#Hokkolorob (let there be clamour) has been India’s largest hashtag movement to date, involving over sixty thousand people in more than one hundred countries. It is also the first university movement in India to command a ninety five per cent student referendum against sexual harassment in the workplace, and as much for the restoration of democratic practices, beginning with a demand for the removal of the vice chancellor.¹ In a more layered manner, it also represents a resistance against processes of state intervention that are doing irreparable damage to institutions of higher education right across the country.

What started in September 2014 as a series of Jadavpur University students’ protests against the problematic handling of a reported case of sexual molestation on campus on 28 August 2014, and against the subsequent police attack on peacefully agitating students, rapidly went viral and erupted into a massive movement. Yet, it also seems to have faded out of sight equally rapidly – after the resignation of the vice chancellor in January 2015. Was #hokkolorob then merely an evanescence? Or does it carry lasting significance in the lives of the students, and for the future of educational institutions in this democracy?

I venture to address this question with two caveats. The first is that hashtags have opened up such new vistas of political experience that one may not even be in a position to recognize every one of them as yet, far less assess adequately the nature of such ‘digitized’ student movements today. Also, I am as wary of the pitfalls of writing this from an ‘insider’s’ vantage point of one of the majority of teachers who actively supported #hokkolorob, as I am appreciative of the lived understanding we have gained of the challenges that teachers and students can actually pose when they finally decide to stop being silent witnesses to the demolition of the finest ideals that a university of repute can uphold.

 

On the night of September 16, the interim vice chancellor, Abhijit Chakrabarti mobilized the police into a violent crackdown on students; it took place in the dark of night, under conditions of an engineered electrical blackout. Policemen and women, and reportedly plain clothes outsiders too, armed with sticks and heavy boots, unleashed brutal violence on the students, and allegedly manhandled everyone, including women. Approximately 40 students were taken to hospital, two of them admitted into the ICU, and 36 arrested, with most taken to the Lalbazar lock-up in police vans.

Within exactly three days the student protests spiralled into ‘#hokkolorob’, taking on the dimensions of a global protest. On September 18, more than 400 of the 600 teachers of Jadavpur University walked in silent unison across the campus, their makeshift posters on pages torn out of exercise books quietly endorsing both demands with a power no political oratory could have summoned. Students found themselves lining up in a veritable guard of honour right across campus, stunned into pin drop silence at this show of solidarity. It was the quietest day ever at J.U., and in that quietude was forged a unique bond between teachers and students based on a memory of values shared in the classroom and their translation that day into shared commitments in struggle.

On September 20, an estimated hundred thousand people marched under the banner of ‘#hokkolorob’ in Kolkata, despite a massive downpour. Students had come from right across the state and country to join them, as had reputed intellectuals, cultural stars, and ordinary citizens of Kolkata. On September 25, J.U. alumni and other students spearheaded actual demonstrations in cities across India, and in one hundred countries across the world, in the #hokkolorob global protest. The movement spread like wildfire via social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and specially on the backs of hashtags such as #Students Against Campus Violence and #hokkolorob, with just this latter earning 56,745 ‘likes’. In fact, according to Keyhole, a hashtag tracking tool, #hokkolorob alone had a reach of 342,130 users in the week the VC resigned.²

Students boycotted classes for more than a month; then teachers and students together resumed classes and ensured that examinations were held on time in December. After all, a prime slogan was ‘Save JU’, educational interests had to be safeguarded. Then the movement escalated again.

 

By 6 January 2015 students had launched into a fast unto death. Parents, teachers, as well as other friends and students from as far as Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi University, began fasting in solidarity with them, some even choosing to do so quietly, in an act of conscience rather than one of political strategy. For those keeping tabs on this phenomenon, it seemed like an unbelievable nationwide fast, one that elicited deep wonderment, especially about the younger generations’ serious investment in non-violent modes of protest. By the 6th day, the fasting students’ conditions had turned precarious, but they remained steadfast in their resolve. Parents were worried, teachers were worried, and then, we realized, politicians were too. On the evening of 12 January 2015, the chief minister followed the higher education minister into campus on a flash visit, and announced that the Vice Chancellor Abhijit Chakrabarti had resigned. Knowledge of whether the woman who complained of sexual harassment on campus received justice or not was, however, resolutely buried in a local quagmire of contesting interpretations of the confidentiality clause in the Sexual Harassment Act 2013.

