They demand Azaadi from the Indian state. For Kashmir, for Bastar, for Nagaland, for Bengal. Azaadi for pretty much any place except JNU itself where they lead cushy lives of “revolution” at the expense of the same Indian state.

Which makes them objects of curiosity for the general population. Why is it that every anti-national duck with a quack finds an echo chamber inside their walls? Why do they fling their waste at us? Is it because they are mad, or just pretending to be mad? Is there a method to their madness? Are they stuck in a time warp or are they forerunners of the times to come?

For the general public, it’s an itch that needs to be scratched. JNU is the longest running and biggest hit reality show of our time. This is why JNU student body maintains permanent missions in every “national” media house on the stretch from Noida to Gurgaon.

But there is a question that no one ever seems to ask : How did the red aliens of JNU get there in the first place?

They didn’t come to JNU riding on a meteorite. They crawled out of our own general population. Somehow. But how?

Let’s see. JNU has been a leftist stronghold since …. well almost since… liberals used to openly say that Communism is a good idea. The student body at JNU is refreshed rapidly every year with students from all over the country. There’s no question of a “vote bank” in a constantly shifting population. It is well known that the support base of Communist parties is an insignificant fraction of the general population. Yet year after year after year, JNU’s entrance procedure miraculously manages to pick out an overwhelming majority of radical leftists.

The odds of this happening by pure chance are so slim that we are better off going with the meteorite based extraterrestrial origin theory.

Somebody has to look at all these kinds of red finches that make the island of JNU their home : CPI, CPI(M), CPI(ML), CPI(ML)L … and tell us how they came to be.

Two clear possibilities emerge.

The first is evolution, i.e. the incoming students had to adapt to become suited to their red environment. Unless they adapt and turn red themselves, they won’t survive. Because of the gaping power differential in a professor – student relationship, this in itself should be sufficient grounds to initiate a detailed probe into the conduct of faculty members at JNU. Are vicious left wing faculty at JNU forcing their students to become Communists or perish?

The second possibility is intelligent design, the more disturbing theory. Is there someone directly tinkering with the admission process to favor cadres of a particular party? If so, this is an outright punishable offense and someone has to go to jail for it.

The reaction to the recent UGC notification is a telling sign.

What happened. Well, the UGC issued a notification limiting the total number of MPhil and PhD advises to around 8 per faculty member. This caused the number of available seats at JNU to drop precipitously from a typical 1000 to just 194!

What! Putting a limit of about 8 students per professor led to an 80% drop in the number of available seats! This can only mean that faculty members at JNU are currently “advising” far more students than humanly possible for any working scholar. It is conceivable that the experimental sciences need more people to work the labs. But, experimental sciences form a tiny minority at JNU. How come social science faculty have such a staggering number of students?

Is it possible that some folks at JNU were hiring party cadres to pose as “students”? The question needs to be asked.

If JNU was a ministry and JNU was hiring thousands of workers from the party of the minister, the media would have called it the “JNU scam”. And it requires a probe.

The task for the right wing is to impress upon the general public that the need for such a probe goes beyond any political or intellectual vendetta. The case of JNU pulling in an overwhelming majority of its students from a tiny fraction of the population needs to be investigated like a scam. Such as all the luckiest land deals in Haryana accidentally getting snapped up by one particular gentleman over and over again for a decade.

We know that large numbers of faculty members at JNU are Communists. And we see that Communists keep getting lucky at JNU entrance year after year. There’s no real difference between this observation and, say, a politician whose ministry keeps awarding tenders year after year to the firm owned by his family members. In both cases, we should smell a scam and we should have a probe.

And like any neta caught on the wrong foot, JNU faculty subjected to a probe will scream political vendetta to try and save themselves in the court of public opinion. You can’t let that get to you. What India needs is a full investigation into the “JNU scam” to fix guilt and accountability. Someone at JNU needs to go behind bars, but not for celebrity crimes like sedition. Perhaps someone at JNU needs to go behind bars for corruption.