Essay

Handling student indiscipline

IN contemporary times, educational institutions such as the universities have witnessed progressive deterioration and decay all over India. At the superficial level, such decay is often attributed to multiple and interrelated causes, including political interference in the appointment of institutional heads, deteriorating educational standards due to paucity of academically excellent faculty, weak training at the primary and secondary levels of schooling before students are admitted to university, and growing student indiscipline. As institutions begin to decline rapidly it is difficult to rebuild them. The immediate victims of any decline are the students; in the long-term, of course, the entire country suffers because educational planning is meant to make good citizens who can, in turn, run various kinds of public and private institutions. Instead of analyzing the general decline in the institutions of higher education, this article sheds some light on student indiscipline, with specific reference to the University of Allahabad (UoA). It also discusses how such indiscipline was gradually curbed after the UoA became a central university in July 2005 and underscores some of the notable achievements of the UoA during the transitional phase from state to central university.

The significance of central universities (CU) in the educational landscape could be understood as follows. The CUs are funded entirely by the central government through the University Grants Commission (UGC), while funding for state run universities (SU) primarily comes from the respective state governments. Apart from the issue of funds, CUs are supposed to be pan-Indian/national and, in theory, attract talent in all the desired areas from across the country. In contrast, by and large, geographic and linguistic restrictions tend to shape admission and faculty recruitment processes in state run universities. However, even if CUs have the potential to perform better than SUs, it would be inappropriate to make any sweeping statement on the performance of either of these categories. For instance, the SUs such as the Universities of Pune, Jadavpur and Madras were among the first five universities chosen for their potential for excellence in 2001. Similarly, even among the CUs, there are several that are plagued by parochial and narrow identity politics. However, more often than not, the interference of local forces and politicians is generally more direct and intense in SUs rather than the CUs. The functioning of the UoA prior to its central status is a case in point. It was customary for locally influential people to take minute interest in the functioning of every aspect of the university. Liquidating well-entrenched vested interests and bringing the UoA in line with established CUs was thus a challenging task that had to be undertaken in the transitional phase. Before discussing these challenges, it might be useful to briefly reflect on the conventional notion of a university.

The university as an institution can best be construed as a product of both modernity and liberalism of the West European countries. Consequently, at least in theory, the universities or the realm of universities offer a space where a diversity of cultures, ideas and thoughts co-exist and even flourish. Ideally speaking, universities are sites where creative individuals with catholicity of temperament tend to think and carry out fruitful intellectual debate and interaction, orally as well as through publication. Tolerance of diversity, intellectual and cultural, is central to the very ethos of any worthwhile university. Even if universities in their ideal form are difficult to locate in our context, there are some that have made an effort to do well. In fact, for a long time in its history, the UoA was ranked among the towering centres of academic excellence in India. However, over the span of decades, especially since the late sixties, the UoA gradually began to deteriorate as an institution and lose its enviable reputation. By 2005, the UoA was virtually devoid of any peace, discipline, high culture and a vibrant intellectual ambience. It suffered from a few typical drawbacks of state run institutions such as paucity of funds, narrow base of students and faculty, extraordinary political interference in appointments, contracts and matters related to the students union (SU), a huge backlog of litigation and overall intellectual stagnation. However, even if the UoA seemed to be almost dead, in a very Shakespearean sense, one could always spy life appearing in the hollow eyes of death. For, within the university as well as the city of Allahabad, there were a large number of people who continued to entertain the dream of recapturing the lost intellectual glory of the UoA.