 

Hashtag movements have been redefining politics in ways we have only just begun to understand. From the Arab Spring to Canada’s Maple Spring, the student movements in Chile and Venezula, Shahbag in Bangladesh and the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, the singular common factor has been mass mobilization. Hashtag movements , however, differ from both the ‘slacktivism’ and ‘clicktivism’ of the digital media. While all disseminate information and generate awareness, #hokkolorob, for example, was clearly not a case of ‘slacktivism’, with gizmo bound individuals sitting in isolation clicking a petition or two a day as self-satisfying ‘feel good’ measures, irrespective of the political effect of the action. Neither was it limited to internet organizing of real life protests, or participation through on-line parody and satire as is the case with ‘clicktivism’. This was still a real life, flesh and blood phenomenon, sustained by the euphoria of shared identification and collective action on the field; it was a movement in which activists put actual futures into some jeopardy in terms of the possible loss of an academic year and the possibility of being marked for future reprisals, and a struggle in which they risked the physical hazards of further police atrocities and put their very lives on the line in the final fast unto death.

A unique dimension of this movement was the rallying power of its refreshingly original creativity. It was evinced in the impact of the evocative slogan that also stretched across the entire road on the banner carried by the injured students leading the resistance march of a hundred thousand people in Kolkata: Lathir mukhe ganer sur, dekhiye dilo Jadavpur (Countering their blows with song, see how Jadavpur showed them down). And it underlined the witty jibes against the VC: Ei VC ke chiney nao, OLXey beche dao! (Check this VC out now, sell him off on OLX now!) and in its sequel: Ei VC ke chinlo na, OLX-o kinlo na! (This VC, they didn’t accept him/Even OLX didn’t deign to buy him!)

 

The pompous oratory and clichéd slogans of political parties had given way to moving refrains and feisty chants, parodic posters, caustic cartoons, gripping graphic novels, disturbing sculpture, and upbeat songs and videos inspired by the movement (which itself had drawn its name from a popular song sung by the Bangladeshi musician, Arnob). Much of this was created or at least uploaded on the internet.

#Hokkolorob taught us a new lesson in political culture – about the potential of on-line creativity for the forging of real life political solidarities. The use of digital media had transformed on-line individuals from passive receivers into active shapers of content, from observers of activism into activists themselves. As Alterman emphasizes in his 2011 essay, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted’: ‘…among the most important roles of social media is one that has been little commented upon: the way in which they allowed a large number of people to see themselves as activists because they were creating content.’³ The outcome was palpable in the passionate investments of the creative activists who formed the bedrock of the movement.

 

This generation of students had accrued many unsavoury labels – ‘consumerist’, ‘self-centred’, ‘apolitical’ – and many of us could only understand their ‘apathy’ at best as a ‘cynical’ rejection of the opportunist political culture of party politics. Yet these were the very students in whom we saw a flourishing of the ethics of freedom combined with responsibility, a commitment to the ideals of gender justice, contempt for authoritarianism and an investment in the collective values of solidarity. Almost overnight, we saw them fighting for the very values we felt we had been unable to draw them to, which had also led some like me into questioning where we may have gone wrong. #Hokkolorob brought home the glad realization that all was not lost; what became evident was that this generation had been in need of new modes of activism in the transformed age of digital media, and a new political culture to confront the intensified corruption of party politics.

One obvious advantage of the hashtag was that it brought together people, from a widely diverse range of social backgrounds and political ideologies, on an egalitarian platform. It had evolved its own on-line solidarities and organizational methods that were capable of resisting repeated attempts at appropriation by various political parties. It was too vast, too new, too internally varied, too net savvy, too intoxicated with its own creativity, and too heady in its own discovery of a new found voice, style and comradeships, to be co-opted by any of the hierarchical ‘old-fashioned’ political organizations.

