Contesting spaces and civil resistance movements: A case study on India’s #FeeMustFall movement

Abstract

The paper intends to conduct a spatial reading of civil resistance movements taking Jawaharlal Nehru University’s (JNU) #FeeMustFall in India as the case study. Amidst the penetration of neoliberal politics in public goods like health and education, the pay-per-user principle is not limited to the argument of efficiency of allocation of resources. It can be comprehended as the larger strategy of the ruling dispensation to deplatform dissent and homogenise state space on an ideological singularity catering to majoritarian and hegemonic nationalism. The paper shall focus on the spatial reading of civil resistance movements using Lefebvre’s characterisation of state space and Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony and nationalism in the context of JNU’s #FeeMustFall movement.

Introduction

In India, public-sector universities witnessing a withdrawal of higher education subsidies as investment in higher education is relatively low. ¹ The paper takes the case of India’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), where the university administration hiked fees by around 300 percent in 2019. Consequentially, students resented and organised protests in large numbers. However, the state police and security forces violently mitigated these peaceful protests by water cannons and lathi (baton) charges. JNU protests in Delhi (India) had inspired its neighbour Pakistan where students have raised voices against the state’s failure to ensure quality education, right to unionisation of students, democracy and dissent. The political economy of higher education in India, the ideological homogenising tendency, majoritarianism of the right-wing government and the resistance against it can be examined as a site of spatial contestations that brings in a new perspective and how space emerges and pans out as a crucial dimension in comprehending and examining such policy-related, ideological and public altercations.

The study becomes imperative as the government, through its New Education Policy 2020, had targeted a Gross Enrolment Ratio ² (GER) of 50 percent by 2030 in higher educational institutions from 27.1 percent in 2019–20. ³ Furthermore, given the average annual per capita income of an Indian household ⁴ (interviewed in the LASI survey conducted in 2017–18), INR ⁵ 44,901 (approximately USD 600) coupled with deeply socially stratified demography, the GER target could be achieved predominantly through state-sponsored subsidised higher education. Amidst such a scenario, the fee hike of India’s second-best university reflects an antithesis to the proposed goal envisaged by the state. However, the spatial analysis of the same reveals the broader political, socio-spatial dimensions and raison d’etre targeting varsities as critical thinking spaces.

The article engages and examines the struggle between the government and the citizens as a site of spatial contestations. The role of state and space in Civil resistance movements has not been actively analysed. It also delves into the spatial reading of state from two dimensions. First, state space as a manifestation of hegemonic nationalism and second, space as an instrument of resistance. Spatial resistances also create political spaces and facilitate a political culture that perpetuates the democratisation of politics (Alvarez, 2018) by bringing in the publicness to the personal concerns of everyday life. With Jawaharlal Nehru University’s fee hike protest as a case study, the paper shall focus on the spatial reading of civil resistance movements using Lefebvre’s characterisation of state space and Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony and nationalism. The stated theoretical framework shall examine the modality of the protests in the fee must fall movement, its internal politics and the state’s response. The paper briefly discusses the genesis of a public university space like JNU and its role in higher education in India, followed by a theoretical exposition on state and space. The last section examines the role of space in the civil resistance movement and how space becomes a conspicuous dimension of contestation between the citizens and the ruling dispensation. The paper concludes that to homogenise space based on majoritarian nationalism, the ruling elite creates a binary within, where critical thinking spaces like universities become ‘adversarial spaces’ that posits a challenge to the overall homogenisation of state space manifested through hegemonic nationalism.

The idea of JNU as a space of resistance

The 1960s and 1970s ushered in the utopian universities phenomenon that conceptualised the idea of inculcating interdisciplinary research bringing faculties and students together in a residential space. The idea of such academic spaces germinated from Sussex in the United Kingdom proliferated to Simon Fraser in Canada, Nanterre in Paris, Lusaka in Zambia and JNU in Delhi, India. These spaces were an experiment in communal living and were driven to engage and critique contemporary social problems (Taylor and Pellew, 2020). The Indian government established JNU (named after the first prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru) as a public university established by the act of the Indian Parliament in 1966 and came into existence in 1969, financed by the Union Ministry of Education of the Indian government. The first vice-chancellor, Gopalaswami Parthasarathy, endeavoured to establish interdisciplinary academic centres that focused and pioneered research on the intrinsic problems of the Indian society.

