Will pro-JVP students ever learn?

This was first published in the ‘Daily News’ on October 26, 2009.  A related article was published, coincidentally, exactly a year later, i.e on October 27, 2010 titled 'Student politics, anomalies and responsibilities'. Still relevant, I believe. 

The other day Ruhunu University Vice Chancellor Prof Susirith Mendis was assaulted. The JVP-led Inter University Students Federation will bend over backwards to claim non-involvement, but no one will buy their story

About 15 years ago, the Students’ Council of the Peradeniya Arts Faculty lodged a protest outside the office of the Arts Faculty Dean. They were objecting to the suspension of some students. The suspended students had been found guilt of ragging freshers. The key student leaders were members of the JVP by way of their membership in that party’s student wing, the Socialist Students Union. The Dean and his staff were virtually held hostage.

A young lecturer, then on probation, raised what I thought was the most pertinent question in terms of student agitation: ‘If a suspension warranted holding someone hostage what kind of ‘action’ would a far more serious ‘offence’ provoke?’ He had just then summed up the thinking of pro-JVP students: an abysmal appreciation of the concept called ‘sense of proportion’.

In the eighties, I remember, the JVP leaders in the Arts Faculty came up with a novel idea. They recommended that every batch where at least one student had been arrested should boycott classes. Prabath Sahabandu, now the editor of The Island, observed then that we will come to a point where roommates would boycott classes protesting the arrest of fellow-roommates. Still, one must appreciate the logic of JVP-thinking.

If the objective was to destabilize then anything and everything that unsettles balance and causes disruption was fair game. Of course they could not openly say that the purpose of the exercise was to disrupt the university system. They had to conjure up some other kind of justification. Their will prevailed not on account of superior logic and the power of reason but the force of threat.

I am not an adherent of the ends-justify-means school of politics but even if this were the case it is still mind-boggling that the JVP could not (and still cannot) understand that chosen strategy has little chance of taking them to objective. The other day Ruhunu University Vice Chancellor Prof Susirith Mendis was assaulted. The JVP-led Inter University Students Federation will bend over backwards to claim non-involvement, but no one will buy their story. There is a reason.

The JVP has for decades played the role of Local Thug in the universities. Back in the eighties when the JVP student leaders, armed to their teeth with ignorance of world history and too confused to engage in even the most simple of ideological debates, referred to UNP supporters as junto (derived from junta). An objector observed, umbala thamai campus eke junto (you are the junto of the university). They could never see that they were the mirror image of their main detractors. It never struck them and I don’t think they would have been too worried even if it had.

The political problem for the JVP is that people notice. They discern pattern. They extrapolate. They are not convinced. However legitimate the grievance, however righteous the cause, the political outcome of their actions is severely compromised by this long history of violence, the utterly uncivilized modes of operation (which makes it impossible for them to object to similarly uncivilized actions on the part of their opponents) and a manifest talent to inflate things to proportions they just don’t have the wisdom to manage.

The students claim that Prof Susirith Mendis had ‘started the fight’. I was not there so let me not pass judgment on the claim. One thing is certain. No one will believe students belonging to the JVP faction on campus and its members can thank all their loku aiya sahodarayaas starting with Rohana Wijeweera for this.

Regardless of who did what to whom, the students have essentially shot themselves in their collective foot by assaulting the top administrator in the university whatever the justification (and I am hard pressed to believe there was any, knowing the JVP and knowing of Prof Mendis). They never held the moral high ground and by this act made it many times harder to ascend those heights.

The Inter University Students Federation has a lot of energy. It has very little humility. It doesn’t seem to understand the notion of ‘self-criticism’.

What is amusing is that the student leaders feel wronged after all this and are at a loss to understand why their battles are not championed by the ordinary people, especially those whose interests they sometimes claim to represent.

The bottom line is that the people are decent and are not ready to stand with thugs even when they articulate their concerns. This is something that Udul Premaratne and his trigger-happy merry men and women should think about and worry about. Sooner, rather than later.

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Student politics, anomalies and responsibilities

This was first published five years ago in the ‘Daily News’ on October 26, 2010.  Coincidentally, it was published exactly one year after a related article was published in the same newspaper: 'Will pro-JVP students ever learn?' Relevant even today, I believe.  

I recently wrote about vandalism, focusing on two university students who had been arrested for defacing a wall with graffiti and extrapolating to other forms of defacement of public space, especially by politicians. A friend of mine, agreeing with my general thesis, faulted me for not elaborating on the plight of undergraduates, their right to protest and the need to respond to legitimate grievance.