Horizontal networking and sharing of knowledge had become the chosen mode of political education; #hokkolorob brought in a range of news everyday – of 80,000 students out on the streets protesting the corporatization of education in Italy; of the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong and the students’ movement in Himachal Pradesh; of the Maruti workers union’s demands, of the resistance movements in Latin America. The oppressive political culture of party hierarchies had been replaced with a mutually stimulating one of reciprocal sharing. In fact, the richness and diversity of thought generated in the absence of even an ‘official spokesperson’ is one of the memorable hallmarks of #hokkolorob, one that also made it difficult to curb the movement.

 

Yet, the passion also combined somewhere with reason, and with mutual respect – the top down disciplinary practices were replaced with more open negotiations and participatory decision making. Conflicts there were many, and these students began to tackle the difficulties of actual democratic practice, of negotiating across a range of political persuasions, across multiple takes on violence and, of course, across the politics of the different faculties of arts, science and engineering too. Gladwell, in his now famous 2010 essay, ‘Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted’, may well have argued for the necessity of a strategic, hierarchical organizational structure, like the Al Qaeda used to have and most political parties still do, for taking on a powerful establishment.⁴ One could also posit the advantages of an experienced leader ‘manning’ the controls and taking strategic decisions in times of crisis, or discuss the need for rigorous theoretical and ideological training many political parties impart to their members. Yet, in the face of all these considerations, #hokkolorob did demonstrate that egalitarian, horizontal, more democratic solidarities may also be effective.

The new political culture forged by #hokkolorob is creative and ardent; yet, most admirable is its determined quality of restraint and its choice of dignity as a language of politics. That the students managed, concertedly, to stave off violence, not only in action but also in their sloganeering, was a singular achievement. In an age of escalating brutality and use of weaponry, #hokkolorob was carried on the strings of a guitar and the strokes of a paint brush, on the words of a song and the keys of a computer. This movement also restored collective fasting as an influential strategy of resistance on the contemporary map of political action. And what prevails as perhaps its most evocative representation is a series of images of Convocation Day – of one student after another going up on the stage, bowing with a polite namaskar and a shake of the head to refuse the degree, and then walking away quietly, reminding us that human dignity may be as powerful a springboard of effective political action as it is of political demand.

 

The burial of the issue of violence against women, which has become one of the key concerns in Bengal today, and was also the launching pad for #hokkolorob comes as no surprise, for it is symptomatic of the slow destruction of democracy that is clearly affecting institutions of higher education. Within days of the massive march, but only after it, the higher education minister and then the chief minister met the father of the complainant; after which the latter shifted allegiance from the agitating students to the ministers in his media bytes. Silence shrouded the complainant’s own perspective after these strategic meetings. The fact that the students’ demands began to focus more on the removal of the VC and less on the issue of sexual harassment may not be unrelated to this series of events.

 

Underlying the demand for the ouster of the VC were also several other profound questions of democratic culture. One set related to the VC’s running of an institution in contravention of the laws of the land such as the Sexual Harassment Act 2013; in authoritarian disregard of student-teacher relations⁵ of mutual respect and dialogue, with the ordering of police action adding grievous injury to the insult; and in violation of the autonomy of the institution, clearly evident in his open participation in meetings of the ruling party. Even the West Bengal Universities (Amendment) Act (2011), promulgated by the current state government, states that a VC may be removed from office if he/she ‘is a member of, or otherwise associated with, any political party or acts in any partisan manner while in office’ 2.(7)(h).