In order to provide equitable access to higher education to a socially and economically stratified Indian society; JNU, since its inception, has adopted an innovative points-based admission policy where applicants’ family income, caste, ⁶ region and gender are incorporated as an adjunct of ‘positive discrimination’ so that more students from marginalised backgrounds can have access to higher studies (Taylor and Pellew, 2020). Amidst this goal, a perceivably unplanned hike in the fee in 2019 made thousands of students come out on the streets, resenting the university’s sporadic fee hike that subsequently triggered the #FeeMustFall movement. The university inculcated the pay-per-user principle while justifying the proposed hike. Electronic and print media were replete with underprivileged students’ testimonials, where a public university like JNU made higher education plausible for them. The proposed fee hike shot expenses up to $112 (electricity, water and service charges) from around $37 a month (IANS 2019). The numbers may seem highly affordable, but when it is relativised in the larger socio-economic milieu of Indian society and the university’s students’ demography, it results in a severe accessibility crisis in higher education in India. A doctoral student typically gets a monthly stipend of $112 for three years only. Many students from marginalised socio-economic backgrounds send a portion of their stipend back to their families. Almost 40 percent of university students (Chirmuley, 2019) belong to families with less than USD 2018 of annual income. According to the Global Wealth Report, 78 percent of adults in India had wealth below $10000, while 1.8 percent had more than $100000 (Kuchay, 2019).

The conceptual, geographic and sociocultural diversity makes JNU perpetually in headlines, particularly in the national media and abroad. There are few higher institutions in India where students of myriad socio-economic and cultural backgrounds get admitted primarily because of the university’s affirmative action (positive discrimination) policies. The university has traditionally been critical of the establishment and has often been subjected to defamation and delegitimisation by the ruling dispensations spanning decades. Allegations such as the university are the hub of ‘anti-nationals’, ‘wasting taxpayers money’ and a place of ‘drug addicts and protesters’ have been carefully crafted by the ruling elite and its IT cell to distract masses from the hard-hitting questions raised by the students against the policies and modus operandi of the establishment. The varsity has a history of demonstrating and resisting the ruling dispensation’s diktats, including the national emergency imposed in 1975 by the then union government headed by the then Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi (Raghunandan, 2020). It is the only university in the country where ‘students manage elections for their own union’ (Bhambhri, 2016).

JNU has often pejoratively attributed to a ‘political space’ by the political parties and the ruling elites. However, reading the word ‘political’ does not limit comprehending party politics or electoral politics but caters to a more extensive understanding that modern life is political. Even though the word political has its etymological evolution from the Greek word polis, its other manifestations also direct the notions and exercise of power. The classical understanding of power as a community’s collective capacity to take decisions gradually culminated in some people’s capacity that impedes the interest of others by de-platforming them from the decision-making process (Bhargava, 2009). However, during the renaissance, the term ‘political’ was closely associated with ‘society’ and not ‘state’. Furthermore, an association of society with the state was armoured by the ‘methodological nationalism’ of the 19th century. The state-centric approach sees the process of nationalisation and territorialisation as the natural conditions affecting social life and not historical. A nation-state serves primarily as a political entity under which economic management is conducted and social welfare is ensured, and when the intended end of the political entity is not realised, it often leads to discontent culminating into civil resistance.

Comprehending space

Poulantzas (2003) provides a historical account of how the state appears as a product of a modern nation. A national territory has a political character in which ‘the state tends to monopolise the procedures of the organisation of space’. A modern state ensures national unity and tends to expand. The expansion is not understood in a conventional (geographical) territorial sense but of homogenisation of different identities within the national territory's frontiers. The modern nation is not created by the bourgeoisie but is an ‘outcome of a relationship between the “modern” social classes – one in which the nation is a stake for the various classes’ that can be further comprehended as elites and non-elites in a spatial configuration. Critical spaces (universities) like JNU stand in contradiction to such spatial homogeneity based on the idea of hegemonic nationalism or ideology.

