The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

ARTICLE

Decline of Haryana universities
Their present academic & organisational edifice needs to change
by D.R. Chaudhry

A university, ideally speaking, is a dissenting academy which should function as a cradle of social change where issues are debated fearlessly and dispassionately. The Vice Chancellor of a university is the key functionary who plays an important role in providing the requisite academic milieu.

According to the guidelines of the University Grants Commission (UGC), a Vice Chancellor (VC) should be a distinguished academician with a minimum of 10 years' experience as a professor in the university system or an equivalent position in a reputed research organisation. Then there are also requirements of published work and research. Universities in the country get grants from the UGC and as such they are required to follow these guidelines.

Haryana has nine state universities. Out of nine only two universities -- Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar, and Health University, Rohtak -- have VCs. who are academicians with a university background. The rest are former Army officers, engineers or pen-pushers in offices. They have never been part of the university system nor did they conduct or guide research. Interestingly, Jambheshwar University, Hisar, is a university of science and technology and its VC is a postgraduate in Sanskrit and has never been part of the university system as a professor.

Academic freedom is unthinkable in the absence of university autonomy. Autonomy presumes two things. First, the university should be free from external control. Secondly, internal decisions such as the recruitment of teachers, organising teaching and research should not be influenced by extraneous considerations. While emphasising the importance of university autonomy, the Kothari Commission Report on Education and National Development observes:

"It is important to recognise that the case of autonomy of universities rests on the fundamental consideration that, without it, universities cannot discharge effectively their function of teaching, research and service to the community; and that only an autonomous institution, free from regimentation of ideas and pressure of party or politics, can pursue truth fearlessly and build up in its teachers and students, habits of independent thinking, and spirit of enquiry unfettered by the limitations and prejudices of the near and the immediate."

Haryana universities are a complete negation of the basic recommendation of the Kothari Education Commission report. External constraints and pressures on a university can be countered only if there is internal autonomy in the day-to-day functioning. This, first of all, presumes lack of an overbearing role of government representatives in the decision-making bodies of a university like the Academic Council and the Executive Council. The situation is quite the reverse in case of Haryana universities. It is the government nominees in the decision-making bodies of a university who call the shots, thus rendering the universities as third-rate government departments. All this has rendered the university structure in Haryana quite autocratic.

In the absence of democratic ethos in the internal functioning of a university, autonomy degenerates into autocracy of an individual. Thus, a Haryana university is run as a fief of a VC. In such a situation a VC tends to act as a despot in the university and a servitor of the powers-that-be as the incumbent, more often than not, is appointed not on the basis of one's academic attainments and credentials but on caste and political considerations.

A VC has to see that standard is maintained in the educational institutions like B.Ed., engineering colleges etc. affiliated to a university. There are more than 1,000 B.Ed. colleges in Haryana run, in most of the cases, by those who are not even remotely concerned with academics. They are money spinners and most of them lack basic infrastructure. The result of the test for recruiting teachers in government schools in the state paints a depressing picture. The pass percentage of candidates in the test for trained graduate teachers held by the School Board of Education, Haryana, recently was a mere 1.44 per cent while for the postgraduate teachers it was measly 2.7 per cent.

In the absence of internal autonomy of a university, its external dimension becomes automatically vulnerable. External pressures start operating freely. Even if there is some resistance in a particular case, arm-twisting is resorted to. This is amply reflected in the change of VCs along with change in the government. When a new ruling set-up is installed after elections, the VCs, appointed by the previous regime, are given marching orders which are obeyed meekly. The device of appointing an IAS officer as a Registrar is often resorted to. He acts as a watchdog of the government and breathes down the neck of a VC as a Big Brother.

Substantially speaking, everything happens in Haryana universities except meaningful teaching, and socially purposive research. To quote an instance, the institution of Khap Panchayat has hogged the media headlines for quite some time and Haryana is the most prominent in this matter in the Khap belt. Several students of Panjab University, Delhi University and JNU are doing Ph.d. on Khap Panchayat. It is not surprising that Haryana universities draw a blank in this matter.

Even a university like the Agriculture University, Hisar, which played an important role in ushering the Green Revolution in the state, has suffered an incalculable decline. Caste lobbies, regional groups, pointless mutual wrangles, caucuses around the power centres, the liaison with the right political quarters and such other non-academic activities preoccupy the university community.

