The question of attendance as a system which imposes oppressive structures on the subject whose being and presence is in prison by the ‘dictatorial dictat’ of the VC is also a very real situation which has to be understood in its ideal as well as its actual course of development. The VC, even in JNU campus, is absolute authority, and so long as it does not have objective knowledge of its subjects (students), it has no power to exercise upon us. The power he enjoys comes from the repression of the students as subjects under the objective system of control by the institutional authority of the VC . But the structure might appear as something leading to objectivity of ‘lived experiences’ and perception as the ultimate reality. Does perception live out of lived experience? Lived reality dwells too much upon the idea of the subjective. The present world schematism is such that the subject loses its place in the objective reality. If we see the case of students, their lived experiences are more generally so diverse that there always would be an incorrect definition in relation to the contradiction between a social group and a class. You could argue of either of the two. Between the student and the student community, the contradiction takes shape. For the administration, students are objects with substance but not essence. The very purpose of education has become the reproduction of ideas divorced from practice, in a manner, that we do not mostly realize what we study if we do not practice and what we actually practice is majorly a negation of our theoretical education, if we try to clearly understand it, by understanding reason as a notion of reality. The subjective notion of reality mostly celebrates the differences of lives of students, one from the other, while the administration has quantitative as well as qualitative understanding of students which is more actual and factual. The memories of lived experiences as objective data come into conflict with fundamental laws imposed upon the subject that leaves no room but to find reason in the objectivity and immediate actuality of practice. In a university, for the students, the administration is not much more than a mechanism and for the administration the students are not much more than organisms that it can and has to affect because the environment has definite social construction governed by fixed laws. The truth is in all our lived experiences we have a subjective notion of reality in behaviour. There is a theoretical need to define objectivity as a higher stage of unity, a stage of absolute where it is almost possible qualitatively, where it ceases to be a mere stage wherein or upon which objectivity is achieved but the course of development of the movement.. On the one hand, there is the fact that all students come from similar and different social groups and classes, the bone of contention is how their lives are governed by reason manifest as the theorization of an actual phenomena, a scientific law because on the other hand the assault upon the classes antagonistic to the interests of the ruling class. Can such a scientific theory, one that is realistic enough to materialize a longstanding movement, a dialectical movement wherein we can negatively realize the totalitarian tyranny of the VC be possible and subsequently to act upon it as one?
Let us consider the case of DU where attendance is not only compulsory, as a form of subversion of subjectivity, but also the conditions of necessities and well as conditions of possibilities. When a student goes to the class, s/he finds it overcrowded, along with a major chunk of students who feel completely and have different opinions because of the disconnection of day scholars from the extracurricular work in college that should necessarily be a possibity of their objective existence. Just as work and no play makes one dull, similarly trying to become political or the trend of expectation that we can continue to resist in our own ways will never result in any realistic action. To gauge student activity as collective and objective as a social group would reveal the fact that objectivity is inherent in the structure and the fundamental contradiction of a capitalist society is such that through propagating that ideology, they are alienating the individual from the collective. By collective, I mean the rank and file of our elected officials in the union and the so-called ‘class representatives’, and the alt-left student group with other students. We live in an age where reality is negative and possibilities are positive but not material, and the self is split. The necessity of attendance is so real a phenomenon in the lived experiences of students that few would take the freedom to craft their own course and study it separately under the guidance of the University (or not!). While that would not only be a subjective notion of study, it would be a self-serving notion of subjectivism. The students expect too much from the student organizations, and not all the student organizations deliver, especially when it comes to politicizing the students upon social issues to raise consciousness, they fall in the trap that the students have set for them. They have become subjectivists. We need to understand that the students are being subjective in their demand, because they are living in a negation of the power they have as a united force, but the manner in which the struggle is taken forward has a very subjectivist attitude. In practical terms, networking, alliances are essential tactically but what is good for the students in the university is what is good for the development of productive forces in the societies, if the activity or the struggle of the students is both pragmatic and prognostic and in the larger struggle is also the kind of unity to fight fascist authoritarianism in the whole country. The body and the mind cannot be separated from each other and only a scientific diagnosis and solution to the questions raised on the struggle against the subjective and the objective situations at play and only the highest unity between the Student masses, between the body and mind of the subject can be achieved. The best ally, the best friend of the students and the most productive force for the students is the union. Well not because they are in power, but precisely because they are not, and if we as students, do not look out for the interest of our union ‘friends’ who are actually struggling and getting served notices but we who study as students think consciously against the system of attendance and do not have a definite objective course planned for it. What is important for us is to actually struggle, not as intellectuals, but as students, learning in society how to make friends. Some friends would stab you in the back. Why? It is in their interest; but why should the student look at anyone differently? The student does not live in a life-and-death struggle. For them, most things are symbolic, as to a large section of youth in our country who are willing and able to work but the state has no employment to give.. Similarly, certain organizations have hoodwinked the students into believing that the students did not do their part in the disappearance of Najeeb and also the larger discourse of how ‘traditional’ vanguards become like the institutional police. These things the BAPSA cannot and will not understand, because they decentre the politics from the subject when they talk about the marginal and its impact on identity and consciousness. Their activity is for students who sit and pontificate on matters of discrimination and marginalization while themselves never consequentially being the voice of the voiceless also not considering a party of the most opppressed which is the propertyless laborer and by that they essentially create the subject in absence. The absent subject cannot speak for itself, therefore becomes an object to be spoken about, not an objective notion that caters to the lived experience of students as political activity. Working class politics then loses all its historical terminology and in the hands of petty bourgeois intellectuals becomes a method of propagating subjectivism. We should understand that fundamentally things can be objects about which one can think of anything. We can think about the attendance issue as another issue that is an objective necessity of our student life that is as structural or systemic oppression, which would obviously be a subjectivist compromise which students in JNU have often been making when they compare JNU to IIT and demand for the same possibilities in JNU at the same price. This is a demand which does not even sound good in the hallowed walls(!) of JNU, haunting us with the ghost of Chandrashekhar on the one hand and Najeeb on the other, wondering whether under the union of the former, the latter would have been the case with a student. Such questions are anyway futile, because nostalgia for/with the history of JNU is a bad trait, and against the interests of the subjectivists.
