India’s #FeeMustFall moment: How JNU fought back

Author: Mayank Mishra

The genesis of the #FeeMustFall movement can be traced back to South Africa. The first rumblings were initially sparked following the announcement of a tuition fee hike at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg on October 14th, 2015. This announcement led to the commencement of a students’ protest on the same day, with the Student Representative Council (SRC) arguing in favour of unaffordability issues, especially among students from lower-income groups.

The early protests began at the University of Witwatersrand and spread to the University of Cape Town and Rhodes University, eventually proliferating to other varsities across South Africa. The mode of resistance employed by the movement was initially nonviolent, and included activities such as sit-ins, marches, and locking in the university’s staff on campus that garnered considerable public support. However, the movement eventually turned violent in due course, leading to a loss of popular support and the alleged loss of US$ 44.25 million worth of property, as per estimates from the Department of Education.   

In India, public sector universities are witnessing the withdrawal of government subsidies from higher education, where spending has been stagnant at 1.3 to 1.5 percent since 2012. At the central government level, student financial aid was cut to INR 2078 crore in FY 2022-23 from INR 2482 crore in FY 2021-22, with research and innovation expenditure down by 8 percent. Given this contextual backdrop, India had a somewhat similar moment to South Africa when one of the central universities,  Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) announced a fee hike across different categories of the fee levied by the university by around 300 per cent. Students complained that they were not consulted while drafting the proposed new manual, which led to an arbitrary fee hike. The vice-chancellor declined to meet the students’ post the early rounds of objections to the fee hike. From November 6^th, 2019, continuous protests began against the arbitrary and unjust fee hike that had gathered nationwide attention and grabbed the eyeballs of international media, leading to the pouring out of support standing in solidarity with JNU across universities abroad.

A student-led initiative in its entirety, JNU’s #FeeMustFall movement maintained a perpetual nonviolent character without a single stray incident of ferocity coupled with an ensemble of methods, efforts and strategies throughout to sustain the zeal and momentum of the mobilisation. The protesting students resorted to a myriad of nonviolent methods of protesting. These included the complete lockdown of the departments, making posters and singing protest songs,  Mashal Juloos (march with a torch), setting up the late-night ‘Guerrilla Dhabas’ serving tea where students gathered and had discussions over a cup of tea and deliberating on the future course of action pertaining to the resistance, mass sleepovers in the department building, boycotting semester exams, and holding long silent marches to the parliament and the Ministry of Education. Concomitantly, during the rallies outside the campus, the students distributed pamphlets enunciating the importance of education as a public good, making the masses aware of the cause and intent of the movement, running social media campaigns with hashtags such as #FeeMustFall, #JNUProtest, #EducationForAll to reach the wider audiences, debating with people and sensitising those who are in support of the policies related privatisation of education of the government.

Within the varsity, SFCs (Student Faculty Committee) members in Centres were delegated responsibility to sensitise and mobilise students at the level of centres. At the level of schools, the elected counceillors, through union election, were delegated to mobilise all centres under school and organise regular GBM to decide the next course of action. The JNUSU led the overall movement, held meetings with the centre’s SFCs, councillors, and General Body Meetings (GBM). These meetings were held with the agenda to decide the future course of action, sensitise people on the importance of public education, and the eventual goal of the quintessential ‘fee must fall’.

The structured nonviolent mobilisation of #FeeMustFall was coercively repressed and mitigated by the state police and security forces viciously by water cannons and lathi (baton) charges. JNU protests in the Indian capital of Delhi had even inspired its neighbour students in Pakistan where they raised voices against the state’s failure to ensure quality education, right to unionisation of students, democracy, and dissent. The state police and security forces have violently mitigated these peaceful protests with water cannons and lathi charges. Such a series of incidents had stirred up the debates in the Indian parliament and in the universities and colleges spread across the country to debate over the questions pertaining to affordable and quality education.

The students union further filed a petition in the Delhi high court, where a stay order was passed on the hiked fee with Justice Shakdher commenting, “The Government cannot get out of education. Government has to fund public education. The burden of paying the salaries of contractual workers is not on the students. Someone should find the funds”.

Education plays a pertinent role in overcoming intergenerational inequalities, and privatisation shall deter relinquishing it. JNU’s #FeeMustFall will be remembered as the successful nonviolent movement where tenacious students emerged as a force to reckon with collectively cutting across myriad identities with the intent to retain higher education as a public good, making varsities like JNU accessible to everyone.

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