1. The academic sphere is coming increasingly under the sway of the two-pronged offensive of commercialisation and saffronisation. The NDA government is working overtime to implement the recommendations of the notorious Birla-Ambani
report. The fact that for the first time a task force on education was constituted not with educationists but industrialists wedded to global capitalism was itself a clear indication of the intent of the government. During the colonial period, the system of modern education founded by Lord Macaulay was designed to produce sufficient clerks for maintaining the British colonial rule in India. Today’s Macaulays want to reduce the system of higher education in India to an assembly line that will only turn out ‘knowledge workers’ who can generate superprofits for the American software monopolies or run call centres for foreign multnationals. Physicists of the RSS school like Murli Manohar Joshi and Sudarshan are only adding a saffron tinge to this scheme by introucing a subject like astrology so that some of these ‘knowledge workers’ can also produce computer horoscopes for this fatalistic nation!
Privatisation and commercialisation of higher education has led to unprecedented fee-hikes in every stream of higher education. Availability of seats is also on the decline and students from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds are virtually being banished from the arena of higher education. Service conditions of teachers are also being redefined and the very notion of university automony and democratic atmosphere in the campuses is being systematically diluted and subverted.
2. The most dangerous saffron onslaught is however taking place in the area of school education where the BJP government has launched a campaign for large-scale rewriting of textbooks, especially history and redesigning the entire curriculum so that impressionable young minds can be thoroughly indoctrinated in the Hindutva variety of cultural nationalism. In fact, the RSS wants to dovetail the school system with its own private educational network. The battle for the minds is central to the fascist project of the RSS and the Vajpayee government is running this campaign on a war footing. The education ministers of opposition-ruled state governments have so far been quite vocal against the BJP’s drive to saffronise education. Now that the Supreme Court has okayed the ongoing revision of text books and changes in curriculum, it remains to be seen how far the non-BJP governments are really prepared to resist the BJP on this score.
3. While the system of higher education is being dismantled, unemployment is assuming explosive proportions. The path of ‘jobless growth’ adopted during the last decade, has not only failed to generate new job opportunities, it has also led to massive destruction of existing job avenues. The lollypop of creating any number of new jobs through information technology has proved a big fraud. The government’s own reports and the estimates made by task forces appointed by the Planning Commission have all had to admit that the number of educated unemployed people is growing at an alarming rate. Even with most favourable assumptions like a GDP growth rate of 6.5% and a growth rate of workforce pegged only at 1.8%, total unemployment is projected to grow by more than 9 millions in the next five years and by another 12 millions over the next five years.
The Saffron brigade is trying to channelise the frustration and anger of the unemployed youth on communal lines and militarising them through programmes like Trishul Diksha. Historically, fascism has always used the reserve army of unemployed youth as cannon fodder.
4. Under these circumstances, our student-youth comrades in AISA and RYA have to play a crucial role in organising the students and youths in ever larger numbers and directing their anger and frustration towards a powerful democratic movement.
Most of our old AISA leaders and activists have finished their student lives and are currently working on other fronts. In most states and even on the national level AISA is currently being run by a relatively new batch of cadres. There has however been no break or discontinuity in the organisation’s multifarious initiatives. Together with their RYA counterparts, comrades of AISA have undertaken several major campaigns and programmes over the last five years. Among the prominent AISA-RYA programmes during this period have been an impressive march to Parliament in November 1998, the staging of a parallel student-youth parliament in Delhi on 28 April 2000, the Faizabad Shaheed Mela this year on May 10-11, 2002 and most recently the September 28 demonstration in Delhi demanding recognition of Bhagat Singh as a national hero and display of his portrait and statue in Parliament. They also took active role in mass political campaigns run by the Party. Among state-level programmes the march to Darbhanga following the killing of several youths during an army recruitment test, a padyatra in West Bengal on the issue of employment, a student-youth assembly in Patna on the issue of develoment, gherao of the UP Assembly on the issue of fee-hike and demonstrations in Varanasi against saffron vanadalism during the shooting of the film Water merit particular mention. Student comrades have also been prompt in organising relief campaigns in the wake of major natural calamities like the super-cyclone in Orissa and earthquake in Gujarat.
