

Read here:—JNU Diary Part 1: Communists Fake It All



Most of the time, it is subtle. The teacher would make snide remarks about you as you pass through a corridor and, sometimes, even while a lecture session is on — if you do not happen to share the teacher’s political ideology. It is not necessary that you are affiliated to the ABVP or the teacher owes his/her allegiance to the CPM, CPI or CPI(ML)-Revolution. The professor might have been a communist when s/he was a student in JNU years ago, or the constant company of communist colleagues has had an influence on his/her mindset.



Saying so, however, would sound no better than a right-winger’s pet theory. So, let’s study some specific cases.

There is an associate professor. who, students say, has boasted about having reached out to Parliament House attack convict Afzal Guru at the Tihar Jail when he was alive. She says she used to carry food to the criminal on death row. During a chat on the campus, a girl student pooh-poohed the associate professor’s ‘feat’. When it was this otherwise promising girl’s turn to face the oral exam for her MPhil, she got a grade of 4.7 whereas a minimum of 5 is required to move to the next year. This student is an OBC.



When questioned by the unfortunate girl’s classmates, the associate professor said that the girl’s presentation skills left a lot to be desired.

Recently, some newspapers had carried stories of caste discrimination in the JNU administration and campus which, curiously, came up juxtaposed with the Rohit Vemula story as though the same set of people were responsible for the acts of discrimination in both the varsities.

ABVP students cutting across different centres of humanities in JNU have been complaining since the NDA government took charge at the Centre that the professors openly threaten them with comments like: “Let’s see how long Modi lasts; he is not going to be around for 50 years, will he? Who will protect you then?”