Soon after the Emergency was declared, the [Jawaharlal Nehru University] campus had its first taste of terror. On July 8, there was a big midnight raid on JNU. Two of the boys’ hostels on campus were cordoned off by the police, and there were mass arrests. In the police station, a masked figure identified those to be detained and charged under the Defence of India Rules and those to be let off. One of the more amusing sidelights of this midnight raid was when the policemen mistook Bob Marley, the Jamaican reggae singer and composer, for a dangerous radical. They picked up the student who had Marley’s poster up in his room. The victim was B Muthu Kumar, who later joined the foreign service and, as ambassador of India to Tajikistan, was one of those who engineered India’s “alliance” with Afghanistan’s Northern Front and its charismatic leader Ahmad Shah Massoud.
The Resistance pamphlet on this raid is now available on the Bodhi Commons site, from where I have reproduced other pamphlets – those of the students’ union and the Students Federation of India. Ashoka [Ashoklata Jain, student leader in JNU and the author’s future wife] and I were not on campus during the crackdown. For obvious reasons, we generally stayed out of the campus at night those days. Strangely, he remains a mystery man to this day in spite of a large number of JNUites joining the administrative services who presumably had access to the records.
The prospectus declared membership of the Students’ Union optional. It also required new students to sign a Code of Conduct that ruled out their participation in any activity not sanctioned by the University administration.
The Code of Conduct was in the offing for all students, as was the de-recognition of the Students’ Union. The Resistance brought out another pamphlet in late July or early August 1975 on these issues. This was to prepare the students for some form of protest action that we knew we had to undertake on the campus soon.
Fight this attack on the union
Immediately, after the police raid on the campus on July 8 we pointed out that this was only the beginning of a deliberate attack on the Students Union and the democratic forces on the campus. Nine students and one karamchari arrested in the raid have been charged under section 69 of the DIR (Defence of India Regulations Act) on the totally false pretext that the students had held a meeting at Kaveri hostel the night before. Everybody knows that this is a bogus charge and that no meeting was held or planned. We had pointed out in our first leaflet that the attack is concentrated on the Union, which the Government and the University authorities are bent on disrupting because they know it is the most powerful forum for the students expressing their united interests. The police action carried out under the Emergency exposes the character of the Indira Gandhi regime today. Who is the Emergency directed at? Is the Students Union right reactionary? Are the nine students falsely charged under DIR right reactionaries?
Now the Vice-Chancellor at the behest of the Prime Minister’s Secretariat has announced in the latest prospectus that Union membership will henceforth be voluntary. It is in order to cripple the Union and destroy its representative and democratic character that this move has been made under the cover of the Emergency. The VC, willing stooge of the Congress that he is, has further published a brochure for the new students in which the infamous “Code of Conduct” imposing an unacceptable discipline on the student community has been put forth. It is untruthfully claimed that this has been formulated in consultation with students and faculty. The General Body of Students and the Students Council not only rejected outright this contemptible code but condemned even the move to discuss it.
Nagchaudhuri and the authorities are playing with fire by adopting this course. Unable to terrorise us by sending in 1200 armed police, they are now manoeuvring to undermine the Students Union constitution and put shackles on the student movement. The Union derives its legitimacy and sanction not from Nagchaudhuri or the University authorities, but from the democratic will of the students. Any attempt to tamper with the Union on the part of the VC is a threat to our democratic rights and will be met with stiff resistance, Emergency or no Emergency.
We call upon the students to prepare for a big struggle even at short notice to force Nagchaudhuri to end his nefarious activities. We warn those elements on the campus who support this Emergency and act as paid agents of the Administration to stop their conspiracies or they will also face the anger of the students.
any attempt to implement the voluntary membership to the union will be met by a form of action that the students consider necessary to defend their democratic forum.
— The Resistance
The students in JNU were proud of their role in the admissions process. A Student-Faculty Committee – a committee where the students had elected representation along with the faculty – scrutinised the results and the tabulation of points, including compensatory points for social and economic deprivation. The university administration’s task was to post the results and organise the admissions. But now the vice-chancellor and the university administration added an extra step: they would weed out those names blacklisted by the police from the admission list. The SFI and the students’ union brought out leaflets condemning the vice-chancellor for violating the agreement with their union, an agreement that had been passed in the academic council. At the same time, a pamphlet by DP Tripathi, president of the JNU Students Union, informed the students about the VC’s arbitrary action.
Excerpted with permission from Keeping Up the Good Fight: From the Emergency to the Present Day, Prabir Purkayastha, LeftWord Books.