News cycles, social media feeds and conversations between young people across the country has been dominated by the student protests and its impact: former union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation and anti-paper leak bill passed in Parliament. As the dust settles, the wave of political awakening that swept Gen Z, as Aratrika D notes, has not faded away. “In the course of one week, we’ve had over 100 registrations from students. Usually, we would get one person in three days or so,” says the Bengaluru general secretary of the All India Students’ Association, which lent support to the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) during the movement and organised protests at Freedom Park.
Student politics in Bengaluru, compared to cities like Delhi, functions differently due to one key reason: elected student unions have been banned in the state for the last 37 years. Even though elected student councils or ones with members selected by college administrations exist, they lack the power that unions do, notes Aratrika, saying, “The major difference is that student unions have representation in the university-level governing body so universities cannot really pass new policies without their consent. In Bengaluru, there is a vacuum. The city also has a dominance of private colleges unlike Delhi, Kolkata or even Hyderabad which often do not even have elected councils but selected ones [which mainly organise fests]. Whenever issues come up – fee hike, sexual harassment, discrimination, etc, students have no space to raise these issues.”
Political activities take place, most often, as discussions, notes Iskra*, a member of SFPD and student at a premier research institution in the city. “Agitations and discussions have kept cropping up. We also have reading circles in which we talk about issues in our daily life or news like protests in Nepal and Bangladesh, we take short readings or articles, and it goes from there. What has changed the most is students’ willingness to participate – we used to get 10-20 people but for the last one, we saw hundreds,” says Iskra. AISA also has a student-led publication called Spark circulated in campuses at a low cost, explains Aratrika, “In 800 words, students write about things happening at city campuses, policies being adopted by the government and other youth or workers’ issues, and in the process, gain knowledge about it.”
A lack of elected representation is not the only hurdle for student politics in Bengaluru though, with Aishwarya pointing out a larger attitude of caution prevalent in Bengaluru campus administration. “Bengaluru’s education spaces actively crush voices that speak about political issues by saying this is out of syllabus, or through faculty or students facing repercussions for political discussions. Reading circles get flak too, being asked not to announce it or share on social media but keep it on WhatsApp groups. It is an effort to keep campuses depoliticised. Sometimes, its because of the vulnerability of being a minority institution or because of the university’s alliances or political leanings. We try to engage and dialogue with universities instead of shaming them,” says Aishwarya Ravikumar, the general secretary of the Bengaluru chapter of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties which occasionally conducts outreach programmes on campuses.
In April, former CM Siddaramaiah had begun consultations to explore a revival of student union elections. Many politicians of his generation, including CM DK Shivakumar started their careers through campus politics, but no new update has arrived yet. Students like Iskra are cautiously optimistic, saying, “It’s a double-edged sword because it will be a positive step in terms of student representation but they can easily be turned into something like we see in DU, where communal forces come in with muscle power and high budgets to dominate the political landscape of the college. But when students are active and aware about their issues and wanting to fight, this will be a positive move."