Part of the Khabar Lahariya long-form series “Sound Fury & 4G” ♦
“This is how it happens during elections,” Priya* tells us during an interview in Banda, Uttar Pradesh. She’s an MSc Physics graduate from Atarra College, Bundelkhand University, but as a Dalit, doesn’t feel she can speak freely without anonymity. “There’s some Panditji, and some Vermaji contesting”—she means a Brahmin and, in this area, a Dalit—“Panditji tells Vermaji, ‘Look, you know how it works. Go and sit down quietly. We’ll listen to your problems. But if you get too ahead of yourself, you’ll be kicked out of college.”
Priya continues, “Vermaji’s voice isn’t heard even outside the college. If he tries to go get some outside help, it isn’t going to happen. Chaturvediji, Dwivediji, they have the connections. We may think it’s our right to contest elections, but it’s not. General category people stand, and general category people win.” Scheduled caste and scheduled tribe students are underrepresented in UP’s higher education institutions with fewer than 20 percent enrolled.
Though Priya was politically active in college, she never experienced student elections firsthand. At Bundelkhand University—which is based in Jhansi but has affiliated colleges in the surrounding districts—student union elections haven’t taken place since around 2012, when they were banned at the affiliated Kalpi College for violating the controversial Lyngdoh Committee guidelines. These guidelines were instituted in 2006 to curb corruption and violence in student elections—but even before this measure, student unions in Uttar Pradesh have had a rocky history, starting in the 1990s when they were banned for perpetuating caste divides. Since then, the ban has been lifted and re-imposed regularly by the different parties in power, for reasons usually related to state-level electoral engineering, which is highly enmeshed with caste.
Though student unions are no longer banned, UP’s colleges and universities deal with student politics in different ways—at BU the union is in legal limbo; Allahabad University now holds Rajya Sabha-style direct elections; others hold classic, party-backed student elections. With anti-CAA protests around the country driven in large part by students and sometimes their parties, we wondered if the lack of elections at BU was hobbling student responses to the polarizing law.
habar Lahariya found two very different models of student organizing unfolding at the BU-affiliated Pandit JN College in Banda, and K.S. Saket College, which is affiliated to RML Avadh University in Ayodhya district (formerly Faizabad). But whether students band together informally under self-proclaimed “student leaders” and various committees; or whether they participate in a college-endorsed student union, in both cases colleges students were most concerned about airing their grievances about admissions, fees and future unemployment. And in both, caste identity plays a role in their allegiances, whether subtle or obvious.
The Bundelkhand University Veterans
Shashank Patel, a graduate of JN Degree College, and now a member of the BJP Yuva Morcha in Banda, was a “nagar mantri” in BU’s student union before it was shut down. Growing up, Patel went to Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-affiliated schools so, in college, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) felt like a natural fit. “I thought, that if I’m in this community, why not continue with it in student politics?” Patel continues, “I’m OBC, but I feel one should go with the country’s ideology, whichever ideology can take the country forward.” His experience reflects the consolidation of the large percentage of non-Yadav OBCs by the Bharatiya Janata Party, which helped the BJP sweep the state in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
“When a student comes to college, I feel they have no caste,” Patel says. “Their identity is that of students, their life is school.” He ticks off several examples of ranking OBC, SC and Scheduled Tribe colleagues in the ABVP. Yet when we ask him about joining the BJP Yuva Morcha, his answer reveals that despite token Dalit and minority members, party-backed student wings tend to follow entrenched caste lines. “When we leave student politics, we have to catch some platform, whether it’s that of a political party or anything else,” he says. “First we look at which party most of the people of our community are in. When we enter politics, we end up mostly walking with our own community. And parties consider this when giving tickets – which assembly has more OBC, which assembly has more general castes, which has more SC – so it chooses candidates according to this.” Naturally, “this ideology comes into people’s thinking as well—that if we’re from the general category, we’ll join this party; if OBC that one…”
Patel describes how recruitment at the ABVP works through “various programs. Each program has a subject and accordingly a guest speaker. We try to understand who would be most influenced by their ideology.” He adds “We mostly use Whatsapp groups to connect people. We bring students into a group, send our message, we try to influence them with our ideas. And if they are sympathetic, they join us and help us.” Patel believes he can convince others, regardless of caste, to join the “ideology of the country”.