A major cause of the malaise in the academia is to be located in the political culture of the state. There is no place for dissent or debate in this culture. The successful political operators do not have companions or comrades-in-arms to help them. It is the faceless quislings, minions and hangers-on who throng the leaders who shape various institutions in the state as they have shaped their political outfits.

What impresses most a casual visitor to several university campuses in the state are the majestic mansions and gigantic gates. However, they are tombs of the academia, a charnel house, bright and glittering, but a sepulcher of ideas and sensibility, nevertheless. They are metaphors of non-resistance and meekness towards the authorities. No Haryana university campus has ever seen stir on any socially significant issue. They are dead spots so far as activism is concerned. They are dens of apathetic quietism. What matters is the academic content and not imposing structures. The Vishwa Bharti University, founded by Rabindranath Tagore in West Bengal, has very few buildings and classes are held under the shade of trees. However, this university enjoys high reputation in academics.

Haryana universities are structured in such a way that they kill the potential of both teachers and students. In the present format they would keep on churning out morbid zombies engaged in the struggle for survival in place of live individuals who take society forward. Their present academic and organisational edifice needs to be dismantled to be supplanted by a creative one. The issue needs to be debated widely.

The writer is a retired academic from Delhi University.

MIDDLE

Love thwarted
by D. S. Kang

MY friend is an innocent victim of jealousy and possessiveness. He is a tall, handsome young man with impeccable manners. The only son of an Army officer, he was groomed in the traditions and values of an aristocratic family. He was intelligent, promising and full of confidence. He loved life and wanted to live it well. While doing his Master's in English literature in Chandigarh, he fell in love. She was a beautiful girl, always gracious and nattily dressed, and had a sparkling sense of humour. She, too, was attracted and soon the bond became deeper. Very often, she would say, "I love you very much. I'm a very possessive sort of a woman." He simply smiled and ignored it.

On completing their studies, they tied the nuptial knot. At her insistence, he dropped the idea of taking the Civil Services examination and joined a business organisation as an executive.

In the initial months of their marriage, they enjoyed being together, visiting places and partying with close friends and relatives. Sometime later, he came to know what she had meant by being possessive. She would often call him at his office, "Darling, where are you? What are you doing? With whom are you at present? I'm feeling lonely and bored, when are you coming back home?"

She checked the calls on his mobile, kept an eye on him whenever he used his Facebook and resented the time he spent with his family and friends. He visited his parents at Ludhiana every weekend. In the beginning, they went together. Her in-laws were nice people who treated her as their own daughter.

On a fine Sunday morning when he was excitedly getting ready for his ancestral home, she bluntly told him, "I'm not interested in your parents at all. Why do you see them so often? Still, if you're so keen, you may go alone. Do you ever think of visiting my parents? Aren't they related to you?"

With the passage of time, he met his parents only once or twice a month. Likewise, he started distancing himself from his friends. He was very nice to her. He accepted her every demand to keep the family atmosphere happy and peaceful. But she wanted to dominate him and impose her own living style on him. She compelled him twice to change his workplace. At her parents' house, she got her pregnancy aborted against his wishes.

At long last, he realised that he had lost his much-cherished freedom. For quite some time, they led a fractured life continuing to live through pretence. Soon they drifted apart. Even the remotest chance of a compromise was spoiled by her mother's arrogance. After divorce, the boy has lost his hearty zest for life and has started drinking to comfort his ragged nerves.

After the death of her second husband abroad, the girl faces desperate times, fighting loneliness and depression. She suffers in silence. Excessive possessiveness killed a budding conjugal relationship before it could mature into a lasting equation.

OPED

Creative writing under the shadow of terror
The assertion that the greatest periods of creativity have been those of peace is challenged in the present times.
The roots and growth of creativity have come to be located in the violent underpinnings.
Meenakshi Bharat

First came the scream of the dying

in a bad dream, then the radio report,

and a newspaper: six shot dead, twenty-five

houses razed, sixteen beheaded with hands tied

behind their backs inside a church.

