Kanhaiya Kumar, March 16, 2016. Wikicommons/ Hemanth5432. Some rights reserved.Since 2014, Indian universities have been subject to the authoritarian impulse of the state, with the right wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of Narendra Modi seeking to fundamentally transform the character of these universities, imposing unqualified administrators that are close to the party line, implicitly supporting party-affiliated student groups such as the ABVP, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) (translation: All Indian Student Council) to silence alternative voices, and deploying both violence and disproportionate punishment to silence student protest against the state’s authoritarian policies.
The ABVP has been reconfigured to establish the BJP agenda on university campuses, serving as both the mouthpiece of the BJP as well as an information source for surveilling over and controlling thought that is seen as critical of the BJP agenda dedicated to Hinduizing India. Moreover, the ABVP has been at the vortex of cooking up trouble and inciting violence across campuses in India.
These active measures of intervention into higher education taken by the Modi government have been orchestrated toward achieving the broader agenda of cleansing the universities of critical voices, instead reconfiguring universities to serve the right wing agendas of further privatization and saffronization of education. The education agenda is being reworked, and turned toward the teaching of Sanskrit, the discoveries of Vedic science, and the reformulation of teaching as practical skills-building.