This act also stipulates that, ‘The vice chancellor shall be appointed from the persons of the highest level of competence, integrity, morals and institutional commitment’ 9.(1)(a).⁶ The other set of concerns related to this – to the moral and academic authority of the head of the university to continue at the helm despite the charges filed against him, of plagiarism, the gravest of crimes in academia; of interference in PhD evaluation committees and selection committees for faculty posts; and of irregularities in financial processes. All of these charges have been presented, with substantiating documents, in the Report on Professor Abhijit Chakrabarti, Vice Chancellor Jadavpur University, compiled by the Jadavpur University Teachers Association (JUTA).⁷ The plagiarism charges were officially confirmed by the Society for Scientific Values, an independent body of scientists upholding ethics in research, while other cases are under trial in the court of law.⁸

 

Notwithstanding all these ethical and legal violations, the fact that on 7 October 2014, the Governor of West Bengal, also Chancellor of J.U., actually reappointed the then interim VC, Professor Abhijit Chakrabarti, as the next full term VC in consultation with the state government, makes it difficult to refute the charges of state control of the university; so does the fact that it was the chief minister, and not the chancellor, who announced the momentous resignation of this VC on her lightning visit to the campus on 12 January 2015. It is significant that when the chief minister declared the news of the resignation, the initial cry of joy from the crowd of students was followed not by cheers of zindabad but by a palpable, hushed silence.

 

As The Economist highlighted in a recent essay, ‘What’s Gone Wrong With Democracy?,’ ‘…turfing out an autocrat turns out to be much easier than setting up a viable democratic government.’⁹ #Hokkolorob had targeted only the vice chancellor, albeit in full cognition of the fact that the latter enjoyed state backing. The representative was toppled, but did the system change? There is still no formal policy against plagiarism. The members of the new Internal Complaints Committee for Sexual Harassment were nominated unilaterally by the next acting VC despite UGC backed recommendations to the contrary.¹⁰ The system of election of deans by teachers had been replaced earlier by one of ‘selection’ from a pool of applicants for the post. Also, the practice of elected representation of teachers to the Executive Council and the Court, the highest decision making bodies in the university, as well as to the Faculty Council, had already been suspended, centralizing power in the hands of the institutional head, even before Professor Chakrabarti had first taken charge.

The autonomy of the university is at stake, and the responsibility for this clearly does not lie with one figurehead alone. Instead what we have now is a rapid expansion of the state, encroaching into private lives through mechanisms ranging from identity cards to internet screening; and into public institutions through surveillance cameras as well as direct financial and institutional control, as represented by the COSA (Computerization of Salary Account) and the Higher Education Council Act. Whether the university, rated consistently as one of the top five in the country, thrives or not will depend greatly on whether or not its autonomy is restored.

 

Was #hokkolorob then merely an inspiring idea that has lived out its time? Was it just an evanescence? Other than the literary meaning of the word signified in this usage, there is another that physicists are familiar with; in their parlance ‘evanescent’ denotes a field or wave which extends into a region where it cannot propagate...¹¹ This signification describes better the limits of #hokkolorob, for the students had only targeted the malfunctioning of the university; their movement was not geared to extending itself to challenge state power, even though the issues destroying the university have their roots in state power.

For it to continue now could mean one of three alternatives. At the time of writing, J.U. has just received a new full term vice chancellor, finally one of considerable academic and administrative repute, who has already initiated much needed dialogue. Whether #hokkolorob revives itself in a cooperative avatar for democratic negotiations it had sought in the first place and the dialogues are successful, or whether it builds up into a larger wave of resistance to extend into regions beyond the university, or just fades away quietly, remains to be seen.

In the meanwhile, one great joy of being a teacher at Jadavpur during the upheavals of #hokkolorob has been to witness profound transformations in our students. Amidst the concern about classes missed, many of us, especially in the Arts Faculty, began to understand the life of the mind differently. When we first resumed our classes – coincidentally, but notably on Kundera, Camus, Shelley – in protest mode in the parking lots, under trees, and in the green zone, we were struck by how much our students had changed in just two months.

Their historical sensibilities had sharpened, as had their understanding of literature and art. Their own creative innovations had enabled them to understand why every new age demands new artistic forms; taking the world into their own hands rather than just being led by the world around them had opened up a hotline to the existentialists; the radical Shelley had begun to carry meaning for them in their own resistance; and they now understood Kundera instinctively – they saw their own struggle to uphold time tested values reflected in his famous lines: ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ Their personal experiences of confronting repression with imaginative thoughtfulness, and their genuine collective investment in something larger than themselves, had fostered unimagined intellectual growth.