Robin Ngangom, Meitei, poet from Manipur, forced to thus become a reluctant witness to the terror being unleashed in the world, seems to have touched the defining chord of our times. Having himself given word to this terror in his poetry, his words ring truer with the forced recognition that ‘terror’ seems indeed to have become a decided cultural marker not only in the world, but quite piquantly, on the Indian subcontinent. Our todays seem to have become characterised by the thorny identification between the output of our creative imagination and the sweep of an almost rabid violent ideological politics which reveals itself in the widespread acts of terrorism and the terrifyingly ‘regular’ outbreak of terror-generating riots. In the past, the assertion that the greatest periods of creativity have been periods of prosperity and peace, veritable, golden periods had been much bandied but in today’s confusing, anarchic turmoil, is there any space for creativity?

With this latter day facility lost, riding the uneasy winds of globalisation, terror seems to have come to establish a stranglehold on the minds of intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike; of both thinkers and creative minds. In more bizarre ways than any other aspect of today’s world, the theme seems to have emerged as a discomforting leveller. Moreover, as a corollary to the rise of the importance of the contemporary, the roots and growth of creativity necessarily come to be located in these violent underpinnings. Little wonder that literature in the subcontinent, a popular and visible cultural witness to this strain, has taken it up with remarkable frequency, impacting on the cultural make-up of the times and denting the sense of self and belonging to the nation.

Literature of discomfort

Taking Michel Foucault’s observation that ‘the forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conflicts’ as the starting point, the compulsive treatment of violent face-offs in the shape of terror and riots become extremely significant — for what are these, if not random, chaotic events? Seen in this light, the novels become an embodiment of the impetus and the effort to chart the new contentious trajectory that the ‘history’ of the nation seems to be taking. Indeed, by doing this, they call into question the commitment of the individual to the nation — the sense of ‘self’, under threat of the disquiet resulting from these repeated acts of terror and rioting that keep rearing their heads with frightening regularity to stall the onward march of the nation as Nehru, independent India’s first Prime Minister had envisaged it.

So, with the evidence that ever since the country gained independence as an unhappy accompaniment to the requiem of the holocaustic Partition which cleft the nation into two parts — one Muslim and the other, Hindu — riots and acts of terror have become an inescapable part of Indian existence. This partition of the subcontinent into two separate nations set up an abiding enmity between the two people, leaving the two countries squabbling for border tracts of land, questioning the lines drawn by the retreating colonising master who had little or no understanding of the cultural commixture of the two religious groups.

Mirza Waheed notes as much in The Collaborator (2010), “…there is [now] always an Indian and a Pakistani version of everything.” The sibling rivalry of yore has hardened to an irreversible distrust of the other and it is this unhappy legacy that reveals itself in repeated conflagration in riots within the country, and incursions into each other’s space in terrorist fashion and it is this aspect of our contemporary predicament that novelists take up again and again. While Basharat Peer may starkly document the dramatic changes being wrought thus, “By the summer of 1990, thousands of young Kashmiri men crossed the Line of Control…and they returned as militants,” he also talks of the cultural reverberations in the excitement that their ‘stories’ generated. He says, “…they were heroes — people wanted to talk to them, touch them, hear their stories, and invite them for a feast.”

The proxy historians

Through art, we come to the inherent paradox of our times: these mean times are yet ‘historical’ in a piquant sense. Writing terror and riots and giving them creative shape, despite the overwhelming abundance of media coverage and debate on the subject, has become an integral part of historiography with the artist/the writer/the narrator taking on the mantle of the proxy historian in this context, an ‘event’ recorder as it were. In a country that has seen the maximum deaths due to terrorist attacks over the years and where political activity and the nationalist agenda have to necessarily take this into account, it is little wonder that the theme catches the imagination of the novelist.

This is the fact that scriptwriter Bhavani Iyer recognises and states simply, “Evocation of any country’s collective consciousness is usually mirrored in its popular art forms.” In the present scenario, it becomes quite clear that if, in conceptualising the present, these acts of terror are either suppressed or not recognised or even wilfully excluded, then the whole process of historiography would become a lie. In giving them creative cover in literature, the latter become the means for verbalising ‘the truth’ inherent in the present and in the process. It is this ‘truth’ that needs to be nailed by following this process with the explicit aim of working out this cultural trajectory. How does terror hit out at the very roots of the forward moving ideology and how, in turn, does contemporary literature negotiate with this downturn? How do these parley with the traditional progressive Nehruvian model for the nation; with the state-embraced notion of secularism? In the answer I discern a cultural model for the nation.