Along with a dream to rebuild the UoA, there was a revolution of rising expectations about brighter career prospects within the UoA, as the university community aspired for more funding and other benefits such as travel or medical facilities on par with the central universities in India. However, apart from the rights/ privileges that accrue from the central status, certain inconvenient questions regarding their immediate duties such as the lack of a work culture, undue politicking in the campus and proclivity of the faculty to eschew academics too needed to be confronted. Transforming a sick institution incontestably required a drastic change in mindsets. In our collective endeavour to rebuild the UoA we had to sensitize everyone to the fact that if it took over three decades to ruin a university, the rebuilding process, in turn, would demand equally sustained and collective work from all sections of the university over a long term. This was an uphill task because negative thinking, cynicism and destructive mindsets of a few people were ever available to stall the progress of the institution. Such individuals were habituated to writing incessant letters of complaint to the government and its funding agencies, releasing negative press reports, abusing the Right to Information Act (RTI) through countless queries, or filing writ petitions on every minor matter at the Allahabad High Court. Often, the student leaders were also used to promote such activity. In fact, one root cause, which perennially disturbed the smooth functioning of the university, was of course student indiscipline. It might be worthwhile to probe the specific conditions of lawlessness that conditioned the campus of the UoA by offering a perspective on the student bodies like the then Allahabad University Students’ Union (AUSU).

Student indiscipline had reached its heights during the elections of the AUSU of November 2005. The AUSU, incidentally, can claim a memorable past. It threw up several national leaders during the freedom struggle. However, like all other bodies of the UoA, the AUSU too had experienced a steep decline in ethical standards. Thus, in order to contest elections, candidates would virtually fleece innocent citizens by asking for monetary contributions, thus disturbing the entire city. They would extort money from a wide range of people – from managers of coaching classes to shopkeepers and doctors. During the November 2005 elections, the walls throughout the city were plastered with posters that would repel the aesthetic sense of any sensible individual. The Allahabad High Court had to intervene and summon the VC to ensure a clean up before the election results were announced.

Unfortunately, just as the elections got over, a grotesque form of violence manifested itself in the murder of one of the candidates, outside the premises of the campus, and at a time when the All India Universities (AIU) had organized one of their annual vice chancellors’ conference at Allahabad. The murder not merely sent shock waves throughout the entire city, but made every other VC think afresh about the role of the students union. To add fuel to the fire, the murder was followed by citywide riots and curfew. Hoodlums gathered to beat up the policemen and eventually the threat of mob violence by anti-social elements even forced the police force to flee the scene in self-defence. As the elected representatives of AUSU assumed office in December 2005, the situation took a further turn for the worse.

A section of teachers, local politicians as well as some members of the then executive council (EC) of the university had a habit of playing an active role in the affairs of the AUSU. In a highly politicized city as well as the university, it was never easy for politicians of all hues to remain distant from the AUSU, as it could easily be used as a vehicle to promote their own agendas. It had almost become customary for a section of teachers and local politicians to use students for their own ends to organize anarchy. The term ‘organizing anarchy’ sounds self-contradictory, but the sensibilities of the university community were by this time so blunted that exercising pressure through students had become a way of life. Faction ridden teachers found in ‘indecent’ students a weapon to attack each other’s group, even as the local politicians viewed such alleged leaders as a resource to be tapped for their political activities. The student leaders behaved like mercenaries hovering around local politicians, including teacher-politicians, and performing different jobs for them. Unfortunately, the VC’s office too had become a site of contending factions, including those based on caste, keen to seize power so as to execute their factional agendas. Even though there is no conclusive evidence about some of the teachers’ penchant to harbour criminalized students for their personal ends, the intertwined nature of teacher and student politics was well recognized. There were moments when student indiscipline was nothing but an outward manifestation of clashes among factions within the faculty.

The nature of politics on the campus was complex because most of the alleged student leaders would use their status to earn some income through foul means. This situation mirrored the backwardness of the state, marked by limited job avenues. Thus, hanging around the campus in the hope of eventually joining politics as a business or vocation was common among the students. Such professional student leaders were so old by conventional standards that one of the candidates for the AUSU presidential elections had a son studying in the university and actively canvassing for his father! Most seasoned student leaders were involved in nefarious activities, including tampering with the mark sheet of fellow students on payment, obtaining construction related or other such contracts, charging money to shout slogans and disrupt the campus, arranging migration certificates, and so on. Since they came to university to earn their livelihood through such petty activities, the university to them was no different from say, the Road Transport Authority (RTA) office.

