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Corruption, mayhem and murder on India's
college campuses
By
Shailaja Neelakantan/NEW DELHI
Issue
cover-dated November 30, 2004
Lucknow, India
Rajpal Kashyap, a candidate for president of the Lucknow University
Students' Union, arrived on the campus one sunny afternoon in
October with an armed guard at his side.
Stepping out of a blue sport-utility vehicle, he walked confidently
into a classroom and greeted about 40 supporters with a wide
smile, his palms pressed together before him in the traditional
Indian style.
A few paces away some 50 policemen, armed with rifles and long
wooden staves called lathis, used for crowd control, stood near
a jeep and a police van. The campaign season had already claimed
two lives at Lucknow in three months -- including one just the
night before -- and intimidation and harassment were rife on
the campus. Elections were just 48 hours away.
Before the day was out, the officers had closed the campus
to all nonstudents, locking the gates to prevent outsiders from
entering. Then they checked ID's and allegedly roughed up at
least one person who couldn't produce identification.
In India student-government elections are not for the faint
of heart.
Beset with violence, intimidation, and corruption, campus politics
have become increasingly dangerous. Historically, such problems
have been most acute in the poorest states, like Uttar Pradesh,
in northern India, where Lucknow is located. But even the wealthier
regions are not immune.
On many campuses, it is not uncommon for student politicians
to stay year after year, earning multiple degrees, so that they
can continue to run for office. Nor is it rare to find candidates
with lengthy criminal records involving illegal weapons and
violence.
Clashes between student groups, and even murders, have become
part of the political fabric during election season. Voter bribery
is common, supported by the deep pockets of national political
parties eager to make inroads among college students. It has
gotten so bad that some states, in desperate attempts to restore
order on campuses, have banned student elections.
Why have campus politics become so cutthroat? Primarily because
throughout India, student elections are seen as steppingstones
to national politics, and therefore a route to wealth and power.
Scores of important political figures, including Atal Behari
Vajpayee, the former prime minister, got their start in university
campaigns.
That has been especially true since 1989, when the federal
government reduced the minimum voting age for national elections
from 21 to 18, the age at which most Indian students enter college.
That made political parties even more interested in involving
students, because they became a vital source of votes.
"The situation was already deteriorating on many campuses,
and after that it really went downhill," says M.K. Desai,
dean of N.M. College, in Bombay, where the Maharashtra State
government banned campus elections in 1994, five years after
the murder of a student leader.
Death Threats
One of 90 candidates for student body president at Lucknow,
Mr. Kashyap, 28, a soft-spoken, mustachioed man of medium build,
says he was provided an armed escort by the Lucknow police because
rival candidates, and even rivals from within his own party,
had threatened his life.
In July another student leader at the university, Upendra Singh
was shot dead at point-blank range in a dormitory, apparently
for reasons related to campus politics. His alleged killer,
Aditya Mishra, another presidential aspirant, later surrendered
to police. One day before Mr. Kashyap's campaign appearance
with an armed guard, Manish Rai, a 23-year-old journalism student,
was shot and killed when he was caught in the crossfire between
supporters of two rival student leaders.
Mr. Rai's death marked the climax of three and a half months
of fear unleashed on Lucknow by members of various student groups,
who defaced public property, extorted money from businessmen
and doctors at gunpoint, and forced the university to shut down
classes with threats of violence. The only beneficiaries, it
seems, were local suppliers of firearms.
Mr. Kashyap, who said he was worried but was not going to withdraw
under threats, represents the Samajwadi Chhatra Sabha, which
is affiliated with the Samajwadi Party, currently the ruling
party in Uttar Pradesh.
With graduate degrees in social work and law, and currently
enrolled in a graduate social-science program, Mr. Kashyap said
his main goal was to end violence on campus. He plans to continue
studying until he gets the nod from his parent party to stand
for office at the state level.
Other candidates running for election also said they were campaigning
for an end to the violence, as well as for better facilities.
But in campaign speeches they rarely talked about those issues.
Instead they engaged mainly in name-calling and criticizing
their opponents about issues unrelated to the university. They
also plastered building walls, buses, even private cars with
posters, and traveled around the city in vans and buses with
their supporters shouting into bullhorns.
