There is a type of campus watcher who waits, almost in romantic anticipation, for moments of student agitation. With her dystopian fantasies about protesting youth pitted against the Orwellian state, she expects the thrills of imagined scenario – a mythical demon (almost the Leviathan) versus the spirited fighters for democratic rights. She can hardly hide her impish glee when such a moment arrives on Indian campuses. The spectacle ensures that she is on news television panels commenting, with asthmatic modulation of voice for seriousness, or joining the angry army of newspaper columnists and editorial writers who are somehow determined to save the world. She is, for all theoretical purposes, a liberal.

The last twelve months have been particularly lucky for her tribe. Two central university campuses became sites of such spectacle right under the nose of national media headquarters in Delhi. Proximity to the scene and dramatis personae have contributed to the scale on which news media amplified – and continues to amplify – student agitation and the alleged crackdown on protesters in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) last year and the ongoing stir triggered by student clashes in Ramjas College of Delhi University (DU) last month. In reporting and commenting on such events through an avowedly liberal prism, the free speech gladiators in Indian media, particularly its English variant, have revealed their naivete on several counts.

First, what constitutes the campus? Who forms the assumed virtuous community called ‘students’ that custodians of liberal space in media seek to protect against the state-sponsored ‘repression’? There is something very patronisingly blinkered about the edits in The Indian Express, for example, that endorse the idea of the campuses “standing up for” or raising the bogey of “university hijack”. Or The Hindustan Times using its editorial comment to label the alleged villains as “goons” and their political patrons as “petty” while The Times of India uses it to offer banal homilies on tolerance, and The Hindu senses the silence of “campus chill”.

To the utter disappointment of free speech campus romantics, the frames of student engagement have changed too significantly to offer any thrill of the student agitations of mid-1970s in India, culminating in the Jayaprakash Narayan-led, countrywide stir, or for that matter the French student movements of 1960s. Why are the liberal sections (only till you agree with them, so read ‘agreeable for all practical purposes’) of Indian media so naïve about their assumptions about the average 20-something enrolled in one of the numerous colleges and departments loosely called DU for administrative purposes? Decoding what’s there in plain sight is a task that confounds liberals in the other parts of the world too.

In his recent piece in The Spectator, James Bartholomew  observes “the so-called liberal elite has been writing articles, having radio and TV discussions, giving sermons (literally) and making speeches in which it has struggled to understand those strange creatures: ordinary people.”

If media narrative on JNU agitations last year was too mushy, blame it on this disconnect with the banal motives that drive the campus dwellers. The placard revolutionaries, looking for the first opportunity to enter the state bureaucracy or grab the feudal comforts of a teaching job in Indian universities, are ironically similar to the ‘corporate plot’ detecting high priests of net neutrality who somehow found the platform of Facebook the key driver of their campaign. With Hindi heartland states dominating the demographic profile of students in JNU as well as DU, reliance on job avenues offered by the state as a ladder for upward social mobility shouldn’t be surprising. A very significant section of the student community in JNU, within campus hostels as well as living in rented accommodation in adjoining areas stretching from Ber Sarai to Katwaria Sarai, doesn’t have any stake in such stirs. In fact, any interest would run counter to their perceived interests – a police case can finish career prospects, especially for young people seeking state employment. The current media commentary on the ongoing stir in DU has obviously no clue about the preoccupations of majority of students spread across the scattered sites of the university in north and south Delhi and hasn’t mapped the areas like Mukherjee Nagar or Hudson Lane where a huge section of students address their career anxieties. Such mundane careerist youth clearly don’t make a gripping copy or engaging panel discussion in news media.

Having developed stakes in real world, the kind of young people who are invisible in media coverage of the campus exposes one of the primary fallacies of young life in university, as Manu Joseph writes in The Illicit Happiness of Other People: “The most foolish description of the young is that they are rebellious.”

Then, what type of students successfully manage to impress seasoned journalists about their free speech crusade? On Wednesday night (March 1), Rajdeep Sardesai was seen gullibly buying the first-hand account from two students of Ramjas College on India Today. Positioning them as ‘eyewitness’ chroniclers of the chain of events at the college on the fateful day, Sardesai offered them something that motivates campus crusaders as well as a section of journalists- profitable victimhood. In a country where most popular songs are still being written about dil, it’s expected that there would always be a section of youth who get the thrills of romanticism from being seen as ‘anti- establishment’ crusaders. When such theatrics become part of the establishment itself – as they did in Left front-led regimes in West Bengal for 34 years (1977-2011) and governments led by avowedly socialist or sometimes Ambedkarite parties in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar for large part of period post -1990s – the farce of ‘revolution’ gets comical. These states account for largest pool of migrant labour, abysmal poverty and regressive feudal values in the country.