Such student leaders also had an unmitigated ambition to lead, irrespective of their age. Every year, to establish their ‘credentials’ before the new batch of students, these leaders would demonstrate their strength by gathering mobs in front of the vice chancellor’s office with media personnel in toe. As soon as the VC came out of the office, he would be greeted with slogans and a bunch of ‘alleged’ students would surround him and be photographed along with him, and these images would be flashed by the local television channels and printed in the local papers. The media personnel, underpaid as they often are, also found such activity a useful way of filling up the newspaper columns. The city at large was habituated to reading negative news about the university. Unsurprisingly, negativism and cynical comments would accompany any conversation related to the university. Any excuse, even concocted charges such as leaked examination papers or incapacity of the administration to fulfil (unreasonable?) demands served as a sufficient provocation for hoodlums to resort to agitation. Can educational institutions bloom in such an insecure and unfriendly atmosphere? In fact, destabilizing the functioning of an institution and forcing it to plunge into anarchic situation had become a routine practice.

Student mafias are a peculiar phenomenon in university campuses and the UoA too had its share of them. The key defining feature of these mafias was their total disrespect for the rule of law and any form of order. Consequently, they constituted a mini-underworld within the UoA and functioned like brokers to subvert the functioning of regulatory bodies. They also formed an important part of groups that would strike alliances to operate the university system through a chain of corruption for a share of the spoils. For parents and needy students, the system of a mini-underworld that student mafias ran had proven capable of co-opting or even buying off sections of clerical staff to process their requirements. If people showed any reluctance to comply, the mafias would often gather hoodlums and threaten them. Pressures created through vandalism and mobs naturally had a magnetic pull for the media and press. As soon as the news was highlighted through the media, the resultant public pressure usually forced the helpless but honest members of the university community to yield to the pressure and give in to the demands of the mafias. Thus, the mafias were habituated to influencing entrance tests, admission processes, examination schedules, marking and every other academic activity. Most of the hoodlums are cowards because they lack the courage of conviction, but it was the sheer timidity of decent individuals that emboldened them. Thanks to the favourable surroundings that the university campus provided, a large number of anti-social elements resided in the comfort of student hostels.

The university hostels thus functioned as a breeding ground for mafias for generations. Owing to the sizable number of illegal inmates in the hostels, it was never easy for the wardens to take these illegal elements head on and often the police had to be summoned to do the job. Since unauthorized occupants were a recurrent feature, police intervention too had been a regular and legitimate phenomenon in the cleansing process. Besides, the mafias residing in the hostels were involved in perpetuating other criminal activities – from kidnapping and extortion, to transactions in drugs and arms. As a result some of the hostels were under the watchful eye of the police.

Given the magnitude of indiscipline that affected the institution in practically every aspect of its functioning, it was initially difficult to move. However, such acts of indiscipline reached an intolerable limit when the alleged student leaders forcibly entered the VC’s chamber on 3 July 2006 and disrupted the proceedings of a selection committee by misbehaving with the external experts. The maintenance of law and order according to the Indian Constitution is a state subject. Though the university administration sought the intervention of the highest authorities in the police force from the city of Allahabad, no help was forthcoming. As it had become difficult to run the university normally, a resort to unorthodox measures was the only answer. We thought it important to building public opinion against indiscipline, and we did so through a peace march.

A peace march was organized on the 4 July 2006, from the Senate Hall to Gandhi Bhavan, to protest against the prevailing indecency on the campus and to symbolize our resolve to recapture the erstwhile glory of the university. An unprecedented number of students, teachers and non-teaching staff gathered near the Senate Hall of the university. The march began with slogans supporting the VC and condemning the acts of vandalism and other anti-social activity. It was a historic march as the VC and the entire university community turned up in large numbers to stand up for decency and academic excellence and against the recurrent onslaught of hoodlums. Thousands of people who were a part of that historic moment condemned the acts of indecency by coining imaginative slogans.