Who are the subjectivists? Those who think that proclaiming “Insha Allah” is a form of freedom (of expression) and thinking that it is in the interests of the minority, and by addressing the minority, we can really address the difference between a theory of political practice, that is not only a lived experience such as the practice of Islam rather than transforming the objective reality of being born into a Muslim family. Life is essential for the human species, and to ensure the prolongation of life, it is imperative to understand the laws of nature in the objective development of human society, and how certain subjects became backward or forward, and unequal or different not just in cultural respects but also in terms of the institutions they are in. In DU, students had stayed the continuation of the FYUP because the objective conditions were affected by the development of the various forces, particularly AISA, associated as another form of saffron terror in JNU, with the development of the student masses participating in that movement. If its defeat was the implementation of CBCS later, its victory was being repealed and setting up a model for the scientific method of struggle. The students have to be real actors in this movement not from the point of view of the subjectivists, but from the side of the union. The union is not just a collection of popular people, nor it the ‘Marvel’s Avengers’ or DCs ‘Justice League’, but the very apparatus of the union must be first put into its full utility before we ourselves as students transform it, hopefully by boycotting the Lyngdoh when the student movement of the JNU students reaches that stage. If a situation is reached wherein the negation can itself stand for the justification, the question in place of the answer, that has happened, not in the name of political polemics (which is negligible) but as the political line which they take to the masses, would you find it absurd or natural? If the question is hard to figuratively think about and definitively answered, what basis is there for catering as students to the interest of the subjectivists whose interests is to serve their own interest, but not to objectively participate and create movements that have lasting impact upon the masses and the student community. What remained the most dominant and decisive factor in the FYUP movement was precisely this lasting impact, when an academic issue became a mass issue for the student community about which organization and the students have the same definitive opinion. AISA knew the part DUSU would play after the elections as an apparatus and how as a mass organization to put pressure along with a variety of different groups of student and teachers who only shared a temporary alliance with the union. Now in JNU, when no student organization can boast of winning the elections for the union single-handedly, and with subjectivists frustrated in equating red terror with saffron terror because they are stuck naturally in their own lack, or rather the contradiction of the state and subject, to which the only essentially scientific resolution would be to be more practical and accept the logic of oppression inherent in the system but still not lose the subject. That can only be ensured when the people who represent you will be responsible for your political action and should so hold you accountable for it. Communication is necessary but lines must separate interest and the students must see for themselves the differences in political lines as separations. Wherever such is the case, the differences between the political constitutions of the students must not be antagonistic to the union and to themselves. This much is clear about the situation of political resistance in JNU.
The communication should be official and factual and the union in this case, has the only objective data, and as for the political path of the movement against mandatory resistance, it is negation of negation, the ultimate struggle for a higher for of political freedom has that has always been under the danger of an attack because university is still an institution run by the ruling class with a fascist government as the objective authority.
In the end then, since the development of subjectivity in the consciousness cannot be under the sole subjective question of identity, because an assault on the participation of students in classroom is a normative practice that now the administration wants to see as an objective criterion for the recognition of identity. The political pursuit of identity in the sphere of socio-economic reality cannot be dealt in isolation from the functioning of consciousness and the reasons for which attendance is made mandatory for the students so the kind of subjectivism that capitalism has led to in order to cover its contradiction is very evident in the reality that has made itself manifest in the actual body count who quantitatively and qualitatively stand for the administration and against the interest of the students and also the existence of individual identity outside or in the margins of the capitalist system. The student is reduced to the subject whose existence is under question, at most outside the classroom and the reason behind this is the reason given by the administration and the resultant silence on the part of the objective factual realityof the students and their rational demands for a more liberal administration.
What we should strive to achieve as students therefore is the right to be members of a society divided by hierarchies but still united in the pursuit of concrete knowledge and scientific theories representative of the real field of study we undertake ‘for a living’ and in that living to overcome the hierarchies and reduce divisions to their minimum function. In order to live productively, we dwindle between sometimes good or bad and sometimes more or less. Such is the uncertain fate of subjectivity which destroys the unity of the student masses, like the Ramjas incident in DU has capability of mobililize thousands when a united activity is practiced and observed conscientiously by the students and the masses are diligent and vigilant about the issue and the politics of the enemy. The course of the development of history is always objective and that is what differentiates it from memories and remembering. In remembering and reminding ourselves of goals that ought to be achieved, the most definite is to repudiate both the “mandatory” as well as the man who enslaves students like the Roman empire in Coliseums to battle with each other and the loins of competitive struggle for existence , without the hope the next VC will be the same as previous. The objective task of the students and the necessary course of action of the students is to not fight ourselves, tame the lion and unleash it upon the despot.
