are being trained to be in jobs that capitalism, neoliberalism, and the saffronisation project require them to hold. I am using saffronisation to mean a normalisation of and a legal status to Hindu Rashtra. Educational patterns and syllabi are being changed to establish that. Consequently, there is almost no autonomy with the universities.

Q. Given that public universities do not enjoy institutional autonomy anymore, some have suggested that the alternative way to secure academic freedom is privatisation. However, as we have seen recently, private universities don’t seem to fare any better at protecting their faculty or students’ freedom of speech and expression. Do you think there is hope for academic freedom in India? And is privatisation the way forward?

Private universities are also not autonomous. In fact, they are less autonomous than public universities. Firstly, they still need to get land from the government. This applies to public universities as well. Government land implies land acquisition which entails huge injustices. All large scale landowning institutions were precluded by some kind of land acquisition which may or may not have been fair.

The second reason why they are not autonomous is because they are driven by private funding. Private funders have their own agendas. Public universities, on the other hand, are run on taxpayers’ money. And if the procedures are in place, if it’s a functioning democracy, if illegalities are not happening, then we are really talking about a situation in which the systems of the university are obligated to the ordinary people of the land. This is because the government derives a larger portion of its income from indirect taxes. So, every auto driver is paying for a student who studies in an IIT or even a relatively less expensive place like JNU or DU. Given this, I don’t see any inherent possibility of greater autonomy in private universities. Unless the VC is a good person, and there is a group of good people who are also very wealthy, who therefore have land that they own. But the degrees that they confer will still have to be accepted in the rest of the country. What are these degrees going to be worth if the government doesn’t recognise them? So private universities are not inherently more autonomous. In fact, public universities are inherently likely to be more autonomous.

Q. If we shift the focus from institutional autonomy to individual autonomy of faculty members and students in the current geopolitical situation, we find many academic institutions being, in some way, complicit or implicated in the imperialism, neocolonialism, and genocide. One visible indicator of this is research funding, or the lack thereof. And there is a sense among academics that it is not possible to avoid being implicit in these systems in some ways. How does one navigate that? Is boycotting, like the BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, and Sanctions) Movement the potential pathway? Is that a potential pathway or what? As someone who is vocally pro-Palestine, how would you sort of navigate these systems?

It is really complex, as you know. First of all, I do support BDS and I have been a supporter of BDS and of Palestinian independence from the beginning. The complexity arises with the issue of academic freedom, which is distinct from and narrower than freedom of expression in general. Academic freedom, as in the freedom to speak in academics, having spaces to encourage critical thinking, to be able to speak critically of anything and everything, involves an obligation to allow multiple points of view, both in our syllabi and in our classrooms and in the university space. For instance, if I am teaching a course on feminism, it’s not as if the arguments for and against abortion will not be discussed, or the arguments for and against sex work will not be discussed. No course would or should express only one point of view. That is what academic freedom is. Academic freedom implies the responsibility to address every view. In a classroom, I am very clear that I espouse X view over Y view. My reasons for doing so may not be shared in the classroom. If a student writes an answer or an essay or a term paper which is completely opposed to my personal position and to the way in which I have structured the course, I have to go by how the student has done the work. If the student has read and represented various points of view, then the position that they take cannot affect their grade or the respect that I have for that student. That is an ideal situation we ought to aspire to, and that I certainly aspire to.

But what is the difference between a boycott position that we might take, and the restraints that institutions place on faculty and students expressing certain views? Are they equivalent? Let’s say that I am boycotting an event in my university in which the Israeli ambassador is coming to speak. I am mobilising for that boycott, it means that I am taking a position. Is that equivalent to the institution penalising faculty and students when we protest? They call us hypocrites for opposing the expression of the ambassador’s views, but having a problem when we are punished for expressing our views. This is the typical kind of right-wing whataboutery which we can very easily demolish because we are talking about two very different situations. Faculty and students who are boycotting a person expressing an ideology are, in a sense, punching up. I love this term. I have learnt it from stand up comics. There must be some other history to the term, but I have learnt that a good stand up comic punches up so you don’t joke about ideas and people who are weaker than you. You attack the dominant paradigm. Boycott by our faculty and students is an expression of academic freedom, because I would not prevent the talk from happening if there are enough people who want to hear it, but I would certainly be all for protesting outside. So we are targeting dominant institutions and ideologies. But the other side, the institution, is not only backing the dominant ideology, it is also backing the state, with its coercive apparatus. It is using all coercive instruments at its control to punch down. That’s the clear difference. When we say we will not accept the visit of the Israeli ambassador, we are punching up. We are not preventing the event from happening. And I don’t think we should. We are going to make it difficult for the event to happen smoothly. We are going to place obstacles in the way by simply producing ourselves, our bodies in that space, and holding flags, shouting slogans, maybe making enough of a racket outside that he can’t be heard inside. But when you’re punished, your voice is being silenced, and the coercive apparatus of the university gets backed by the coercive apparatus of the state in doing so, because the police get involved. So the university’s closeness with the coercive apparatus of the state is also becoming more and more common. The police are commonly called by the university, either by individuals in the university or by the university itself as an institution. 