Unlike Mr. Kashyap, many student-government candidates here
have a history of run-ins with the police. Charges against them
include attempted murder, rioting, illegal possession of firearms,
and violations of the Uttar Pradesh Gangsters & Anti Social
Elements Prevention Act and the Uttar Pradesh Control of Goondas
Act. (Goonda is the Hindi word for thug or hooligan).
Like Mr. Kashyap, many other candidates here have received
financial backing from major national political parties, which
often provide muscle power for their activities, legal and otherwise.
"Politics is a full-time profession" in Uttar Pradesh,
"and preparation for politics is a full-time profession
in the universities here," says the Lucknow district's
chief administrator, Aradhana Shukla. She should know. In the
month leading up to the election, the feisty bureaucrat tried
to stem criminal activity at Lucknow University by ordering
raids on dormitories to confiscate arms and ammunition collected
by some student leaders.
No Worries
Despite the bloodshed at Lucknow and on other campuses, India's
politicians don't seem particularly worried. Though the annual
ritual of student elections occasions soul-searching on television
talk shows and in the local press, there has been no concerted
effort to reform student politics.
In fact, last year, Mulayam Singh Yadav, chief minister of
Uttar Pradesh, ended a ban on student elections at Lucknow that
had been imposed by a former chief minister in 1999. Speaking
to a gathering of students, faculty members, and reporters,
he said that he, too, had begun his political career as a student.
Turning to the university's vice chancellor, he asked rhetorically,
"Do I look like a goonda to you?" It was a risky question,
given that he, like many other politicians, has long been known
to consort with suspected criminals.
If Lucknow officials had their way, they would ban elections
on the campus for good. But that power, just as in the rest
of India, is reserved for the state governments.
"When the [Uttar Pradesh] government banned elections,
it was really peaceful on campus," says V.D. Mishra, the
university's proctor, or president. "This year alone we
have lost more than two months of study, as campaigning began
at the beginning of the term itself in late July. ... But nobody
asks us, of course."
While political corruption in the state is directly linked
to poverty and low literacy levels, wealthier states, with higher
literacy rates, are also plagued by campus violence. Kerala,
the country's most literate state, finally forbade political
activity on its campuses in July 2003.
Academics say the ban was long overdue. Since 1970 some 50
students have died and hundreds have been badly injured because
of the violence endemic to campus politics in Kerala.
Meanwhile, party politics rules the day at universities in
states without bans on campus campaigns.
In Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab, an attack on a candidate
and the murder of a former student-union leader in September
forced the police to deploy more than 100 officers in riot gear
until the elections were held.
This year, even in the Delhi University student-union elections,
which are normally free of violence, campus officials were roughed
up.
Though violence is rare, student campaigns at the elite university
in India's capital are plagued by other problems. Financed by
their national affiliates, student parties spend thousands of
dollars on campaigns that disrupt campus life, mimicking the
bribery and corruption that mar national politics.
Student elections "are a complete waste of money and time
and other resources. I am not in favor of it. College life is
meant for education," says Divya Dhar, a senior at the
university's Sri Venkateshwara College.
Four years ago Rajiv Khanna, a Delhi law professor who is also
the university's commissioner of student elections, helped create
a code of conduct that declared that no candidate should spend
more than about $200. Although the code was created in consultation
with student groups, "that has not stopped anyone from
spending much more than that," he says. In this year's
elections, he estimates, the competing student groups spent
a total of $133,000. "There is nothing we can do,"
he says.
During the September elections, Mr. Khanna says, he saw student
groups giving away mobile-phone cards, chocolates, and coupons
for liquor, among other freebies.
At Lucknow University, student leaders spent an estimated $444,000
on the elections this year.
Robbed of Educational Value
Despite such enormous sums in a country where the average annual
urban family income is $2,800, student politicians in Lucknow
and elsewhere deny that they receive outside assistance.
"We don't get money. We get support and nonmonetary resources
to mobilize students," says Ashok Tanwar, president of
the National Students Union of India, which is affiliated with
the Congress (I) Party. "Candidates spend their own money."
He was evasive as to what he meant by nonmonetary resources.
Mr. Khanna himself doesn't go so far as to condemn student
politics. "We know that these students directly report
to their political bigwigs and bosses and take directions and
contributions from them, both of the monetary kind as well as
strategic guidance," he says. "But we don't say anything,
because then they would be disqualified from running for elections,
and we don't want that. Elections are a healthy democratic process."
Others support university politics but believe that the money
and violent tactics associated with student campaigns have robbed
the experience of much of its educational value.
