ABSTRACT
This chapter foists a thoroughgoing critique of the governmental demand for ‘depoliticizing’ the university through evacuation of student dissent. The organized repression of student activism by right wing forces and ruling party hegemonies in Indian university campuses undermines the university’s necessary relationship with a socially transformative agenda. In this, Teltumbde succinctly holds, the imaginary estrangement between politics and academics as mutually exclusive domains of university ‘activity’ – relayed in the relevant registers of ‘activism’ versus ‘passivism’ – not only falsifies a world history of sustained student engagement with issues of social-material significance, but also amounts to a brazen defence of the status quo. With changing student demographics on university campuses – owing to large-scale privatization and punitive-administrative regimes of censorship – student struggles are increasingly relegated to the outsides of neo-liberal reason, parading through lessons of competitive individualism and narrow economic self-interest. Insofar as forms of social exclusion continue to proliferate, the muffling of student voices resisting such violent incursions can only turn the idea of the university against itself.
