On the afternoon of 6 March, student activists gathered outside the office of the Dean of Students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in response to a call put out by the students’ union to “Occupy DoS.” Their demands ranged from hostel allocations to the withdrawal of disciplinary enquiries against students. Although the protest succeeded, differences over the methods used by students put paid to the Left Unity alliance—already shaky due to ideological disputes—that had been a pillar of campus politics since 2016. The alliance’s two biggest groups, the Students’ Federation of India and the All India Students’ Association, parted ways, mirroring the rift between their parent bodies—the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) (Liberation), respectively.
“Initially, we were united,” Gopika Babu, a doctoral student and a former SFI councillor at the university’s School of Social Sciences, told me. “All four office-bearers stood under the JNUSU banner and called for the occupation of the DoS office to fulfil several demands,” she said, “but things unravelled quickly due to undemocratic decision-making.”
“We consistently tried to build an alliance,” Nitish Kumar, a third-year doctoral student from the AISA who was elected president of the JNUSU this year, told me. At its national congress, held at Madurai in April, the CPI(M) formally adopted a resolution that the union government was not fascist but exhibited “neo-fascist characteristics.” The AISA expressed its discomfort with this stance during school-level general-body meetings held before the JNUSU election. “We could not let an organisation lead the alliance if it did not even acknowledge that fascism exists in the country,” Nitish said.
A key feature of these general-body meetings is the convenor’s report, a year-end summary of the work done by a school’s councillors, which is presented before the student body for discussion and a vote. The report’s passage or rejection is seen as a verdict on the work of the convenor—who is elected from among the councillors—and on the policies of the political groups they represent. The AISA members in the School of Social Sciences abstained from voting when the convenor, who belonged to the SFI, presented the report. “Through that,” Nitish said, “we aimed to highlight that the CPI(M)’s stance, which denies the rise of fascism in India led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, is deeply problematic. They do not even acknowledge it as neo-fascism; they merely describe it as having neo-fascist tendencies.”