This is a side point, but I have also noticed that there’s an increasing presence of military personnel who are invited to speak on campuses. I am absolutely appalled by this. What sort of connection with the coercive apparatus of the state is the university displaying when it does this? They say it’s about patriotism, but is patriotism only related to the coercive apparatus of the state? It’s only when you think of war and military and hatred for the other that you can think of patriotism? That’s not my patriotism. But I just want to say that I do support BDS and this is the way I’m able to ethically defend it. Israel is also a very special case in two ways. Firstly because the land grab and occupation is very recent. In one sense, every nation state is based on some form of land grab and whether it is the native indigenous peoples of North America or Australia or India, where lands have been taken over from Adivasis and farmers. So land grab is a common aspect of the state. That is how the state rules. But Israel’s case is particularly pernicious because it has a very recent history, not in a dim and distant past, and because it involves genocide. The Palestinians have to be exterminated in the way in which Native Americans were exterminated two centuries ago. If we had been there then, and if democracy was active, then we would have protested then too. The second reason why Israel is a special case is because of compulsory military conscription, which means that every adult in Israel has at some point stood at a guard post and harassed Palestinians, if not actually shot them or been violent towards them.

Q. As a follow up, we have seen in the US when BDS encampments on campuses were going on, a lot of police entered campuses. Student protesters were expelled and their funding was revoked. If the endowment model cannot protect academic freedom, what can? In a resource scarce country like India, how can we protect academic freedom? Can we do that through legislation or through a change in culture?

I think that all we have to do is go back to the principles expressed in the preamble. The judgments which grant bail to arrested students, journalists, intellectuals, activists, don’t produce any new law. They simply reiterate principles of rule of law. There’s no jurisprudential creativity involved. They simply restate the rule of law, which means that in all the other cases, rule of law is being violated. There is rampant violation of rule of law in this country, supported by the courts. That is what I’m talking about when I say that the government has absorbed all institutions, and separation of powers is almost absent now. So we don’t need anything new or to produce university autonomy.

Coming to the question you raised about funding. It depends on where the endowment is coming from. So far as far as I’m concerned, I believe that education should be free, and I believe we already have the resources for it. Those resources come from taxation. There should be much higher taxation at the highest level. Income inequality around the world has radically sharpened, and Oxfam reports tell us the extent of it. The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few happened because the government withdrew from the social sector and directed money towards the private sector. It has withdrawn from health and education, and is pushing towards privatisation in these areas. Privatisation is literally handing over resources to the already rich. So I don’t think that we are resource poor at all. I also think there should be freedom for private universities to exist, and people should have access to them. But it should not be a situation where public universities are just ramshackle messes. The way in which there is a huge difference between government schools and private schools. In Delhi, we saw how the AAM Aadmi Party government was able to actually transform government schools without any additional taxes. I am not sure about endowments. Endowments from the state are alright, because in an ideal democratic situation where the state is actually not controlling all other institutions, public universities are the way to go. Public universities can actually protect academic freedom by simply taking the values of the preamble seriously and respecting rule of law. 

We have the right to free and compulsory education at the primary level but their excuse for not doing it at higher levels of education is lack of resources. I’ll give you one example of JNU, where the access to databases is becoming less and less. At one point they even stopped access to JSTOR claiming lack of resources. It was only after students agitated, that they got JSTOR back. But at the same time, the university was spending 30 to 40 Lakhs on face recognition technology at the library gate, which the students had objected to as well. The buildings in the university are crumbling, but instead of spending on them, they are spending that sum on facial recognition technology. Facial recognition technology doesn’t actually stop theft of library books, it controls who is allowed to enter, use the library, and issue books. It also enables data mining. This data is stored somewhere and it is going to be used in some way. Digi Yatra and other apps also do the same. Data capitalism is using our bodies as natural resources to survive. So where is the shortage of resources? They evidently have resources. The JNUTA (Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers’ Association) has shown that as the budget for the library was slashed, the budget for security was increased. And it’s not for the security of people on campus, because, as you know, there have been at least two big, physical attacks by outsiders on campus. One of our students, Najeeb, is still missing. He was definitely attacked and we don’t really know what happened to him. This was so many years ago and we still call him missing because that’s all we know about him. So when these things happen, the security is not there. The security is there to treat JNU like occupied territory. I should not use that term so lightly, because I know what occupied territory means in the case of Palestine, so I am using it just now like a metaphor. But security is there to ensure compliance.

