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What Indian universities can learn from Oxford about student politics

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Palash Krishna Mehrotra
Palash Krishna MehrotraMay 10, 2017 | 09:06

What Indian universities can learn from Oxford about student politics

On May 6, Partha Chatterjee, West Bengal’s education minister, announced that the state would now be following the "St Xavier’s model" as far as student politics in colleges was concerned: "We don’t want the involvement of political leaders in student body elections. Student bodies should function as apolitical units." 

A week earlier, Allahabad University had witnessed violence and arson, after four students were arrested. The university has seen sporadic, at times sustained, violence for almost three decades.

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Elections

In the wake of the Lyngdoh Committee Recommendations (LCR), its first clause of mandatory elections was violated by universities like AMU and BHU, which didn’t hold any elections for a decade. The universities that held elections, Delhi and Allahabad, blatantly flouted LCR’s norms governing money and muscle power.

To keep students away from politics is like keeping adolescents away from sex. You can try, but chances are you will fail in doing so. If you are successful, then you can take the blame for producing a self-obsessed generation which worships only money and has no social conscience.

Politics as public engagement is vital to producing future citizens of a democracy. Let me personalise the argument a little. Allow me to take you with me from Allahabad University to St Stephen’s College, Delhi, which followed the St Xavier’s, Calcutta, model, to Oxford University where wings of political parties have always been involved in campus politics, but which has never seen its educational standards being dragged down.

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Growing up in Allahabad, I loved university elections. Coming home after school in a trolley rickshaw, we’d have to wade through marching campaigners. With every slogan, "Hamara neta kaisa ho, Anugrah Singh jaisa ho", the supporters would throw pink and green pamphlets into the air. We’d be out of the rickshaw and running around trying to grab these fluttering pamphlets — because they were scented.

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To a five-year-old it was candy. This was my first impression of student elections. That they smelt good. My father was a professor at the university but it would keep shutting down because of student unrest. At 17, after my school-leaving exams, everyone said: "Why go to big bad Delhi, when the Oxford of the East is here." 

I wanted to flee. A cocktail of street politics, crude bombs and country pistols is not education. I joined St Stephen’s. Here was democracy in a petri dish. Political parties were banned. During morning assembly, we had American-style presidential debates between the candidates. There was room-to-room campaigning based on "community" issues: a tube light in every room, a washing machine in every residential block, better T-shirts and hoodies than last year.

Priorities

One could already see the priorities shrinking. The young elite of the country was cut-off from the issues facing the nation. We rarely discussed caste, religion, economic policy or any of the big issues in our student elections. For that we had the adda under the tree.

When I met friends from JNU, it reminded me of Allahabad, with its culture of dharnas and gheraos. The St Stephen’s model suited me just fine. Then Oxford.

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My second day I was roped in for a protest against a hike in tuition fees. My first protest. We tied pink balloons around our ankles — a metaphor for ball and chains. We got photographed for the student’s union newspaper. The entire protest lasted about 10 silent minutes, and then we headed straight to the Balliol bar to sink a pint of Tetley’s bitter.

This would be the last time I’d participate in a protest. Activism, I realised, didn’t run in my veins. Beer did.

Two things of note here. The protests in Oxford were small in duration, not lasting for days like in some Indian universities. It was a short film, not Ben Hur. The rest of the time you were in the library. In a university of "toppers", there is far too much peer pressure to perform.

System

Oxford seemed to have a perfected a system which was a mix of JNU and St Stephen’s. The Tories had the Oxford University Conservative Association, a student organisation founded in 1924. Labour had the Oxford University Labour Club, founded in 1919 to promote democratic socialism. The Green Party was beginning to sprout shoots in the 1990s and so on.

So Oxford, unlike the Xavier’s model, welcomed political parties. It suffered no academic migraines as a result of this. But Oxford also had a glue of a degree that cut across political lines — the degree I did, the PPE (Philosophy, Politics, Economics).

The Guardian wrote this February: "The Oxford PPE pervades British political life. From the right to the left, from the centre ground to the fringes, from analysts to protagonists, consensus-seekers to revolutionary activists, environmentalists to ultra-capitalists, statists to libertarians, elitists to populists, bureaucrats to spin doctors, bullies to charmers, successive networks of PPEists have been at work at all levels of British politics — sometimes prominently, sometimes more quietly — since the degree was established 97 years ago." 

India needs a degree like this, which trains you in critical thinking, energises political consciousness and produces informed individuals who can make creative choices.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)

Last updated: May 10, 2017 | 16:00
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