One of those arrested, Udul Premaratne, the Convenor of the Inter University Student Federation (IUSF) was released and arrested again (along with 14 students of the Ayurveda University) a few weeks later on charges of damaging public property. Everyone was later enlarged on bail so they could sit exams, except Premaratne who was not granted relief because he was no longer a student.

The students had demanded the opening of the Outpatients Department at Ayurveda Hospital in Rajagiriya and were protesting the hospital’s lack of medicines, which severely affects their practical training courses. The protest was not non-violent. Students’ frustrations, real or imagined, spilled over the parameters of protests that are sanctioned by the law. The Police stepped in.

It has been argued that Premaratne’s incarceration was politically motivated. He has led the IUSF for over two years now and is seen as the key mover in the recent rise in unrest in the university system. He has not done himself any favours of course by violating the law, inconveniencing the public and even earning their wrath for promoting party politics when the students he mobilizes for protests ought to be in their classes doing justice to the public funds being used to educate them. Does this mean, however, that students should not protest?

Personalities do make a difference of course, but discontent and agitation can hardly be explained by the charisma of a single individual. There are issues in our university system that have been neglected by the relevant authorities for years. The mismatch between education and the job market naturally frustrates the undergraduate population. Lack of commitment on the part of the academic staff, curricula that are not updated as per the requirements of new research, trends and realities, and poor facilities also contribute to creating unease in universities.

Some of these issues can be addressed and corrected, others are more difficult. If there was a perceivable effort on the part of authorities to address the structural flaws of the system and correct them, then students might be less impatient, although one cannot count on this since student politics unfortunately is determined to a large extent by the prerogatives of the political parties that have a handle on student organizations.

Two things need to be done to keep student agitation to a minimum and within non-disruptive and non-destructive dimensions. First, a comprehensive review of the system of education in terms of the demand and supply pertaining to the entire gamut of occupational categories needs to be done. For too long, we’ve blundered our way from decade to decade believing that the market will absorb those we train or believing that we are giving our students marketable and useful skills. There has been very little done by way of reviewing intake for each sphere of education and matching these with the demand in each relevant sector. Mismatches cause slippage; some fall in and others fall out and end up in jobs that they were not trained to do; meaning, a gross wastage of public funds.

I believe that failure to address these anomalies feed into fears, apprehensions and frustrations which make undergraduates easy prey to predatory political animals that have for decades made the university system their traditional hunting ground. We cannot however fault the IUSF for taking on these issues because they are real concerns for students. It is to blame the JVP, for instance, for engaging in cheap politics, but this is not sufficient dismissal of student agitation.

The other dimension of the problem that I believe has been neglected for a long time is the matter of civic education. The stark negative of free education that stands up like a sore thumb is that students have been pampered beyond belief and have taken for granted all that the State does for them.

We have students who have benefited from a State that has placed far greater value on welfare than it should who have absolutely no sense of the amount that the public has invested in each of them and therefore a woeful lack of responsibility in how they conduct themselves.

How many undergraduates pause and reflect on the kind of bill that the public has had to foot on their behalf, from the day they were born, one wonders. From the moment that the midwife visits an individual’s mother when he/she is still in her womb, through delivery, medical attention and medication whenever sick, and education right through to the securing of a degree, he/she is hardly conscious about monies spent and responsibilities that ought to accrue.

They graduate believing that the people owe them a secure and remunerative job. They believe that they have a right to soft loans so they can purchase a vehicle, a house and a lifestyle that conforms to their teenage dreams.

They are not to blame, though. The fault lies in the fact that their education lacks systematic instruction on what has been spent and the responsibilities they have to bear throughout their lives to the public. Students are hardly aware of the how difficult it is for a country like ours to spend the amounts spent on free education and free healthcare.

Perhaps if students are required to engage in some form of social service during their tenure as undergraduates, it would help them get better perspective and acquire more responsibility in how they conduct themselves in the classroom and outside it.

I should add a third factor that serves to ‘legitimize’ student protest: the gross wastage and corruption in all levels and the politics of patronage that is so conspicuous. Doesn’t give students the right to deface walls, hold university officials hostage, break down walls and so one, of course, but it helps students justify to themselves the violence they perpetrate.

There is irresponsibility, then, and not only on the part of students. There is an urgent need for comprehensive review of education. Yes, it’s been ‘urgent’ and oft-repeated. Students like Premaratne, if they are really serious about educational reform, should not wait on Government; they should take on the task themselves. Self-criticism is not a bad thing. I am sure that Premaratne and others like him are pretty selfless in their politics. We need such people.