 

In the course of their difficult negotiations with each other, their reflections upon the efficacy and wisdom of planned strategies, and their own creative experimentation too, they had traversed much ground, from abstract ideals to the cultural practices of democracy. One of the sobering realities of democracy is that ‘building the institutions needed to sustain democracy is very slow work indeed, and has dispelled the once popular notion that democracy will blossom rapidly and spontaneously once the seed is planted… Although democracy may be a "universal aspiration", …it is a culturally rooted practice.’¹² The experience of activism in #hokkolorob had become, for thousands involved in it, an initiation into the cultural practices of democracy.

Hashtag movements seem to signal recognizable transformations of subjectivity. Other students, in earlier, and also heady yet short lived, hashtag movements have said that each one had ‘Changed all who were in it for life.’ And the measured refrain here amongst erstwhile indifferent or cynical J.U. students has been: ‘At least we fought.’ It is carried in tones of a new sense of self-worth. Such impalpable transformations, in the realms of interiority, are sometimes the most lasting.

This 68 year old democracy is a survivor of many threats; and to each of these the populace of India has responded with massive electoral ousters, such as after the Emergency of 1975 and the communal carnage in Gujarat in 2002 at the national level, and the crackdown on Nandigram in 2007 at the state level. These ousters demonstrate not just the power of the people but also their continuing investments in citizen’s rights and democratic institutions. In the current reign of capital, identity politics and political corruption though, these investments do run the risk of being eroded by elitist, majoritarian and partisan interests; moreover, authoritarian forces do have the power to silence people. In such a scenario, the powerful rekindling of the ideals of freedom, justice and gender sensitivity in #hokkolorob, and the concrete collective experience of the processes of securing them, may well have won a new lease of life for democracy, even if it amounts simply to the courage to refuse to be silenced.

 

Footnotes:

1. Cf. https://www.facebook.com/search/str/hokkolorob%20referendum/keywords_top; http://www.telegraphindia.com/1141113/jsp/calcutta/story_19032413.jsp#. VZl3ThuqpHw; http://www.telegraphindia. com/1141113/jsp/calcutta/story_19032413. jsp#.VZl3ThuqpHw

2. The Economic Times, ‘Jadavpur University standoff: Hashtag Hokkolorob helped make students’ protests viral on social media’, 18 January 2015. http://articles.economictimes. indiatimes.com/2015-01-18/news/58200628_ 1_jadavpur-university-indefinite-hunger-strike-abhijit-chakrabarti

3. Jon B. Alterman, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted’, The Washington Quarterly 34(4), Fall 2011, pp. 103-116.

4. Malcolm Gladwell, ‘Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted’, New Yorker, 4 October 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell

5. The VC himself is a teacher; in most public universities in India, the VC is normally appointed from the constituency of teachers.

6. West Bengal Universitiy Laws (Amendment) Act 2011 9.(1) (a) http://www.vidya sagar.ac.in/Downloads/ShowPdf.aspx?file=/act_statutes/WB_University_Laws_ (Amendment)_Act_2011.pdf

7. Report on Professor Abhijit Chakrabarti, Vice Chancellor Jadavpur University: For Submission to Shri K.N. Tripathy Hon’ble Chancellor Jadavpur University. Jadavpur University Teachers’ Association, 21 October 2014.

8. Cf. http://scroll.in/article/690135/plagiarism-charges-fuel-demands-for-removal-of-jadavpur-universitys-vice-chancellor; https://in.news.yahoo.com/who-will-stop-the-plagiarists-093145581.html;

9. The Economist, ‘What’s Gone Wrong With Democracy?’ 1 March 2014, www.economist. com/printedition/2014-03-01

10. Saksham, the report specially commissioned by the UGC, recommends that the VC should nominate the members selected by the respective constituencies. Copies of Saksham were officially sent by the UGC to Vice Chancellors with the mandate to ‘work out a road map’ for their universities in accordance with the recommendations of this report (Letter from Jaspal Sandhu, Secretary UGC, August 2014).

11. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/evanescent

12. Cf. ‘What’s Gone Wrong With Democracy?’