The march received unprecedented coverage in the national news and media. It also gave a moral boost to the entire university community and society involved in the rebuilding the UoA. The public anger and determination to rebuild the university forced the mischievous elements and their supporters on the back foot. Fortunately, just before the historic peace march, in May 2006, the VC along with his administrative team had deposed before the Lyngdoh Commission that was probing the state of representative student bodies and had briefed it about the worsening condition of universities in the state of Uttar Pradesh (U.P), particularly Allahabad. By September 2006, the Lyngdoh Commission recommendations became applicable, bringing in age restrictions, limits to election related expenditure for student bodies and laying down minimum classroom or laboratory attendance requirements for valid candidature. Noting that the universities in the state of U.P. were in an abysmal condition due to student politics, the Lyngdoh Commission recommended universities in U.P. to postpone the formation of representative student bodies for at least three years. In a word, the alleged student leaders were forced to go into hibernation.

Coincidentally, the Allahabad High Court, in its order of December 2006, declared that the then student union president was not a bona fide student of UoA and cancelled his election and requested the VC to appoint another president from among the candidates who had contested in the November 2005 election. Despite severe pressure from politicians across party divides to nominate a new AUSU president, obviously of their own choice, the VC decided against filling the post. Within a few days, the one year term of the AUSU was over and the university decided to form a representative body of students in line with the recommendations of the Lyngdoh Commission.

Both the relevance and quality of student representative bodies depends upon the specific circumstances in which a university functions. There have been student bodies like in the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi that functioned, at least during the seventies, in a civil manner. The debates in the students’ general assembly meetings were often educative and intellectually stimulating. In contrast, certain universities like the University of Pune have no tradition of student bodies. Incidentally, both these universities are among the top universities in the country and the existence and non-existence of student bodies has in no way made any difference to their academic standing. There cannot be any hard and fast rule about the necessity of student bodies, because all such bodies have both positive as well as negative consequences, depending upon the social circumstances under which they function. However, such bodies can and should function only under conditions where the main work in any university, that of imparting and creating knowledge, is not hindered. If such bodies routinely disrupt the functioning of universities by turning them into a battleground between mafias, they have no raison d’etre to exist. In fact, a sizable number of students from remote areas with financially and socially weaker backgrounds are admitted every year in the UoA, desirous of studying and acquiring skills. There is no need to squander public money to handle student indiscipline that stems from ugly union politics.

Unfortunately, the VC in places like the UoA is under constant pressure from all quarters to conduct student union elections at the beginning of every academic year. Fortunately, such pressures were collectively resisted by the administration in the interest of a peaceful and academic atmosphere for a majority of students. Although, in principle, representative student bodies are essential, in a transitional phase from state to central university, we felt that the environment was not conducive for the functioning of any worthwhile student body in the UoA. It was more important that the faculty, students and non-teaching employees be first sensitized to their new responsibilities. It is not easy to rebuild an ailing institution along with the existence of student bodies in their vulgar form. In fact, such bodies often foreclose the possibility of any worthwhile academic, cultural and intellectual activity. The universities, after all, cannot become nurseries to nurture criminal elements.

When the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) regime assumed power in 2007, it officially banned student bodies all over the state. However, the UoA, as a central university, was not under state jurisdiction. Even though the BSP-led regime had banned SUs, there was pressure from the central government to hold elections in all the central universities in U.P. Members of Parliament from the Samajwadi Party (SP) continually raised the question of student union elections in the Parliament. Local as well as central Congress leaders too felt the need for elections. Under the circumstances, the VC of the UoA was caught in the crossfire between the Centre and the state government. The situation was particularly tricky because the representatives of the BSP-led regime made it abundantly clear that they would not rush to aid the university should elections cause a law and order problem. Without police support it would have been impossible to hold elections or even run the UoA. However, if elections were not held, it would obviously displease the Centre, a situation that no VC of a central university can afford. In fact, when different parties lead the state and central governments, the VCs have to display a great deal of tact.

