I am old enough to remember the far worse 1983 repression at the JNU- in which Nobel laureate Abhijit Bannerjee was put in jail. The truth of the matter is that the State, irrespective of who is running it, will not tolerate anarchy so close to its centers of power.

Moreover, the BJP and the ABVP are the least thuggish of the various Student outfits. This is why its own student members prefer to have crazy Leftists- who have good ties with the Media- to head up 'bread and butter' protests- e.g. over hostel fees. The reason they reacted with violence this time was because they felt the Left had overplayed its hand. The cause was already lost. Thus, when the Left used violence to prevent the ABVP registering their students, they called in a retaliatory strike.



The Government is tapping into popular sentiment against pampered students who are studying worthless subjects and will be unemployable- unless they already had an elite, English medium, education. Moreover, economists have stopped saying that having more PhDs- even in soft subjects- will boost FDI and economic growth. This is because it is obvious that students who receive nothing but ideological indoctrination can't get jobs. Thousands of PhDs end up working in jobs which require just an Eighth Grade education.



It is commonplace to speak of the BJP as Fascist. Yet it was the Congress which acclaimed Gandhi as 'the Il Duce and Fuehrer' of India. Sonia Gandhi's father was an actual Fascist who volunteered to go fight the Russians. In any case, Fascism is about beating Communists in the streets. Mamta Bannerjee (who started off in the Congress party) has plenty of experience of being beaten by Communists. Then her goons gained the upper hand and beat the Communists with vim and vigor. Consider the 2014 Jadavpur Student agitation. It was caused by Mamta's goons grabbing a girl student and dragging her into a hostel. TMC goons and the police beat the students with great ferocity. Mamta organized a popular rally against the students. Now Jadavpur Students jump before they are asked to do so by the TMC goons. They live in fear of TMC thugs.



When the JNU was set up, it was supposed to be a center of excellence- especially in Languages and the Social Sciences. However, by 1983, everybody knew it was useless. That is why Indira could have her goons thrash the students with vim and vigor. They retreated into their ideological shell. In 1989, they started beating each other over different attitudes to the student uprising in Tiananmen square. This signaled that the Left had lost the plot. In the Nineties, the politburo refused to let Jyoti Basu take the Prime Ministership for some arcane ideological reason. Thus the campus Left's 'long march through the institutions' was bound to end in Paranoid fantasy. Why speak of battling Fascism? Few Indians know what the word means.



Prof Ghosh says millions of Indian citizens will be rendered stateless. This is false. An illegal immigrant is not a citizen and is not stateless. Thus if I enter America and overstay my visa, I am not an American citizen. Nor am I stateless unless I can prove I would be persecuted in my country of origin. Non Muslims have had to flee Islamic regimes. They may be considered stateless because Courts may say that there is a real danger they will be killed or forced to convert if they are sent back. However this is not the case for Muslims who, for economic reasons, wish to reside in another country but who do not qualify to do so under existing law.



The problem with the current agitation is that it is based on a lie. It is not the case that Indian Muslims will be stripped of citizenship. Just speaking their own mother tongue is all the proof of citizenship they need. As for illegal migrants, the fact is they may wish to leave places like Assam which are not doing well economically and go to the South where their sobriety, good character and labor power will make them welcome.



An agitation which identifies a genuine 'bread and butter' issue can succeed. It can even bring down the Government- e.g. the Nav Nirman movement in Gujarat which contributed to the formation of the 'Janata Morcha' in the Seventies. Take the case of the 'Lokpal' agitation. Corruption was a bread and butter issue. Everybody who was protesting had had to pay a bribe at one time or another. This contributed to the fall of Sonia's regime. Arvind Kejriwal will probably win another term as Delhi CM thanks to his strong stand on this issue.



By contrast, the Left has lost the plot. Its antics are a godsend for Amit Shah! Why make a fetish out of beef and pork eating? This is repugnant to most Indians. Why pretend terrorists- who are hated by Indian Muslims- are actually revolutionary martyrs? Why tell lies to try to scare Indian Muslims? They will soon see they are being used by paranoid fantasists.



The biggest losers in all this are Indian students from poor backgrounds. They are told they can get ahead by getting Academic credentials. But the Academy is incompetent and corrupt. The worst Professors are foisted on them. They become less employable. Their life-chances decrease. Just recently a Muslim Sanskrit scholar was appointed to teach Hindu priests. This was crazy! Either the man would be forced to do things repugnant to Islam by engaging in 'idol worship'- which is what the priests have to be taught- or else he would not be able to do the job for which he was being paid. Thankfully, the University administration relented and gave the young Muslim savant the job he really wanted and was qualified to do- viz. teach Sanskrit poetry (much of which is erotic and obnoxious to trainee priests).



In the case of the Hindu priests- ordinary people could understand immediately that a Muslim can't teach rituals he himself has never performed. However, in Economics, how can the ordinary person know that a particular Professor has been talking ideological nonsense for the last four decades? Getting a PhD in that nonsense makes you unemployable. Of course, if you have an elite background, this does not matter. Your connections will ensure you can emigrate to teach that nonsense at Ivy League. Alternatively you get a sinecure with the UN or an International NGO. But if your English is poor and you come from a rustic background, you have to apply for a job as a security guard. This is very unfair to the 'subaltern' class. India's future does indeed hang in the balance. It must close down worthless Academic Departments. It should offer proper support to BPL students- e.g. rigorous training in idiomatic English. It must remove the 'bottlenecks' in labor supply of 'job-ready' young people which industry has been loudly complaining of.



Education must not be about feather-bedding senile fantasists who believe they are saving the world from Fascism, Nazism or (Mukul Kesavan) the Spanish Inquisition.