5. In campus elections, AISA has however got very few recent victories to its credit. Only in Uttarakhand colleges and universities have our comrades succeeded in winning major victories in recent years. In JNU, after a very poor performance in the last couple of elections, there has been a modest increase in our votes in the latest union elections. The Delhi University campus has always been dominated by the ABVP or NSUI, and AISA has still not been able to make any major inroad in the campus. It has been finishing a distant third or fourth in the students’ union elections. However, new teams are gradually coming up in both JNU and DU and also in UP campuses like Allahabad and Varanasi. In Patna we are now on a course of recovery with new students again getting attracted to the organisation. In Kolkata too, we have at last made an encouraging beginning in Jadavpur University.
Apart from these major campuses, AISA units have a functional presence in several colleges and district centres in Bihar, U.P., Uttrakhand and Assam. Ocasional activities are also held in Punjab, Orissa and Tamil Nadu.
The youth organisation is present more or less in all major states. There are elected state committees in U.P., Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Jharkhand, while occasional initiatives are taken in Assam, Orissa, M.P., Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka etc. The total membership of the organisation is still below 50,000.
6. Despite laudable initiatives on major issues, our student and youth organisations are still very weak. AISA remains largely confined to certain campuses and organisational network in muffassil colleges is very weak. While paying special attention to some key campuses it is important to spread the organisation among students in colleges in district and block headquarters. Attempts should also be made to reach out to high school students and carry the AISA message to them through various socio-cultural activities. Only in a few districts of Bihar do we have this kind of network. Also in the major campuses, while retaining its revolutionary orientation, AISA must try and emerge as a popular platform of broad democratic students.
At the time of the Strengthen-the-Party Campaign, we had emphasised that mass organisations, especially RYA must not remain confined to merely organising campaigns on national issues but must concentrate on developing area-based work. There was consequently a shift in emphasis for some time and it produced some good results, but it is yet to become an integral part of the organisation’s own character and agenda. A drastic change is needed in this regard.
If the youth organisation has to grow and acquire a character and identity of its own, it cannot happen merely on the basis of sporadic and symbolic protest campaigns on major national and international issues. Without day-to-day area-based work, the organisation is bound to become formal and remain confined to the Party’s own mass base. With little scope for government jobs or organised employment, large sections of the unemployed youth nowadays remain engaged in various kinds of self-employment or part-time employment of a most uncertain and exacting kind. Organising the unemployed youth therefore often means organising young people who are self-employed or semi-employed youth. Indeed, in some areas RYA activists have taken the lead in organising unorganised workers. Civic amenities, issues like electricity, water and health care, corruption in local administration, etc. are all important material for youth activism. Only the other day, RYA comrades in Balia town, UP successfully took up the issue of negligence on the part of the local hospital administration. It grew into a powerful agitation winning the active support and sympathy of large sections of the local people. The agitation continued for quite a few days and ultimately the district administration was forced to retreat and release the arrested leadership of the movement. This is just an example which shows the political potential of local issues.
Integration with the basic masses and their struggles has always been upheld as a key component of the revolutionary orientation of our student-youth movement. In recent times this orientation has become weaker. Our student-youth comrades did however play an exemplary role in standing by the rural poor in facing police repression in Jehanabad district of Bihar and in the Mirzapur-Sonebhadra-Chandouli region of UP. In this era of grave economic crisis, the student-youth movement must forge closer ties with the worker-peasant movement.
The student-youth organisations should also maintain living links with certain specific streams of the democratic movement like the human rights movement and campaigns on issues pertaining to people’s health, environmental preservation, literacy and scientific awareness and the like. q