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Students inIndia have frequently rebelled against injustice. Sometimes their rebellion has been expressed in individual, isolated instances of violence, at other times they have sought to build a larger movement.
The earliest instances of protest against injustice was There were a number of episodes in which individual students resorted to violence against the state during the Swadeshi movement in the 1910s. In Bengal the rebel students found togetherness in and inspiration from organisations such as the Anushilan Samiti. It is said by the historian Rajat Kanta Ray that even the young Abul Kalam Azad was a member of one such Kali worshipping group.
In the 1920s, many students joined the Hindustan Republican Army which was later renamed as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army. The inspirational leaders in this organisation were Chandrashekhar Azad and Sukhdev Thapar. But it was the young Bhagat Singh who caught the attention of the Indian public when in 1929 he along with his colleague Batukeshwar Dutt threw a few bombs in the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi in protest against the proposed Public Safety Bill.
It was in the period after independence that student action transformed from acts of individual heroism to actions that involved bringing thousands on to the streets. One of the first such protest was the Anti-Hindi agitation in Tamilnadu to protest against the proposal floated by Gulzarilal Nanda to impose Hindi over all of India from 1967. Students across Tamilnadu filled up the streets and shut down markets. Several students immolated themselves. About 70 people died in the violence. The protests ended only when prime minister Shastri clearly promised that Hindi would not be imposed. One of the outcomes of the anti-Hindi protest was that the Congress lost in the elections in 1967 and the Dravida Munetra Kazgham formed a government. The agitation ended when PMLal Bahadur Shastri assured that Nehru’s promise (who had assured that there would be no imposition) would be kept. Congress was routed in the 1967 elections and DMK came to power with Annaas chief minister and the renaming of the state as ‘Tamilnadu’. It was previously known as ‘Madras’. Since then the Congress has not been able to form a government in Tamilnadu.
Parallel to the anti-Hindi agitation in Tamilnadu were the anti-English agitations in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. These agitations too were mostly by students. They resulted in total disruption of classes in these states, lot of burning of property and the marginalisation of the English language in the education system of these states. The total decline of education in these states followed.
In 1973-74, in Gujarat, the students created the Nav Nirman movement. The movement started with protest against hike in mess fee in the hostels but soon grew to oppose the prevalence of corruption in public life. Morarji Desai, leading the life of a retired politician too joined this movement. It resulted in the resignation of the chief minister, Chimanbhai Patel. The movement had seen statewide strikes, curfews in 44 towns to stop violence. In Ahmedabad even the army had to be called in to restore peace.
Inspired by the student agitation in Gujarat, the students of Bihar too came out on the streets. They also brought out of retirement Jai Prakash Narain, the much revered socialist Congress leader of 1942 fame. The joining together of the student movements of Gujarat and Bihar was seen as a great threat by prime minister Indira Gandhi who imposed the Emergency in 1975. Over 300 student leaders were arrested and sent to jail. Among these were Laloo Yadav, Sharad Yadav, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Arun Jaitley, D P Tripathi. Each of them would play a major role in the politics of India subsequently.
Parallel to the student agitations of Gujarat and Bihar, even the students in Madhya Pradesh went on strikes and took out street demonstrations. Their demand, however, was for reducing the cost of cinema tickets for students. For many years thereafter, in Madhya Pradesh, students could go to cinema theatres with the i-cards and see the films at concessional rates.
The next big student agitation was the most successful and fruitful. It was an agitation that was led by students but involved all other people too. This was the Assam agitation which started in 1979 and continued till 1985. Prafulla Mahanta who headed the agitation became the chief minister of Assam. The National Register of Citizenship (NRC) that was created in Assam in the past five years under the supervision of the Supreme Court of India, is one of the demands of the Assam agitation that was agreed upon by the government of India in 1985.
V P Singh presided over the saddest and most useless of student agitations on becoming prime minister. When V P Singh became prime minister he promised to implement the recommendations given in 1980 of the B P Mandal Commission. In September 1990, students across north India, especially Delhi, Haryana and Punjab, came out on the streets to protest against the imposition of reservations for OBCs. The movement took a ghastly turn when Rajiv Goswami, a commerce student from the Deshbandhu College in Delhi and an activist in the Youth Congress, put himself on fire in one of the protest demonstrations. Subsequently almost a hundred young people committed suicide ostensibly in protest against the implementation of reservations. Schools and colleges across UP, Delhi, Haryana and Punjab were shut down. Finally V P Singh resigned in November 1990. That brought the agitation to an end. In its last legs in Chandigarh-Mohali, some students blocking a road in protest, were shot dead by a posse of Punjab Police who were travelling on that road. From September to November some 33 cases of suicide by protestors were reported to the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research at Chandigarh. Only a handful of them were from the upper castes. Many belonged to the OBC or SC castes, caste groups that would actually benefit from implementing the Mandal reservations. The next government did implement OBC reservations and no one protested this time.
After the anti-Mandal agitation there was lull in student protests. A brief protest did take place in 2006 against reservations. A similar stray protest took place at Jadavpur University in 2014, this time to oust the VC. In 2015, the students of FTII came out to protest the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as the chairman of the institute. In 2016, the students of Hyderabad Central University took to agitation on the death of a student. The students claimed that the death was because of caste oppression; the university disagreed.
A protest in February 2016, at JNU as students who had gathered to oppose the hanging of a few Kashmiri terrorists boiled over into a much larger agitation by students. The students were accused of being ‘anti-national’. Soon leaders of almost all opposition political parties came out in support of the students. The students agitation
Jnu,Jamnia, Aligarh,Bhu and other universities are major now....
India history.
Photo -JNU
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