Wild west machismo

Forget Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi. India is experiencing the new face of aggressive students’ politics sans values, vision or ideology. Witness the volatile youth politics in the rough terrain of western UP

Sandeep Yadav Meerut

It is 4 pm, and Room No. 6, the registrar’s office in the administration building of Chaudhary Charan Singh University (CCS) in  Meerut is crowded with students, teachers and university staff, all jostling to grab the attention of the thin, bespectacled man behind the large wooden table. The occupant of the room, Professor Sanjeev Sharma, is at his cheerful best, unmindful of the commotion around. Commanding endless patience, for he has not had his lunch yet, the man is trying to placate the students surrounding him with demands ranging from the announcement of the B.Ed result of a particular candidate to the release of sports equipment for the women’s badminton team.

The ever-volatile campus of CCS University is slowly striving back to normalcy. After a month-long agitation in the wake of the mark sheet scandal in Agra in which school kids were found examining the answer sheets of university students, and bribes were demanded by the coordinator and his cronies,  the classes have finally resumed. And with it the turbulent students’ politics, notorious for sudden violence and sharp divisions on caste lines in this university and its affiliated colleges in western UP, the badlands of wild west in the Hindi heartland, its raw realism depicted so well in Vishal Bhardawaj’s Omkara.

In the low level political battles here, there is no space for ideological debates or patient discussions; instead, it’s an eternal twilight zone of ‘slanging matches’, often leading to morbid public spectacles of muscle and money power, and raw physical confrontations between political groups. These macho, feudal youth groups are basically caste gangs owing allegiance to local MLAs or MPs or some local heavyweight.  Clearly, ideological commitments and political principles have no takers here.

The intellectual depth of a stereotypical student leader’s ‘political consciousness’ is abysmally dismal in this socially backward and economy rich ‘green revolution’ belt, dominated by landlord Jats. Registrar Sanjeev Sharma accepts the falling standards in the academia. “It’s a fact that the fall in moral values has also resulted in the pollution of political and educational atmosphere,” he says. He believes that compared to universities in Delhi and Mumbai where students are academically sharper, the awareness level of students in this university is low. “The socio-economic background of the students is largely responsible for it. Belonging to rural areas and having illiterate parents has its limitations. It’s unfair to compare them with the convent-educated children of the big metros,” argues Sharma.

Except the Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), students’ wing of the BJP, which has a modest presence in the campus, other students’ wings like the National Students Union of India (NSUI) of the Congress, the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) of the CPI-M, or the All India Students Association (AISA) of the CPI-ML (Liberation) are yet to find their feet in the campuses here. Instead, western UP truly reflects the character of its cut-throat power politics: this is the land of Chatra Lok Dal (CLD, of the Rashtriya Lok Dal), Samajwadi Chatra Sabha (SCS, of the Samajwadi Party) and Chatra Lok Shakti (CLD, of the Lok Janshakti Party led by Ramvilas Paswan).

As for the ABVP, the president of the CCS University Students’ Union, Ishwar Chand Sagar, a Scheduled Caste (SC) student, is their big leader. His office in the Shaheed Mangal Pandey Bhawan has non-stop live television with portraits of Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh,