ABOUT THE AUTHOR- The author of this article Subhendu Bikash Tahal, is a Gold medalist in BA(POL.SC) and is currently pursuing Post-graduation in Political science at Utkal University, and has also qualified for Junior Research Fellowship(JRF) and eligibility for Assistant Professor in the National Eligibility Test(UGC-NET).
Universities are bastions of free speech and expression, the beautiful environment of a university allows the competing views to flourish together for collective progress. It’s a battle ground not of goons, face covered, but of ideas, wide open. To quench the thirst of intellectual curiosity, students search for the ocean of ideas, and after getting exposed to the wide variety of ideas, an inclination develops for a set of ideas, to which a student embraces as his/her own and follows it until another set of ideas challenge and shake his notion.
We are prisoners of ideas, ideas shape, reshape and mould an individual. Idea gives solace and create anguish, it pushes as well as pre-empts. However decrepit an idea may be, it has the potential to create a hurricane and tornado within an individual, and impels an individual to act.
Universities are the hunting ground of ideas, old and new, ancient and modern, left and right, radical and moderate. Each set of idea is touted and warranted as superior or the best by its followers, but it is always wise to allow the ideas to compete with each other in a sound and insulated framework of democracy devoid of violence and without reducing to personal attack and character assassination, which will ultimately result in the triumph not of idea but of humanity, because the consensus that will evolve for the best set of idea, will help to shape the future of a nation.
Some intellectuals of high stature, earlier reticent now expressive, plead that universities are synagogue of learning and the petty politics shouldn’t be allowed to vitiate its atmosphere. Although it seems logical but the narrowness and the logic behind this logic baffles me. Democracy requires sound leaders characterised by faith on its core principles of free speech and freedom of expression, and a university nurture and mould an individual into a tolerant being, who in future will be the flag-bearer of democracy. The survival of democracy is contingent on the present system of education where individual brains are allowed to use their cognitive ability of choosing and standing for a set of idea which fascinate them, creating a system which doesn’t allow the students to take side of ideas will produce mass robots without the ability to think and the colourful future of democracy will turn bleak.
Antonio Gramsci, the illustrious Italian Marxist propounded the concept of hegemony, which also stands for the battle of idea and the ability of bourgeois idea to displace all other ideas. An in depth analysis from the prism of theoretical framework lands me in a conclusion that now in India a situation akin to what Gramsci propounded years ago, is prevalent, a set of idea is in a continuous and ceaseless effort to wipe out all other ideas from the intellectual firmament. The beauty of India lies in its plurality of ideas, we are the progenies of argumentative Indian, respecting every shades of opinion is in our DNA, but the way efforts are on to destroy some sets of idea stands contrary to the Indian ethos which begets and nurture the diversity of opinions.
Peace eludes from the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University for the last few years, and some even has gone to the extent of arguing to shut down this institution as it has become a safe heaven for anti-nationals, but some questions remain unanswered i.e. who defines the anti-nationals, what is its definition? Does speaking against the government amounts to speaking against the country? Or is it a systematic attempt to stifle the expression of one set of views identifying with a particular ideology?
Party will come and go, but Democracy as a system of government will last for long, may not for eternal as the inquisitive individual will certainly find a best system superior to democracy, in order to sustain the democracy until a superior system of governance has emerged, the soft touch of the party in power towards all shades of opinion is sine qua non, and any attempt in strengthening one set of ideas at the cost of other set of idea will definitely have a debilitating effect on the democracy itself.
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