“Our coming generations will ask us for an answer...will ask us, where were you when new social forces were being unleashed...Where were you when the people who live and die every moment, every day for their rights...Where were you when there was assertion of marginalised voices of society...They will seek an answer from all of us”. (Com. Chandrashekhar)
After a persistent struggle, involving many sacrifices, the students of AMU were able to achieve the holding of AMUSU elections on 19th January 2011. They have been witness as to how the administration has taken advantage in the last few months in the absence of a union and implemented many anti-student policies in the university. The campus has been turned into a place where students’ voices have been muzzled; even today CCTV cameras closely follow throughout the campus closely monitoring every student’s actions, as if they are not students of a university but criminals living in a prison camp. Voicing of any dissent against the administration results in suspension or eviction from the hostels. But recent AMUSU election presented the student community with an opportunity to provide a mandate which would enable them to resist the continuous attacks which are being mounted against them.
The AMUSU elections were held at a critical juncture when the country is witnessing the biggest scams in its history. CWG, Adarsh Society Scam, 2G Spectrum Scam, and Yeddyurappa’s Land Scam have all openly looted the resources of our country. AMUSU elections were held at a time of spiralling inflation, when cars are getting cheaper but Dal is becoming unaffordable!, and when Arjun Sengupta Committee has shown that 77% of the country’s population survive on less than Rs. 20 per day, when every half an hour a peasant is committing suicide in this country, where every one minute an adivasi is being displaced, where the tide of hunger has engulfed every district in the country.
AMUSU elections were held at a time when the findings of Sachar Committee has revealed beyond doubt the systematic injustices meted out to the Muslim community in the last 60 years. Today the percentage of Muslims in Government services are next to null, whereas the place where Muslims are found the most are in the jails of our country! AMUSU elections were held at a time when we are witnessing increased attacks on democracy by the state. Killing of youth has become a routine affair in places like Kashmir and voices of Kashmiris and people from North-East are being silenced whenever they open their mouth for voicing their anger. While Dr. Binayak Sen is labelled anti-national and put to jail, for having stood by the poorest and weakest against state repression, the Hindutva groups are enjoying all legitimacy.
The AMUSU elections were held at a time when in more than 95 percent of the campuses across India has not yet seen the student union elections. In the recent AMUSU elections we have seen how the guidelines and rules of Lyngdoh Committee Recommendations were flouted. The printed materials which are banned during the elections were pasted on the walls of university in such a fashion that not even an inch of space was left vacant. The use of hoardings and banners costing hundreds of rupees were found hanging from rooftop to the ground in various departments and faculties. In the name of curbing money-muscle power Lyngdoh Committee Recommendations were actually implemented to curb the democratic rights of the students. In fact money flowed like a flooding river and nobody knows where the money came from and muscles were flexed to silence the alternative voices that could have strengthened the democratic spirit of the university As Terry Eagleton, noted British Marxist academician and scholar has said, “What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, and human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future”. The same statement runs true for Sibal’s, industrialists and technocrats of our country who are hell bent on selling out our education and resources.
The most historic and most remarkable attempt in this Students Union election was shown by the girls who participated in large numbers. Though they were defeated, this election provided them the opportunity to come forward and provide a platform to raise the voice of women in campus and outside the campus. An active Gender Cell to address the sexual harassment cases and the security of women students in Aligarh Muslim University is the need of the hour, and this was demanded by most of the female candidates.
Aligarh Muslim University has a glorious history and proud legacy of providing intellectual leadership not only to the Muslim community but also to the whole country. Today the need is to further strengthen that glorious legacy. It is the need of the hour that the Muslim youth should join radical, secular, democratic organization which raises their issues from Minority witch-hunting, Batla House, Babri Masjid, illiteracy and to unemployment.
The mainstream parties from Congress to Mulayam to Laloo and Nitish Kumar have become impotent enough to tackle our grievances. The fake Batla House encounter in 2008 and others and the state of Muslim youth in both U.P and Bihar have shattered our minds to question the past and visualize our future with revolutionary politics of organizations like AISA and CPI-ML (Liberation) which have always raised and championed the issues of minorities.
In this AMUSU election a candidate for Cabinetship supported by AISA got a massive support from student community of AMU with 4,400 votes. The massive support and response by the student community to this alternative revolutionary student politics of AISA has provided us an opportunity to build an alternative intellectual and political leadership from the Muslim community. As Comrade Chandrasekhar once said, “At this juncture of history, the content of history has moved far ahead and it is trying for new language, new voice and therefore one feels that at this juncture of Indian history two visions of nation building are contending with each other, one that of a fascist, autocratic, totalitarian India, another that of a democratic secular and egalitarian India...AISA stands for the latter, AISA stands for a democratic India”.
As we all know, we are the few thousands from our community, and our country to have been lucky enough to come to such a great university to learn and enlighten ourselves and it becomes our responsibility to lead the rest by being a democratic and inclusive model for the entire country. Let us all be a part of a radical, secular, democratic organization in shaping and making this country more democratic and voice of the wretched and marginal people.
Shakeel Anjum, SIS/ JNU
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