Sardesai has been one of the earliest to herald the arrival of Big Brother state as the Narendra Modi-wave propelled Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power at the centre in May 2014. During an event in November 2014, organised at Jamia Millia Islamia University to promote his book 2014: The Election That Changed India, raised the alarmist pitch saying, “Modi wants to make India Singapore, but don’t forget, in Singapore, journalists who question authorities can be jailed.” What is still awaited is what I had observed in a piece I’d written for The Hoot: “Rajdeep Sardesai is still awaiting arrest… He can rue the fact that going to jail for speaking his mind isn’t going to get easier in India.” Profitable victimhood still is a viable option for his ilk. If your voice isn’t important, creating the perception of it being muzzled would make it important.

A third set of naivete is rooted in the selective outrage that is so often a feature of campus agitation narratives in media. If you are not pre-judging the case, the widely-reported video of Delhi Police cops pushing a girl student in midst of Ramjas College unrest can also be seen as a procedural lapse in mob management, which the police force is quite vulnerable to when cornered or outnumbered. While pouncing on it and choosing to dissect it with feminist polemics, same sections of media developed collective amnesia about how JNU student leader Kanhaiya Kumar was accused of misbehaving with a woman when she objected to his proletarian right to urinate in public. The poor man had to pay three thousand rupees as fine for misbehaving with the woman. Being the blue-eyed boy of liberal media, he is now enjoying fresh lease of media sympathy for what is seen as vindication of his assertion that he did not shout seditionist slogans. Similar scepticism has not been shown in evaluating the contested versions of events at Ramjas College. Why isn’t the Right wing student organisation entitled to the same benefit of doubt?

Such a selective approach often alienates a large section of news consumers from mainstream media because they have perceived that a significant section of media professionals are more keen to prove their liberal credentials than to establish the facts. A case in point is how student organisations like Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) have a valid lament about how acts of intimidation against its members in JNU campus were given silent burial by mainstream media. One such report of an ABVP member’s belongings thrown out of hostel by members of Left organisations wasn’t followed up with any considerable detail in media.

These flawed assumptions about the culpability or innocence of campus offenders also are sometimes defined by the way perceptions in liberal sections in media are swayed by embedded Nehruvian aesthetics. They somehow serve as the default critical yardstick by which to gauge the ‘civility’ of rabble- rousers in academic institutions. So you have a university professor certifying the intellectual abilities of Umar Khalid, a key character in the chain of events in JNU and Ramjas, finding space on the edit page of  The Indian Express. This may remind you of how Patrick French’s piece in Open in which he somehow alluded to Afzal Guru’s literary inclination as a ground for assuming his innocence. These are the usual pitfalls of the delusions of’ intellectual civility and literary refinement. The extension of this comical ‘logic’ is dangerous: anyone seen with a book should be granted lifelong immunity from any criminal proceeding. That is rubbish.

In times when political correctness is being stretched to threshold of prudishness, another danger posed is that of nitpicking. In a social media-driven news universe, swinging between outrage and ridicule, there is a rush for spotting gaffes, off-the-cuff remarks or simply fragile arguments to attack. They are not only mainstreaming what could be mere peripheral voices of the ruling dispensation or forces which they prop up, but also seek vicarious pleasure in moments of vindication. Even a cursory look at the front pages of major English newspapers of last few days is enough to show that news agenda was defined by one ‘outrageous’ statement or the other. It’s not surprising that the snowballing of Gurmehar Kaur cyber trolling controversy shows the costs of such opportunism. In a perceptive piece written only five months after the Modi government assumed office at the centre in 2014, Pratap Bhanu Mehta had warned against the dangers of such facile spells of self-congratulation: “As critics, we often define our identities by picking out the worst arguments and the worst characters to go after. This is not because of the magnitude of the objective threats they pose. It is because our intellectual victories are easy”.

In many ways , campus watching is a harmless activity, particularly with gun control in place in India. But, with the media discourse on campus often getting trapped in liberal blind spots, its disconnect with a major section of our universities can only get worse. Perhaps in that distance lie some clues for finding why liberals fail in understanding the university life in India.

Photo credits – Stephen’s Shall Rise Facebook Page