The Outsider Within

Left solidarity is impossible if our Leftists give in to conservative impulses when faced with dissent on campuses, says Brinda Bose.

I want to start by thinking about a couple of terms we use when we talk politically about the spaces we inhabit in our everyday: ‘Outsider-Insider’ (hyphenated) and ‘Commons’. Feminisms have long grappled with the notion of the ‘outsider’, and the havoc this marginal can wreak upon structures and institutions that thrive on the power of ‘insiders’ to hold firm against change. More recently, and very powerfully, we have been much taken by the politics of the ‘commons’—the intellectual, the digital, perhaps even the social and the sexual. Arguing about women’s lives and labours in an essay titled ‘Feminism and the Politics of the Commons’, Silvia Federici says, “Indeed, if commoning has any meaning, it must be the production of ourselves as a common subject. This is how we must understand the slogan ‘No commons without community.’ But ‘community’ has to be intended not as a gated reality, a grouping of people joined by exclusive interests separating them from others, as with communities formed on the basis of religion or ethnicity, but rather as a quality of relations”.[i] We may deduce from this idea that the commons, which we all politically aspire to, must subsume within it the hyphenated outsider-insider conundrum, bringing both within a fold that remains free of gating. And since the ‘outsider’ is metaphorically always an antagonist,even when enfolded within, the commons must necessarily embrace the discomfiting paraphernalia of conflict in tandem with a somewhat precarious camaraderie.




To turn, then, to thinking about ‘the Left’. Philosophically and politically, Leftist thinking also stands against the bourgeois barricading of spaces that keeps the subaltern silent and powerless. Why, then, does our Left imaginary continually fail to robustly fight repression from state and institutional authorities, which are hell-bent on sanitising and securing establishments in order to weed out dissent in any form? We are in the midst of resurgent student movements on campuses across the world—and in India. Student movements have been traditionally associated with the Left, a question and a comparison repeatedly raised in the case of the ‘Hokkolorob’ (“Let There be Clamour”) student protest at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, located as it is in the Bengal of the historic radical-Left Naxalbari movement of the 1970s, in which urban students played a significant role. We could start, then, by thinking about where the Left has failed to live up to the standards of revolution its very nomenclature still evokes—and how this may be connected with a failure to come to terms with the changed and changing identities of the outsider-insider in the university commons.

Can the current spate of student protest movements on Indian university campuses help us think through this very real identity crisis that the Leftist—and the Left Liberal—is facing in India in the era of global capital and neoliberal grandstanding? I will examine a couple of points from the Hokkolorob movement, that spread solidarity tentacles impressively across the country for many weeks late last year and climaxed over the New Year with a cliffhanging hunger strike by fifteen students that forced the resignation of the university’s vice-chancellor. The bare case was this: JU students sat on a peaceful dharna on campus to protest against the administration’s inaction and silence at their demand for an inquiry along the Vishakha guidelines into a sexual harassment charge brought against some hostel boys of the university by a female student. When the vice-chancellor refused to entertain their call for dialogue and investigation, they threatened not to let him leave the university premises, at which point he called in the state combat police, apparently in fear for his life. The police crackdown on the unarmed students was swift and brutal; many students had to be hospitalised. The campus turned into a war zone in which students were disciplined and punished without afair hearing or any semblance of a negotiation, let alone addressing their original demand. The Hokkolorob movement gained momentum as students and their supporters across the country and cyberspace took up the cry against the cowardly yet autocratic vice-chancellor.

 

These facts are now well known. Even as there were huge (and justifiable) celebrations the day JU’s VC did resign, student protesters vowed that they would not forget the original reason for the movement, that they would pursue to its logical conclusion the sexual harassment case at the heart of it. There is a significant prequel to the tale of harassment, however, being apparently impelled by a few male hostellers’ disapproval of a female student’s intimacy with a male friend in a secluded part of the campus during a student festival—a friend identified repeatedly by the authorities, government spokespersons and the police as an ‘outsider’ (bohiragoto), since he was not a student of the university. Ironically, the sexual harassment was the result of a misplaced moral policing of a fellow student’s sexual behavior.

Two factors make it significant in this case: first, the male friend’s identification as an outsider—implying that the female student as well as the campus space ‘belong’ to insiders—and second, the history of surveillance and policing that has grown on campuses in India in recent times as a reaction to an apparent increase in “unacceptable” immoral, illegal, anti-social activities within institutional premises, darkly ascribed to many pitfalls: from an open campus into which corrupting outsiders flow and spread harm, to globalisation’s smarmy fallouts arising out of cyber-limitlessness. But three decades ago, in 1983, Jacques Derrida wrote astutely and lyrically on ‘The Idea of the University’: “Beware of the abysses and the gorges, but also of the bridges and the barriers. Beware of what opens the university to the outside and the bottomless, but also of what, closing it in on itself, would create only an illusion of closure, would make the university available to any sort of interest, or else render it perfectly useless. Beware of ends, but what would a university be without ends?”[ii]

Jadavpur University, in fact, had been the hub of a huge controversy in 2010 following the administration’s decision to install 16 CCTVs in “key locations” all over campus as a safety measure. Students protested against what they deemed a violation of their privacy and gheraoed the then-VC for 52 hours, but the decision was not revoked. During the course of this protest, what emerged was that many of JU’s faculty—of Left, Right or Centrist dispositions—either vocally or tacitly supported the installation of CCTVs to check what they said was an indulgence of drugs, alcohol and sexual promiscuity on campus. I heard from a faculty member that it had been necessary to call in the parents of a student for class-absenteeism because of his leisure activities at the (in)famous JU ‘lobby’—where generations of students have hung out before, between, during and after classes, and which was closed down around this time for being/becoming a breeding-ground of “immoral activities”. One wonders why there is so little anxiety among broadly Left or even Liberal teachers about moral policing of adult students, that it is a curbing of student rights in the garb of protectionism, and that teachers are guilty of not practising what they preach.