Amit Dwivedi, another BJP supporter in Banda, was also involved with the student union at BU, around 2012. He has not made such a successful transition from student politics to a political platform post-graduation and thinks this transition has become more difficult. “Strong politicians are born out of student politics,” he says, arguing against the ban on elections. “It’s the primary school of politics. Nowadays, it’s wealthy and corrupt people who spend their money to enter politics and buy tickets.”
In terms of caste diversity, “there were all types of people in our organization,” Dwivedi recalls of his days at BU—“from humbler backgrounds to higher ones. If someone comes from an underprivileged background, he should still be able to participate politically.” This participation, Dwivedi believes, should focus on problems within the university – professors not coming on time, for example – but not national politics, unless students are directly affected. “Whatever their issues are – unemployment, the job vacancies, shortages – they should come out onto the streets in full force.”
Yet when we ask why students in Bundelkhand haven’t been participating in the CAA protests, he observes that “students here are mostly poor, from farming backgrounds. Since elections have been shut down, there’s not much importance being given to student politicians or unions.” In other words, in the absence of a strong student union, students don’t have much of a forum to protest even fairly uncontroversial things like unemployment—the one issue that unites everyone we speak to.
Party Lines at K.S. Saket College
At Saket College, there are four parties in the fray for the upcoming student elections. Abhijeet Bachchan, a law student, explains that “Everyone has their own ideology. Here, there are four parties who compete: the ABVP, Bahujan Chhatra Sabha, Samajhwadi Chhatra Sabha, and AISA. All of them have recruitment programs to build their base and get members.”
Bachchan is a district general secretary of the Bahujan Chhatra Sabha, which represents the interests of Dalit and minority students. “This year, we’re running a Muslim candidate, last year we ran an SC candidate, who served as vice-president,” he told us. “There are some organisations—whether student parties or national parties—that don’t want SC or ST candidates. I can’t tell you why that is.”
His fellow party member, Shivansh Majhwar, a third-year Economics BA, sheds some light on how caste becomes perpetuated through campus politics. “When a person starts thinking about their own particular identity, they start looking at their caste,” he says. “And when he starts to establish a student community, then eventually people from his own caste start following him. So parties somewhere down the line start taking on caste identities.” Majhwar feels that “this is bad for society, because the word student signifies no caste, no religion, no place, no language. The society of students is one in which we all work together for the betterment of our country.”
While his words echo those of Shashank Patel, as a Dalit, Majhwar is deeply attuned to the history that necessitates caste-based solidarities, whether they are engineered by national political parties or not. “History is witness to the fact that Dalits and minorities have been exploited,” he says. “Nowadays some parties are ruling the country in such a way that Dalits and Muslims … feel that their rights and values are being snatched away. People in high posts who have reached there through politics or administrative roles are relentlessly exploiting them—they are trying to bring back the ideology of Manu.”
Warming up to his subject, Majhwar adds, “The person who gets ground up between these divisive politics is the regular student. The regular student gets led astray—sometimes in the name of caste, sometimes religion. Anyone who is left is dealt with in the name of language, and then region.” With economic issues like unemployment at the forefront of debates, the BCS is confident of winning Saket College’s upcoming elections. The party has “a strong position and a good vote base,” says Bachchan.
BU’s Whatsapp Student Union
Priya’s outlook isn’t quite as positive. “The lesson we learned from Rohith Vemula was that however educated an ST/SC/OBC may be he has no value next to a general caste,” she says. “Student unions have a different power,” she points out. “Or had. Since this Yogi-Modi Sarkar, they have nothing left. There’s nothing they can do.”
Even in the absence of an official student union, however, an unofficial Bundelkhand University Student Union has been addressing students’ problems since around 2013. Using Whatsapp groups, Facebook messenger and other social media, students share problems and work out how to fix them. They have women members to reach out to female students about issues like harassment. But is this unelected, unofficial union free of caste and religious divides? We met a couple of the organisation’s leaders to find out.
At first, Shailendra Kumar Verma, an engineering student at JN College, is reluctant to speak to us among a crowd of his classmates. Later, interviewed alone on the roof of the Dalit hostel, he opens up. According him, the unofficial union has about 150 members, “from every caste, like Thakur, Brahmin—all kinds.” He qualifies, “I would say mostly Kshatriya castes,” and tells us that there are nearly 20 students from SC or ST backgrounds.
