This is how I can describe the harrowing experience of attending 145th meeting of the academic council of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) a few days ago.
This was the second meeting of its kind for me. I had had the first bitter taste of it months ago in a similar meeting. That was when our beloved vice chancellor (VC M. Jagadeesh Kumar) who earlier used to listen to my interventions attentively – like on the occasion I responded to a proposed shoddy course on Yoga – suddenly turned blind and deaf to me. After repeated efforts made in vain to draw his precious attention, I left the meeting. I even decided that I would no more subject myself to such contempt, which I do not deserve.
I had to go for the 145th AC meeting because my colleagues insisted. The new attendance policy had been thrust down our unwilling throats by ignoring procedural propriety. It had further been put as a resolution of the previous meeting based on inaccurate minuting – a bane of our recent AC meetings. I felt obliged to attend the meeting and request our beloved VC to get the policy approved after taking the objections and suggestions into cognisance. Though our dean had gathered over 20 responses to the proposal, the administration, in its infinite wisdom, had decided to bulldoze them all.
Our beloved and revered VC declared the proposal approved. He said that only four suggestions had come in to the administration. I, along with several senior teachers, stood up and said repeatedly that the proposal bears a thorough discussion. We were silenced by the raucous shouts of ‘yes-sayers’ in the hall. These front-benchers, friends and supporters of our VC, are brought in for no other reason than to manufacture an illusion of majority by the shouting and cheering of people who are not even members of the Council. The VC chose to be deaf and blind to us, more than 30 members of the council, as ‘yes-sayers’ yeses rose to the firmament. Our no’s were drowned.
Suddenly my blood pressure shot up and my body began to tremble. It was a Kafkasque scene. Neither I nor the other no-sayers existed for the vice chancellor and his sacred chorus of gleeful yes-sayers. We were dead. My other colleagues, mostly women, were making desperate attempts to draw the attention of the chair. But the chair only spoke but refused to listen. I felt helpless. What could I, a 63-year-old patient of diabetes and hypertension also cursed with hypersensitivity of a poet do in that melee and pandemonium?
What was happening was adharma. Rajadharma, which applies to all rulers whether of a country or a university, demands that rulers listen to their subjects. Did not lord Sri Ram, the personification of dharma, go to the extent of sending his queen to the forest just because a rude subject suspected her purity? Rajadharma imposes such hard duties on rulers apart from power. Here was a situation where the king turned completely deaf to his subjects – the opposite of Ram’s glorious example.
I walked out of that scene from the theatre of the absurd, repeating to myself the lines of my saintly ancestor Basavanna:
‘When the fence eats up the field
When the housewife steals in her own house
When mother’s breast milk kills like poison
To whom should I complain
O Kudalasangamadeva’
H.S. Shivaprakash is an award-winning poet, playwright and translator who works in Kannada and English. He is a professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at JNU.