The answer to the question — “Is student politics relevant to national politics” — necessitates traversing student politics from its evolution to organisations across decades to where it stands currently vis-a-vis national politics.
An all-India conference of student activists was convened in Karachi in March 1931, under the presidentship of Jawaharlal Nehru to establish an All India Students’ Federation (AISF). Over 700 delegates attended it. The objective was to mobilise young people against British imperialism.
It took five years of intensive ground work before the first conference of the AISF could be held in Lucknow in August 1936. Ironically, Nehru inaugurated the proceedings and Muhammad Ali Jinnah presided over the conference. Speaking on the occasion, Nehru administered a note of caution, “When you are trying to build up a student’s federation, you cannot afford to make it narrow and shut out persons holding different views.”
The sage advice was but in vain. It took less than two years for the national students’ movement to splinter along religious and political lines. The Muslim Students Federation, under the patronage of Jinnah and Muhmmad Iqbal, came into existence in 1937 itself.
In December 1940, at the Nagpur session of the AISF, the students’ movement split on the question of what came first — the question of Indian Independence or the larger solidarity against the global struggle against fascism. It led to the formation of the National Congress Student Organisation (NCSO), also known as the All India Student Congress (AISC). The first conference was held in Patna in 1943 and Ram Sumer Shukla was elected as its first president. He was succeeded by Ravinder Verma in 1946.
After Independence, at the initiative of the RSS, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad was established in July 1949. Balraj Madhok and Yashwantrao Kelkar were behind its inception. Its main objective was to counter communist influence in university campuses. An all-India socialist youth conference was held in Varanasi in April 1953 under the presidency of Ram Manohar Lohia. When Lohia formed his own socialist party in December 1955, a student organisation called Samajwadi Yuvjan Sabha was concurrently constituted. Finally, under Indira Gandhi, the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), the student organisation of the Indian National Congress was established in April 1971.
It is thus evident that the doyens of the liberation struggle and the new leadership of Independent India were responsible for founding student organisations to harness the energy, creativity and potential of students for larger national purposes. Those were the decades when ideological cleavages were sharp across the world and great debates, if not outright disagreements, animated university campuses globally. It produced leaders who went on to play prominent roles in national politics in various countries.
It was also the era of student movements and struggles, some secular, others sectarian.
The Paris student movement in 1968 caught the imagination of young people globally. It represented a universal yearning for a change in status quo. It mainstreamed left-wing politics, anti-war sentiments, the thrust for civil rights and the institutionalisation of a counter culture that found resonance in the hippie movement of the 1970s.
The anti-Hindi agitation in 1965 in south India and the anti-English agitation in north India in 1967 were linguistic in character but soon gave way to more pluralistic student agitations such as the Navnirman Andolan that convulsed Gujarat in 1974 and the Sampoorna Kranti protest by Jayaprakash Narayan in 1974-75. The last major students’ agitation was against the recommendations of the Mandal Commission in 1990 in north India.
The reset of the economy in 1991, coupled with the global collapse of communism as manifested by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and political transformations in eastern Europe suddenly brought an era of ideology-driven debates — a staple of student politics — to a close. These epoch-making changes were summed up in Francis Fukuyama’s rather exuberant exhortation, The End of History and the Last Man (1992).
Globalisation, the liberalisation of the Indian economy and its alignment with the Washington Consensus opened up new vistas for young people. No longer were medicine, engineering, civil service, and student politics as a stepping stone to national politics, the only road to careers that were intellectually challenging, materially satisfying or providing public visibility. The opening up of the broadcasting space to private enterprises in 1992 and the advent of cable and satellite television provided an avenue to young people who craved for the latter. Student politics started taking a backseat, given the new opportunities that post-1991 India had to offer. The average young student now thought that unnecessary activism was but a waste of time.
Except for the ideologically blinkered far left and the bigoted far right, the space at the centre gradually became an “apolitical space” where you still had young people with political aspirations but no buoyancy in terms of a community willing to be mobilised for causes, or a larger calling that went beyond their own immediate aspirations.
As the national president of the NSUI for five years between 1988 and 1993, and as the only Asian who was elected as the president of the International Union of Students in a post-communist world in 1992, I saw these transitions — trends that have held the field for the last three-and-a-half decades now — play themselves out in front of my eyes rather rapidly.
The writer is lawyer, third-term MP and former I&B minister
