A response to Ramjas College’s Dhani Ram Ambedkar’s ‘gurukul’ statement

Ramjas College has made it to the radar of media houses and has turned into discursive field, yet again. This time around, it is for one Assistant Professor of Commerce Department, Dhani Ram

Ambedkar, who voiced his opinion about how the college has “seemingly started taking precautions to avert such incidents, and have decided to adopt ‘Gurukul’ style teaching to freshers who

will join this year.”  The statement was retracted by the college authorities today, yet the nuanced solutions and important suggestions of Dhani Ram Ambedkar need a comprehensive analysis

and material contextualisation in the events  of the college from where his ideas and problematic solution emerge.

The “problem” that Dhaniram refers to is the violent attacks on February 21 and 22 against students who got together to organise an annual seminar, Cultures of Protest, a two-day programme

to grapple with ideas and seek for solutions of complex issues to do with exploitation and protest in the country. However, there is a twist there. The understanding of the “problem” is

flawed as it considers the violence to be a result of “provocation” by the organisers, a result of the “mistakes” committed by the organising committee in inviting Umar Khalid and Shehla

Rashid to speak on topics in which they are experts. When the narrative is constructed upside down so that the problem becomes the debate and not the brutal violence, then the ‘the

solutions’, too, cannot be straightforward. I shall first try and look into Dhani Ram’s proposed solution and their pragmatic relevance, examine their impact and then look into the moral

connotations of the interview.

The first part of his solution to end disruption in college is to stop “unlawful assembly” in the premises. How does a teacher in a college disregard the very ethos of a university space? A

space which has been created specifically for thinking minds to debate and discuss. The “discipline” that he proposes is in complete contradiction to the idea of a university . In the most

horrific and brutal manner, it is an attempt to now limit and circumscribe the physical space of students, after the already heavy surveillance on and the diminishing space for ideas and

thinking. How does one determine this “unlawful assembly”? Is it a group of students in a class, the canteen or a bunch of students talking in the college, or are these all “unlawful”? Where

do we draw a line? How many students will be considered an ‘unlawful assembly’? Is he seriously considering implementing Section 144 on a permanent basis inside a college?

The second part of his solution is that the students must not slip into “activism”. He says, “They (the students) should concentrate on their attendance rather than get into activism…” His

attempt is clearly to alienate us, the students of the university, from speaking about issues that touch us the most, that affect us in our everyday-lives. The attempt to curtail our

fundamental right to speak for what we feel and what is right and wrong is an attack on the foundations of a democratic society. How do we ask students of a University reading Edward. W.

Said who said, “Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed.” not to question the ones who destabilise their rights? But, Dhani Ram is not content with simply silencing us in the

public sphere: he wants to control our emotions in the private sphere as well. He dictates that students should not get into personal relationships either. The future citizen that he wants

to create through this gurukul style of teaching is an unthinking, unfeeling, uncritical person.

This is an attempt to stab student movements across country, to control the wind of change that is rising and gathering power to question the ones in power. University education is about

activism: it is about being aware of one’s rights and privileges, about understanding oppression and questioning the oppressor, about trying to make a nation that is a space where each and

every citizen can exist with dignity and equality. To stop activism in colleges is like throwing fish out of water—usurping life, forcing them to die and rot. The most disturbing part is the

ideological undertone that this diktat carries: the binary of “national” and “anti-national”. This is the lens to see and understand everything under in the country today. Simply singing

the national anthem every morning unthinkingly is to be a marker of one’s nationalist sentiments. Those who want to make the nation a better place for all its citizens by questioning

inequality and exploitation become threats to the society.

In this heavily moralistic sermon, there is a compulsion to sing national anthems to prove nationalist sentiments. The nationalism, therefore, is very symbolic in nature. Any attempt to

further act on the sentiments for any productive purposes gets one into the trouble zone. Going back to the seminar once again, the attempt to understand the problems of this country and

trying to work towards a solution became an act of “anti-national”. This can be seen in the fact that the college authorities have failed grandly in punishing anyone who had engaged in the

violent attacks inside the college premises, that left the country shocked. The inability to redress the grievances of the victims in a timely manner when there is plenty of evidence

establishing the facts very clearly attests to this. The true solution to the actual problem of perpetration of violence by a gang of students is immediate action against the perpetrators of

violence who move scot free. It is devastating to see the solution to violence in the “Gurukul model” and “national anthem”. It seems the time has come when we have gau-rakshaks and

anti-romeo-squads inside our college campuses who are now dictating terms about how we must talk, think, eat or maybe just live, if at all we can!