So there’s no shortage of resources. We need to ask them what are you spending your resources on? The  JNUTA showed that they are spending on security and not on the library, the students showed that facial recognition technology costs this much even as access to JSTOR was limited.

Q. What has been your experience of teaching amidst such active student politics in the JNU? In your capacity as a professor or as an administrator, have you supported or opposed politics on campus?

I don’t think any of us as faculty intervene in student politics. These kinds of protests that I am talking about, none of them have been planned or designed by us. We are informed that such and such a thing is happening. Most of us would not permit any of this kind of politics in the classroom. When student groups come to mobilise for some event, I don’t even ask what group are you from? They simply cannot enter while I’m teaching. They have to come at the end of the class after I’ve left, and if they are there before I come in, they have to leave once I come in. So, most of us treat the classroom space as a very different kind of a space from politics.

The way in which we end up supporting them is when student groups organise talks and things outside the classroom on specific issues. They might also call some of us, so when we speak at those events, we are marked, and it’s very clear what our politics is. But that is happening outside the classroom and if anyone was able to show that that is affecting my treatment of the classroom, I think that would be a very serious issue. We see that happening with certain new faculty. They do let their politics affect how they treat students.

Our support is shown because there are two elements to who we are in a university. One part of it is we are faculty and students. But the other part is that we continue to be citizens of this country with certain political views which we have every right to express, and the campus outside the classroom is a public space and we can express our views in that public space. I think that is perfectly legitimate.

One of the things the government is trying to do is to treat us as civil servants. Civil servants are direct employees of the government, and they don’t have the freedom to express their views, whereas we as academics have these two personas and we insist on preserving this distinction. Our work is different from the work of bureaucrats. They can’t express their views and have to watch silently as institutions around them crumble, but we don’t. We insist that we are not governed by Civil Service Conduct Rules and we are a different category of employees.

Q. We see numerous student protesters like Umar Khalid facing violence and being kept in jail. On the other hand, if you are aligned with the ruling disposition, if you are powerful, you will often get bail very easily, for example, the cases of Brij Bhushan Mishra and Kuldeep Singh Sengar. How can the law shape its values so as to not be excessively carceral? How can it ensure neutrality in its treatment of people with opposing viewpoints?

I want to start by saying that the law or courts don’t need any extra backing or any new kinds of interventions in order to make them do their job. As you can see, every time there’s a judgement that upholds rule of law, they say that we are reiterating the rule of law in some way or the other. I want to go back to a certain critique of the law that I have made in the past and I still make. Around the 18th century the law emerged as one of the instruments of establishment of bourgeoisie rule. As Marx put it in the 18th century, the law itself became the instrument of the theft of people’s land. That is what he said with reference to England. So law was established in order to normalise the new capitalist regime that had come out of feudalism. Gradually, with the emergence of democracy, democratic movements started using the law for their own purposes and they were able to make the law perform certain emancipatory functions. That is, they were able to use the values that liberalism attributed to capitalism, namely, liberty, equality, and demand that law deliver on them. So the law is then used to deliver on these promises, and it does serve an emancipatory function for some time. For example, the right to vote gradually. But it took a long time, early to mid 20th century in many parts of Europe. It was only in the Global South that there was never any question of women not voting alongside men because their anti-imperialist struggle meant getting as many votes as possible. Not that anti-imperialist struggles were any less patriarchal, but there was more of a feminist element. Once law becomes that tool for bringing about social transformation, the paradox of sameness in difference emerges. Should the law treat people similarly or should the law recognise differences? This is not a paradox that has been resolved. And in a sense, it cannot be resolved, because what feminists and counter hegemonic voices would say is that we need to think of equality not as formal equality, but a substantive equality. In every context the law has to decide where the sameness will lead to justice or difference will lead to justice, right? So there’s that, that paradox that happens now.