And we need to make sure that they are engaged with as adults and in intelligent ways. They have their flaws; the system has its faults. There has to be conversation and that conversation should not take place on walls (or in their breaking).

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Losing the moral high ground

(to undergraduate protestors with love)

Young people are rebellious.  That’s how it always was and how it always will be, all over the world.  They have the energy, the determination, all the answers to all the questions, the idealism, romanticism and are typically fortified with sufficient quantities of arrogance, disrespect and innocence.  It is a heady cocktail and can be quite potent in destabilizing conditions. 

The young, especially students, are hardly ever free agents.  Idealism coupled with naiveté are made for manipulation.  The emotional are almost always prone to come under the sway of the calculating.  The organized consistently prevail over the un-organized or dis-organized, and the group even if small will sway bigger numbers made of disparate individuals.  This is why university students time and again end up becoming pawns of serious, determined, organized minorities.  Universities, consequently, are often the happy hunting grounds of the agent provocateur. 

Today’s undergraduate is a pampered individual.  On the other hand, courtesy an education system that is at odds with real world opportunity, a culture that is rights-heavy and responsibility-light;  a country where politics, from constitution to parliament to street, screams for a monumental re-haul; an economic system that accentuates disparities; a development paradigm that consistently marginalizes while undercutting civilizational ethos and erasing memory of history and heritage; their agitation cannot be tagged with the dismissive ‘ungrateful’. 

If policy makers have a point, it is clear they are not communicating the point effectively.  If students have a point, it is lost in hooliganism.  Policy makers appear to be in hook-or-crook mode, made worse by an unholy hurry.  Granted that long-standing anomalies need to be corrected, it is still advisable to exercise caution when making radical changes.  When systems are dismantled, even those that need to be changed, they fall on the heads of those they contain.  People need time to get out of the way.  More importantly, bad systems should not be replaced by bad alternatives.  The good and bad need to be assessed and debated using all avenues available.  When this is not done, both conscious objector and agent provocateur obtain and abuse, respectively, the moral high ground. 

What have the students done with the moral high ground though?  The history of student politics in Sri Lanka shows that time and again they fall prey to the machinations of political parties.  The JVP has had a stranglehold for at least 30 years.  They don’t have the numbers, but number-lack has not stopped them.  Endowed with organizational skill, well versed in the art of manipulation and intimidation, and carrying a perniciously vindictive and destructive gene, these operators have on numerous occasions brought the university system to a standstill. 

The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) has always stuck to a ‘not-us’ response, a line picked up by its all but in name successor, the Jana Aragala Vyaparaya (JAV).  Self-criticism has never been their forte.  All acts of thuggery and vandalism on the part of students have gone without censure and worse, uncommented.   Retaliation is not out of order.  The authorities with their own brand of arrogance have certainly justified the umbrage of undergraduates. Still, there are many ways to react and undergraduates have sadly chosen poorly in the matter of articulating objection.  They’ve lost the moral high ground. 

They’ve lost years.  They’ve gained a bad name in the eyes of would-be employers.  They have made it difficult for the larger population to take up their cause.  They’ve helped justify the call for the setting up of private universities and even privatization of the entire system.  In effect they are cutting the ground from under the feet of those they deign to speak for: the nangis and mallis who dream of obtaining higher education.   In short they are playing into the hands of their detractors. 

The sloth on the part of the JVP/JAV when it comes to condemning these acts of thuggery and vandalism and blank refusal to correct their ways feed the widely held view that they are not serious about meaningful social change, that they are good at destroying and poor at building, and therefore are essentially spoilers.  Even though the United National Party was the principal villain in the massacres of the eighties, the JVP was certainly not a minor player; the Red Comrades helped push the country to the brink.  If the current regime is flawed, the principal objectors are no saints either. 

There are times when anarchy is a convenience and indeed a necessity for regimes.  There are times when regimes have no choice.  The responsible rebel will not cut a path to an anarchical situation where the ordinary people will necessarily bear the brunt when the coercion option is exercised.  You don’t make revolutions that way.  You make mass graves.  The masses may not cheer, but they probably won’t weep either.  If at all, they’ll heave a collective sigh of relief and get on with their lives. 

Young people are rebellious by nature.  The rebel rarely wins but that is no reason not to object.  One thing is clear: when you lose the moral high ground you are in fact cutting a path to defeat.  That’s where student agitation seems to be heading right now.  Pity.   

[The Nation editorial, January 15, 2012] 

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