We are loud in condemnation when such strictures come from the Dinanath Batras and the Yellapragada Sudershan Raos of the world, but the dangers really lie elsewhere, when the Leftists and the Left-Liberals justify their own conservatism through arguments of safety and wisdom. The university space is a unique microcosm of the larger world and yet most of its ‘workers’—especially teachers—are happy to exist in a milieu divorced from the grave political and social issues of the time, lecturing loftily about freedom and equality inside the classroom and then curbing it outside. Jacque Ranciere’s Ignorant Schoolmaster outlines a scenario where there is equality in the teaching-learning space: “One need only learn how to be equal men in an unequal society. This is what being emancipated means. But this very simple thing is the hardest to understand, especially since the new explication—progress—has inextricably confused equality with its opposite.”[iii] As one is witnessing on every campus, a range of left responses from us all appear to fall short of conceding equality, freedom and power to any student who queers the university’s pitch by protesting against conservative structures and gestures.

 

Where does this reluctance come from? Largely from a deep suspicion that student protests are not gritty enough to make the truly social mark, that they are frivolous, sporadic, excessive, apolitical, asocial, even carnivalesque and anarchic. The range of reactions may be categorised as fourfold. First, the official Left, which keeps a stoic (or perhaps disapproving) silence—as the AISA has, for example, on the spontaneous student protests in the English department at Delhi University. There is a gravitas there completely at odds with Ranciere. On the other hand, wise Leftists rave and rant at the immaturity of the youth and exhort them to aspire to revolutions such as that of May 1968; consistently, class and caste issues do not merely paralyse but also succeed in creating rifts within fledgling unrests that find it difficult enough to articulate and sustain new protest movements.

A second Leftist position is to find some worth in the spontaneity of protests—especially when they are characterized by song and dance and poetry and graffiti art—but not concede that there might bea sustainable politics that will shape the ongoing movement and its participants in ways that just reading or writing about May 1968 never will. These Leftists see the ‘moment’ of coming together in protest as a positive signifier, but do not want to think of it either as programmatic or pragmatic.

A third position plays the balancing card: extending some support to students,but also willfully withdrawing it when the protestcrosses some lines of general acceptability. A number of faculty members empathetic with student causes will suddenly, conveniently remember responsibilities to department administrations, teachers’ associations or even political party affiliations that may be threatened by too overt an alliance with protests that are mostly maverick, transgressive and sporadic. The response tempers to then slide from Left to Liberal, spouting legal redressals and hiding behind the expansive skirts of rights-based discourses. In the Jadavpur University case, many of the faculty in support of Hokkolorobinsisted on telling the media which parts of the protest they did not stand by—like the gherao of the vice-chancellor that led to the unleashing of instant brutal police action,which included groping and harassing many of the young women under cover of the night (they turned off the main switch and plunged the building in darkness). The gherao had a distinct trigger, as we know, but ironically enough, the gherao, which is a tried-and-tested Leftist form of protest, makes the Left squeamish when students deploy it. In tracing a vision of an “engaged pedagogy” in her book Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks rightly says that “empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks… It is often productive if professors take the first risk.”[iv] The critique is that movements emanating from the classroom and people’s movements like the queer are not authentically social—that they may be, in fact, antisocial because they may undermine, for example, working-class Dalit politics.

The fourth kind of Left response is prudish, and also suspicious of alliances, wanting always to keep the purity of its own specific concerns intact, not to be contaminated by others. Somewhere,is this not in contradiction with the notion of the universalist subaltern of Marxism? And in contradiction with the power and promise of intersectionalities, alliances across marginalised outsider-insider communities, the possible building of a commons? One fears that as long the Left persists in its hoary tradition of a healthy suspicion of the risky, the risqué, the hedonistic and the anarchic, there will only be a dissipation of its potentially revolutionary energies. This is seen over and again in movements related to sexualities and student movements, separately and together. In his rousing essay ‘Teaching as Provocation’, Upendra Baxi puts it perfectly, clairvoyantly: “The hedonistic conception of teaching leads to the politics of commitment to causes; the rationalist conception tends to maintain a respectable, and safe distance between knowledge and ‘politics’ of action… Student and teacher ‘politics’ has to be endured as stoically as vice-chancellors who come and go, ruining in their movements the university”.[v] Moral policing, unfortunately, has been the bane of the Left in the public domain; any gestures toward the hedonistic make them anxious, dismissive or repressive. But the power of the people will always come from subversions and transgressions of the norm, and until the fractured Left is able to reconcile and shore these fragments against the ruins of rationalism, protectionism, paternalism or righteousness, a larger Left solidarity—that aspirational commons that enfolds the outsider within it in combat and camaraderie—will be impossible to build and sustain.