State and territory are mutually constitutive based on their interaction which state officials manage. State officials seemingly administer a natural space, but they ‘substitute another space for it, one that is first economic and social, and then political’ (Brenner, 2003). In such a scenario, state officials perceive that they represent their nation or the like; however, they establish an order of their own. States are spatial entities, as evident with the emphasis on territoriality. Each state bifurcates itself from the ‘inner’ political interactions instead of ‘outer’ interstate relations and thus can be attributed as a ‘container’ (Brenner, 2004). There are multiple approaches through which the theorisation of state space takes place. First is the link between state and society. It studies the spatiality of social life and combines cultural and political identity enclosed in geographical space. A state’s role as a ‘power container’ acts as a static platform for constructing social relations. Second, post-world war ushered in the national state as a ‘primary political scale on which economic management was conducted, and social welfare was delivered, and treatment of political subjects as national citizens’. State space in an integral sense is ‘mobilisation of state policies, public investments, or financial subsidies to modify or transform social conditions within specific jurisdictions and at particular scales’. States tend to manifest their power through the principle of territoriality to contain myriad social, political and economic activities.

A nation-state can be taken as a representation of a ‘self-organising historical entity’ that focuses on making and achieving collective ends. The state serves as the political arm of a nation and as Easton defines the political system as the authoritative allocation of values and resources to an economy comes into play (Easton, 1981). Pursuing national goals helps concretise the idea of a ‘nation’. In this context, the ‘state’ becomes a political arm of a nation responsible for cohesion and welfare. The idea of collectivity gives a sense of unity of goals that members of the state should subordinate for the common good, meaning a sense of mutual responsibilities.

For (Lefebvre, 2003), space is all about power and classifies it into different categories in the context of a state. First, material and natural space is a physical space transformed by myriad infrastructures such as highways, railways, financial and commercial establishments, air routes and the like. Second, hierarchical institutions form the social space that may include state institutions, schools, workplaces and higher education spaces relevant to this paper. Each state is a social space with a minimum consensus for attributing or denoting certain things, activities or ideas; in the stated case, the fundamental premise and nature of the Indian state. The third is the mental space that includes the representations of a state that people at large construct, and the state provides social relations of production. Lefebvre argues that a state tries to create a space that claims to accomplish something perfect: a unified and homogenous society. The representational sense of state space examines myriad spatial imaginaries that compete. The spatial imaginaries provide a crucial foundation for politics of representation, mobilisation and intervention and territorial politics.

Hegemony and space

Hayek (1945) demolished the presumption that experts (administrators sans the ruling elites) had sufficient knowledge to design solutions to all social problems consciously. He noted that the knowledge to make an investment, production and consumption decisions was often very localised, context-specific and personally idiosyncratic. According to him, amidst the absence of dissent, there would be ‘stagnation of thought and decline of reason’. It manifests the contestations between the elites and non-elites that Antonio Gramsci’s cultural hegemony can further comprehend.

The power of domination in space is manifested predominantly through violence and consent. However, Godelier argues that the consent of the dominant is stronger than the violence of the dominant (Godelier, 1978). Every society is based on shared interests, including a share of interests that are conflictual and compromising constantly. An individual is anchored around various symbols, identities and beliefs where identity is given by society and not created by an individual (Burawoy, 2011). In the Gramscian scheme, the bourgeoise class sustains dominance through several non-coercive ways than merely by force. The ruling class imposes its own culture and set of beliefs through processes of socialisation (Gramsci, 1971). Thus, the role of ideas and culture (that are constitutive attributes of the identity of a ‘nation’) gains centrality instead of economic dimensions as proposed by the traditional Marxists. Furthermore, to maintain their ruling position, the elites forge alliances with other groups creating a social bloc. The fear psychoses of attributing, for instance, the university as anti-national or anti-Hindu, is thus peddled by the ruling dispensation amidst groups premised on religious and national identities to claim their consent to maintain their rule. Thus, hegemony is political leadership based on consent, diffused by popularising the ruling class’s worldview. The working class gives consent to the ruling class to be ruled. Just by leading the daily lives, the non-elites consent to be ruled by the elites, which is a process in perpetuity. It is essential to comprehend consent and coercion, wherein Gramsci says it is not coercion but subtle and voluntary consent on the part of those who are ruled. The popular discourse against the varsity is thus touted as anti-national and subversive by the masses.