"Universities are nurseries for future politicians, and
there is nothing wrong with them starting off at that level
with the aim of joining mainstream politics," says Manish
Tiwari, a doctoral student at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University
who is conducting research on how voters' and candidates' castes
influence election outcomes in the State of Rajasthan. "But,
unfortunately, in the last decade the nurseries' crop has spoiled.
Students' groups are blank in ideology and never address issues
of national concern. These students have to ultimately deal
with problems at the national level -- but they are woefully
unequipped to do so."
Longtime observers say that in addition to money, outside political
parties also give tacit approval to their student affiliates
to indulge in extortion, as happened during the Lucknow elections.
In return, the parties use their student wings during national
and state elections, both for conventional canvassing and for
more dubious purposes, like taking over polling booths to intimidate
voters into choosing specific candidates.
Given their intimate connections with national politics, it
is not surprising that student political parties pursue platforms
virtually identical to those of their national counterparts.
They rarely raise issues of direct concern to students, like
housing shortages and the quality of cafeteria food. Instead,
as national candidates do, they often urge students to vote
for them because of their caste or religion. Indeed, student
political parties often nominate candidates based on those attributes.
"In Rajasthan University's student-union elections, every
nomination is decided on the basis of castes and even subcastes,
just like in their state-level nominations," says Mr. Tiwari.
"In the newspapers there, come election time you will see
full-page advertisements by caste-based students' parties that
are affiliated to political parties."
In 1990, in one of the more notorious incidents of caste-based
politics on campus, a Delhi student, Rajiv Goswami, set himself
on fire to protest the expansion of quotas to the backward castes.
Mr. Goswami, who died last February after suffering over a decade
of complications resulting from his burns -- and inspiring many
copycats over the years -- won his campaign for a student-union
post that year.
And if India's national parties don't seem to see anything
wrong with known lawbreakers running for office -- in May's
parliamentary elections, 16 percent of the candidates had criminal
records -- why should students?
Bajrangi (Bajju) Singh, a presidential contender in Lucknow's
student-union election, who represents a breakaway faction of
the ruling Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, has eight cases
pending against him, involving the detonation of crude bombs
on the campus and attempted murder, according to police officials.
"I have taken part in serious students' struggles, and
so I have been falsely charged," he says, echoing the defense
commonly made by politicians at the national level. "That
doesn't mean I am a criminal."
Likewise, Vijay (Tintoo) Singh, a candidate with a similar
record, calls the charges against him "politically motivated."
Some Lucknow candidates have been at the university for as
long as 13 years, earning not only bachelor's but also numerous
master's degrees in order to continue their involvement in university
politics while they wait to advance to the national level of
their parties.
Once Idealistic
It was not always so. In the 1960s and the '70s, idealism pervaded
campus politics. Just as in the United States, where the antiwar
movement on campuses led to the building of public opinion against
the Vietnam War, Indian students rose together in 1974 to protest
corruption and the connections between politicians and black
marketeers, who hoarded essential goods and sold them at exorbitant
prices.
"The movement arose in the university dormitories of Gujarat
and spread nationwide, so much so that former prime minister
Indira Gandhi was forced to declare a state of emergency a year
later, so threatened was she that she would be unseated,"
says Anand Kumar, a professor of political sociology at Jawaharlal
Nehru University. Mr. Kumar was president of the student union
at Benaras Hindu University in 1972 and at Nehru in 1974.
The situation he refers to is considered by many to be Indian
democracy's darkest hour. "It was classic anti-establishment
politics then, because one political party, the Congress, dominated
politics," says Mr. Kumar. "From 1977 onwards, when
Indians voted in India's first non-Congress government, the
quality of student politics began to decline. The classic anti-establishment
position was no longer valid."
Ironically, then, the success of student idealism led indirectly
to its decline, he says.
"Political parties, astonished by the students' successes,
then started co-opting students to the point where students
no longer represent a subculture," says Mr. Kumar. At the
same time, he adds, nonpartisan solidarity has vanished over
the years because of cleavages caused by caste politics, religious
divisiveness, and the commercialization of education.
"The political parties are responsible for this,"
says Mr. Kumar.
And what of Mr. Kashyap? He won the election without harm befalling
him or anyone else at Lucknow. Whether he can keep his promise
to end election-related violence on the campus remains to be
seen.
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