For Verma, the primary motivation wasn’t to find common cause with a particular community or an ideology. “I came here first and foremost as a student,” he says. “After some time, I noticed various injustices occurring against students.” Some people weren’t getting their scholarships. Others weren’t being enrolled, even though they had received admission. Seats had been reduced; the prospectus fee had become unaffordable for poorer students. A group of students began taking up these issues in street protests, often resolving them successfully.
Verma believes he can “take all students with him” by retaining the focus on solving student issues brought up in the unofficial student union Whatsapp groups. “We’re like brothers and sisters,” Verma says of the group. But while it’s one thing to insist that students are students first, any student organization is subject to pressures from politically powerful, caste-aligned parties or groups.
Verma’s senior in the union is “senior student leader” Pratap Singh “Prince”, who is also president of an organization called the Bundelkhand Akhil Bharatiya Kshatriya Mahasabha. A political-style banner on campus shows Verma and Prince wishing people together around Diwali. “Most of the Kshatriya students that are in our organization support the BJP, Verma says. “Yadavs will support the Samajwadi Party. SC/ST will support the BSP. From Banda right now there is a Brahmin MLA. So all Brahmins support him, and his party.” But he says his organisation’s work is accomplished in collaboration with various political parties, without preference for any of their ideologies.
“Many parties have approached me through their local representatives to say that I am doing very good work and I can join them if I want,” he says. “They said that with the support of their party I will also have certain power. Yet I did not join their party. Because I know if I join a party people will look at me as a politician, and I don’t want that … Students who work for national parties end up doing their work, not student politics.”
Verma isn’t oblivious to the way caste plays out across his own organization. After Rohith Vemula’s death, Verma noticed that “all of our SC/ST student leaders said if we try to raise anything about this, we’ll be put down, beaten up by a mob—no case registered and no accused punished. I’ve started to understand how SC/ST people involved with national parties are not allowed to rise by other castes. I’ve seen SC/ST students who have joined certain political parties and been there for years, but they’re kept at the karyakarta level, as party workers, and not given any district or nagar level tickets.”
For Priya, the Dalit graduate from Atarra College, this observation has crystallised into cynicism. “Partywallahs know how many students are in each organization … and of what mentality. They begin to motivate accordingly. First, they help with manpower. ‘Oh, your this job isn’t happening, let’s help you.’ That’s how they bring them into politics. They don’t understand what’s going on until the benefits stop. Then they start to understand that politics has corrupted them.”
Priya believes that identity can be a powerful tool to amplify Dalit concerns if students don’t blindly succumb to political pressure. “If you want Dalits to be mobilized, first SC and OBC students need to understand what is right and what’s wrong,” she says. “Who is actually with us, and who is an outsider.” For her, this recognition has the potential to result in other kinds of solidarities, perhaps the sort apparent in the Saket College Bahujan Chhatra Sabha’s choice of candidates. “You can’t assume, ‘He’s a Muslim so he’s not doing anything for us, but that’s a Pandit so he’s doing something for us,” Priya said, “In Bundelkhand until we realise who our friends and enemies are, we’re just going to keep fighting like this—Hindu-Muslim, Hindu-Muslim.”
For now, Verma is staunch in saying that if elections do take place in BU, he’d contest as an independent candidate—unless there’s a party “that gives students its attention and facilities”. Famously, independent candidate Richa Singh became Allahabad University’s first woman student union president, but eventually had to turn to the Samajwadi Party for back-up. “It’s a different thing that in the future I may want to join a party,” Verma admits.
Perhaps students’ demands—like improved women’s safety and better toilet facilities—are common enough ground to forge inter-caste and inter-religious solidarities in this cobbled together, election-free set-up. Yet there are times when Verma feels a more legitimized forum would give students greater bargaining power. “Whenever we raise our demands, raise our voices, we know we need a student union,” he says. He doesn’t to criticize any particular government, he says. But he hopes the ruling dispensation will urgently address unemployment, “for the future of students, in the interest of the country … There is no other issue,” he says.
*Name changed.