The idea of power and culture works by controlling a person’s loyalty which is a key to power. Power comes with consent and manifests subtle and innocuous agreements wherein people do not control the ideas, but the ideas control people. All political, economic and social ideas are accepted passively. Moreover, everyday actions in which individuals do not put much effort into thinking are cultural hegemony. The idea of the thing or the concept that affects people and their behaviour demonstrates the exercise of real power. For instance, anyone who holds a counter-view to the majoritarian beliefs (the ruling dispensation vs JNU in the stated case) is tagged as a threat to the nation’s unity and is ‘anti-national’. This de-platforming manifested predominantly through propaganda by the ruling Right leads to otherisation, leading to homogenising space based on ideological singularity. The ruling elite would distract the masses from the core issue. For instance, public education is not subjected to commodification or the significance of varsities as an independent and critical space to narratives of students being anti-nationals as they resist certain state policies. The manifestation of ‘one nation’ based on religion does not limit the homogenisation of geographical or physical spaces. It intends to capture the psychological mind-space of the masses where varsities like JNU stand in contestation to the popular imagination perpetrated by the ruling elite.

Spatial understanding of resistance

Educational institutes like schools and cultural organisations employ the most significant number of people in a state. To have a linear, coherent and homogenous world view, control over the stated institutions is ineluctable. According to (Gramsci, 1971), there is a significant gap between the popular masses and the intellectual groups as the state does not entail a homogenous conception; however, to mitigate such contradiction to homogenise the space, the ruling elite encapsulates it. Unlike previous ruling classes who were conservative and operated within their spheres and did not enlarge it to subsume other classes, the bourgeois intends to absorb the entire society into its conception of the cultural and economic realm. Here the paper would instead attribute the bourgeoisie as the ruling elite where they intend to hegemonise their own socio-political and cultural world view and deplatforms those who disagree.

The parties are analogous to classes, and the former develop, solidify and universalise the latter. The paper intends to see a class in a broader sense of entailing more aspects of identifies that pertain to a belief system. When an elected government commences operating as a ‘party’, Gramsci (1971) argues it sets itself above other parties not to harmonise the myriad interests under the framework of nation and state but only to disintegrate it from the broader masses. Parties are a product of classes, and parties form state personnel (Hoare and Smith, 1971).

As Gramsci asserts, ‘repetition is the best didactic means for working on the popular mentality since the masses are slow to alter their beliefs’; therefore, the rhetoric of power elites must be incessantly put through questioning in order to divulge their propaganda and the divisive polemical narratives for electoral gains and their attenuated imagination of nation-state (Gramsci, 1971). The students have resorted to myriad ways of non-violent methods of protesting. Briefly, it includes complete lockdown of the departments, making posters and singing protest songs, setting up the late-night ‘Guerrilla Dhabas’ (makeshift food stall), serving tea where students gather and have discussions over a cup of tea, maintaining the night culture of conversations and debates inside the campus, mass sleepovers in the department building, boycotting semester exams, holding long silent marches to the parliament and the Ministry of Education. Concomitantly, during the rallies outside the campus, the students distributed pamphlets making the masses aware of the cause and intent of the movement, running social media campaigns with hashtags #FeeMustFall, #JNUProtest, #EducationForAll debating with people and sensitising those who are in support of the policies related to privatisation of education by the government. Interestingly, the state police and security forces have violently mitigated these peaceful protests with water cannons and lathi charges. Such a series of incidents have stirred up debates in the Indian Parliament and the universities and colleges spread across the country to debate the questions about affordable and quality education.