Under these circumstances, by the time we come to the middle of the 20th century, the question becomes, is the law serving its purpose? And one kind of critique with which I am fully in agreement, is that the law is being perverted. There are perversions of the law. There is a perversion of rule of law. That is what is happening now with all the kinds of imprisonments that you’re talking about, not just of people who dissent, but also of opposition leaders and so on. You just lock people up and run the country. So the perversion of the law is enabling the powerful and the corrupt to get away. Another perversion of the law is it becoming an instrument of state power. For example, the Babri Masjid demolition, where the judgement eventually said that the demolition of the Babri Masjid was illegal, but we are giving the land for the building of a temple anyway. Now this is the normalisation of ethnocratic democracy, of the idea that there is a majority community in this country, namely the Hindus, and their views and interests are paramount. The judgement shows that it is expressing the state’s view. So that’s a perversion. If the law has to recover any kind of legitimacy, these perversions have to stop.

Q. We live in times where the men’s rights activists are getting more organised, and the manosphere is increasing its footprint on the internet and social media. How do you, as a feminist scholar and activist, understand this counter revolution of sorts, and what are the ways in which feminists can combat it?

It is a counter revolution. That is very well put. It is definitely a counter revolution, and it is happening across the globe. In the US, for example, every right that has been won by feminists has been withdrawn. The right to abortion has been withdrawn. The critical gender theory is being treated as some kind of criminal enterprise and unless you say there are only two biological sexes you’re breaking the law. It is criminal to say that the binary sex model begins from the 18th century, and in the Global North it’s very much backed by conservative Christianity and its view of how god made humans. So, there is a counter revolution in the sense that the rights are being rolled back. In India also we see this counter revolution and a backlash. Susan Faludi uses the term ‘backlash’ to describe the attack on the new world that feminists have managed to create. What we see in this domain of social media that we’re calling the manosphere, is patriarchy speaking back, patriarchy reasserting itself, or trying to reassert itself in multiple ways. Every instance of misuse of the Domestic Violence Act or the Dowry Prohibition Act will be used to make a larger argument that there is no such thing as domestic violence or dowry harassment. If a sexual harassment case is supposedly proved to be wrong, then there will be the claim that there’s no such thing as sexual harassment. We should expect this. It is a sign of the success of the feminist movement, of the queer feminist movement, which has challenged the binary sex model, which has challenged normative heterosexuality and patriarchy It has challenged every pillar of an unjust world. Sections of queer feminism take into account caste and class very seriously. So if you have a kind of a queer feminist transformation of the world, which also takes into account savarna privilege and class privilege and challenges every hierarchy, then why would we not expect those who were at the receiving end of the advantages of that hierarchy to push back? They will push back. There is a backlash. 

How should feminists deal with it? We should also push back with more speech, so I am not for banning any of this expression; I don’t think that we should ever be demanding censorship. We need to be on social media with, with counter counter-revolutions, with counter voices, and we are. For every meme that Andrew Tate-ish, there are enough reels by women and queer feminists of all genders speaking back. So if there’s a backlash, there’s also a push back from us. And that push back has to continue at every level.

One thing I will add here is that the manosphere in India thrives on the laws that supposedly protect women, and it focuses its energies on how they need to be dismantled. These laws, like the Domestic Violence Act and the Dowry Prohibition Act protect women in marriage. We need to speak up much more with a critique of the institution of marriage as it exists today, which is the heterosexual patriarchal marriage, which is also virilocal, where the wife has to move to the husband’s home and adjust. So this institution is doomed to suppress women. Courts often use the term ‘the sanctity of marriage’ in their judgments and orders. When you say ‘sanctity of marriage’, you’re establishing it as an unquestionable institution. Because sanctity means that something is sacred. It’s like a sacred book. You don’t question the teachings of the sacred book. We need to produce discourse outside of this which continuously talks about ways of being intimate which are not policed by the state.

There are two more things I wanted to say about marriage, one has to do with marriage equality and the demand for queer marriages. And I would support that because at this time, marriage is the only legal institution that protects an intimate relationship. If you want to be able to leave your money after your death to someone, or if you want to make someone the nominee for your life insurance policy, or if you want someone to have the right to pull the plug during your last days, you don’t have any other institution, but marriage. Those biological family members who might have actually disowned you should not be able to step in at the time of your death and take your property, because they will. They will get priority in courts because the biological family is prioritised. The other thing I wanted to say is something I discovered recently with the summary revision of the electoral roles. This data came from Yogendra Yadav and Rahul Shastri; they’ve written on this. They’ve collected the data that women are inordinately excluded by SIR (Special Intensive Revision). The SIR software does not accept women’s in-laws as their relatives. So women who have left their homes and villages over 30 years ago, are summarily removed from electoral rolls. Now what happened to your sanctity of marriage? Again they are only looking at biological relationships, and not this new relationship in which the woman has to remake herself. So look at the contradiction involved there.