Of course, these exercising issues have much in common with those of the world which has revealed itself to be morbidly and compulsively fascinated with this disturbing topic. The west sees these acts of terror —9/11 having become a key ‘event’— as bringing about, as Ian McEwan said in an interview a few months after the terror attacks, ‘great changes’ in the world from which it has to ‘learn.’ The event that seemed, in its very reality, more fantastic and more creative than fiction itself, seemed to scotch the creative attempt by virtue of having simply outdone it. The fact that he goes on to himself illuminate a path for all who attempt to write on the subject, the choice and the act of writing a novel on the subject comes as a renewal of faith in creativity. In the light of this, the fiction writer’s task comes to be invested with the unmistakable implication of its interpretive richness and the intimation that its insights are rare: evidently, what fiction can do is something beyond the ability of mere fact. It can take stock of disruptions, of change, and its lessons are unique.

Chroniclers of loss

But whereas, McEwan’s novelistic abilities had been temporarily frozen by the enormity of a terror attack, in India, living with the menace of guns, and the fears of one’s own people turning against one, as is done to known Calcutta streets in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines(1988), there is the other unique and imminent danger of this terror turning ‘banal;’ of believing that there is nothing to excite the creative imagination. But it is not long before one realizes that even here, in India, the evidence of aesthetic witness intervenes to remind us that this element of the contemporary merits special attention, that it is a task that must necessarily be essayed. Moreover, the multifariousness of the narratives emerging in the country, quite often with conflicting interpretations, makes for a rich, fruitful critical matrix on which the art can thrive.

As the creative writer probes deep into the various possible origins of the actions, it becomes clear that the all too apparent exceptional cover that the theme has received in fiction, poetry, journalism, film (short/long/mainstream/independent/documentary) goes beyond mere acknowledgement of a contemporary phenomenon. It becomes imperative for the cultural theorist to ascertain the underlying markers that run through them and to recognise the responsibilities that following this course entails. So, when Pablo Neruda urges people to

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood in the streets!

to step out to witness the violence, the call becomes a bidding not just to witness, but to participate and to share in a responsibility. This double demand becomes the iteration of one of the most problematic paradoxes of the age: in irresponsible times, creativity verbalizes the acknowledgment of the fact that we are all liable; that we are all answerable. Mirza Waheed’s collaborator openly gestures to this when he says, “ I am sure it’s a human rights catastrophe waiting to be noticed.” Again, Robin Ngangom corroborates this in the emotionally debilitating realisation of a killing difference between a wholesome, happy past and a distressing, violent present:

Childhood took place

free from manly fears

when I had only my mother’s love

to protect me from knives,

from fire, and death by water.

I wore it like an amulet.

Childhood took place

among fairies and were tigers

when hills were yours to tumble

before they became soldiers. barracks

and dreaded chambers of torture.

Childhood took place

before your friend worshipped a gun

to become a widow maker.

In this ongoing ‘reign of terror,’ Ngangom plainly identifies the role of the creative artist as that of a witness, an annalist and as a voice of the communal conscience.

So, are we witnessing the making of history? Of significant history ? With the memorialisation of events like the riots following the theft of the Prophet Muhammed’s holy hair from Hazratbal in 1963-1964, that become the focal events of Amitav Ghosh’s 1988 SahityaAkademi Award Winner, The Shadow Lines; the Mumbai blasts of 2003 finding mention in Kiran Nagarkar’s God’s Little Soldier (2006), and the Taj imbroglio of 2008 prefigured in Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (2006), we realise that over and over again the artist seems compelled by the urgent need to artistically commemorate these events which have little of the ‘grandeur’ associated with the great conflicts of past times; events that are politically, socially and morally diminishing in impact; events that entail tremendous loss.

The writer is Associate Professor, Department of English, Sri Venkateswara College,
University of Delhi. Edited excerpts from ‘Troubled testimonies: Culture in terror-stricken times’, a paper presented at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, on July 23, 2013