As a threat to a perceivable homogenised space by the ruling right, even these unique non-violent modes of resistance were questioned. The onus quickly shifted on to the students to work within the ‘social contract’ of the institutions that deprived them the rights and justice in the first place. However, a social contract’s goal is ‘to show that members of some society have reason to endorse and comply with the fundamental social rules, laws, institutions, and principles of that society’ (D’Agostino et al., 2017). However, the question remained to what extent the individuals demonstrating are represented and justified under the social contract they signed up for. The students’ resistance intended to bring an element of introspection for the state apparatus rather than locating it within ‘state legality’ to uphold the social contract’s sanctity equitably and justifiably prior branding them as recalcitrant and subsequently delegitimising them.

Therefore, to disregard and delegitimise counter-narrative, the ruling dispensation diverts focus to civil resistance’s modus operandi locating its legality and validity within states institutions. States can obliterate the protests through their ‘legitimate coercion’ as it wields its authority through the summation of power and legality. Thus, a confrontational demonstration from a disaffectionate population, even though they are an active adjunct of the state through social contract, is deemed illegitimate by state institutions (Mishra, 2020).

The ruling elite positing as democratically elected, that is, expressing an opinion on the behalf of vox populi, legitimises its narrative and thus discredits dissent from academic spaces. Since a majority elects them, they have a popular mandate and support anything they intend to promulgate. However, as Gramsci calls ‘giving a measure’, numbers merely have an instrumental value. The measured thing is the persuasive and expansive capacity of rationality and historicity of elites (i.e., few individuals), thus contradicting the hypothesis of equal weightage to all individual opinions. The sporadic rise in the fee is one of the many regulations (varying from political appointments to the massive funds cut for the library and other academic activities) be an endeavour to straight jacket public universities along linear pedagogical lines and reduce education coherent to the right-wing nationalist understanding and the idea of the nation-state, India. Such imaginations are manifested through discipline, spatial homogeneity, hierarchy and order (Martelli and Parkar, 2018).

Conclusion

Civil resistance in the context of social movements exhibits political socialisation that varies across age brackets, creating contesting spaces. Cognitively, humans tend to adopt specific behavioural attributes at certain life stages; thus, youths tend to be risk-takers, radical and reluctant to experiment or innovate as opposed to elders, who generally tend to be more status-quo and conservative. Furthermore, polysemous understanding of the word ‘radical’ (i.e. political radicalism) is often subjected to misinterpretation and thus used as a tool to discredit and dislodge the ruling dispensation as an act of subversion. The current right-leaning dispensation’s rationale of the pay-per-user principle with the constant push for privatisation of higher education is the efficiency in allocating resources and training masses for the industry to usher in economic growth. However, the approach’s implications have been contrary to where private colleges in India have resulted in an enormous number of degree holders who are incompetent to get absorbed in the industry, and education differential (public vs elite and expensive private) has exacerbated the class divide. However, the economic rationale of efficient allocation of resources does not hold water as the recent imbroglio of a senior faculty member of Political Science at a leading private university in India resigned for being critical of the government highlights a more significant politico-culture manifestation. Furthermore, public-funded universities are not meant to serve the industry’s immediate interest but are focused on identifying and conducting an independent inquiry of social complications.

The article offers a brief historical account of JNU and elaborates on its character and role in modern Indian polity. The paper took the university’s #FeeMustFall movement as a case study and examined the protest as a site of spatial contestations. The spatial reading of the fee hike goes beyond the economic rationale or efficiency in the allocation of resources argument. It reveals it as a modus operandi to dislodge the university as a space for critical thought and novel idea that does not fit into the populist imagination of ruling elites. The idea here is not to make two spaces (a university as an academic space and the other as all-encompassing state space) stand in contradiction or opposition. The ruling elites’ pursuit to remain relevant in executing spatial ideational homogeneity needs an adversarial space as a threat. Critical thinking spaces like universities are potent examples of such ‘adversarial spaces’ as they evade the ruling establishment from tough questions and concomitantly equips them to seek popular consent from the masses for their hegemonic belief system manifested through fear psychosis. The concerted effort by the ruling right-wing to delegitimise and to be contemptuous to different political thoughts and concomitantly normalising the idea of a Hindu nationalist state is an explicit attempt to homogenise space manifested through hegemonic nationalism.