In this case, there was a general perception, within the university community and society, that the UoA could only function smoothly if there were no elections. The fear of lumpen elements that historically dominated the campus as well as the city during the election season frightened parents, teachers and most people in society. Under the circumstances, the VC along with the UoA bodies like the academic and executive council (AC and EC) opted to stand firm, and assert the autonomy of the university from both governments. In an autonomous organization, the nature and scope of the student body has to be worked out with reference to the law of the land, as per Lyngdoh Commission recommendations. To us it was clear that due to restrictions on union related activity after 2006, the UoA had enjoyed a far more peaceful and academic ambience which helped pave the way for several major achievements.

The unprecedented change in the university became conspicuous with the passage of time. The UoA was among the first universities in India to have a master plan drawn by a talented young architect. The faculty took the initiative to draw up an academic vision plan for the next twenty years by building programmes with interdisciplinary content. The examinations were now conducted as per schedule. The gradual introduction of the semester system, credit system, letter grade marking in some departments, and all-India entrance tests for admissions in six centres dramatically changed the composition of students. With an improvement in the laboratories, libraries and acquisition of sophisticated equipment, as well as computers, the research output of the faculty increased noticeably. The establishment of new centres and departments and the presence of bright, young and talented faculty as well as officers among the non-teaching staff began to improve the profile of the university. The campus started bustling with intellectual fervour as each department organized national/international seminars. The alumni convention of February 2008 witnessed a unique gathering representing a galaxy of several extraordinary stalwarts from different walks of life. It revived the dream of transforming UoA into an outstanding institution. A few days before this gathering, with the approval of the central government, new ordinances of the UoA were promulgated, which now gave a sound legal base to run the university.

Further, a campus recruitment drive initiated by the university helped more than three thousand students find employment in different industries with handsome salaries. By 2010, the UoA students had started doing remarkably well in all the all-India entrance tests, including the civil services examinations, and examinations conducted for junior research fellowships (JRF) or the national entrance test (NET). Besides, construction of new hostel buildings and faculty quarters, or completion and renovation of different buildings, and initiation of the construction of one grand building helped make the UoA an attractive destination for Indian as well as foreign students. Further, even the medical college and hospital that fell under the central university for a few years, was efficiently managed with disciplined personnel and the latest facilities. Unfortunately, the ‘status’ of the Motilal Nehru Medical College and the Swarup Rani Hospital represented a classic illustration of a tug of war between Centre and the state. Following an act of Parliament and the Allahabad High Court judgement, both these institutions fell under the UoA. However, given the desire to control precious property of these places in the centre of Allahabad, erstwhile state control over admission process and stakes of vested interests in purchase of drugs and equipment, the state government contested the manner in which the central government had brought these institutions under its control in the Supreme Court. If the VC was forced to contest the political regimes in the state in the Supreme Court indefinitely, it was feared that such regimes might not extend cooperation in the running of the UoA. Thus, even though these institutions had improved noticeably, keeping the long-term interest of the UoA in view, the central government opted to delink these institutions from the UoA in July 2008. In the aftermath, interestingly, the state government offered the desired support to the UoA in matters related to law and order. Eventually, the UoA could be turned around due to a peaceful ambience that facilitated sustained, committed and systematic efforts by all the sections of the university community. Now, more often, the press and media are replete with positive reports about the functioning of the university.

To conclude, universities cannot function in the face of student indiscipline and hence, indiscipline in any form has to be firmly put down. For, if the cancerous growth of indiscipline and crime permeates every vital organ of the university system, the student bodies can turn into catalytic agents of diverse anti-social or disgruntled groups and work as a stumbling block. Ideally speaking, in order to establish a peaceful campus, the governments at the state as well as at the central level jointly need to extend all cooperation to universities by protecting their autonomy and curbing unwarranted political interference. Arguably, student bodies should be formed on the campuses where intellectually inclined, dynamic, idealist and positive minded students can dream and debate over the likely role of younger generations in changing this country. As India has a sizable young population, the future naturally belongs to the youth. However, idealist youngsters can find self-expression and viable channels to release their creative energies only if they get an opportunity to study in sound and healthy educational institutions.

Rajen Harshe