The students and alumni who marched at Jadavpur on Friday (August 21) carried a long strip of painted cloth between them, and what was written on it rhymed.

Jadavpur dichche dak, gerua santras nipat jak (Jadavpur is calling, down with saffron terror).

The flags that were standing behind it, that tells the story: the Democratic Students’ Organisation (DSO), affiliated to the Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI), the Students’ Federation of India (SFI), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)), and the Revolutionary Students’ Front (RSF), which has spent years arguing that both of the other outfits are the problem.

They do not march together. They have been each other’s opposition on that campus for decades, in reading rooms, in union elections, occasionally with their hands on each other. On Friday, they were holding the same banner.

The slogan rhymes because it is meant to be shouted by people walking. Bengali protest slogans are built in couplets so that several hundred people can hold the rhythm together without anyone leading them.

It is old, and it is not really a slogan at all. It is a form with a gap in it.

Nipat jak, down with it, is the fixed half. What goes in front is the variable, and this campus has been filling that space for as long as it has existed. The same metre has carried imperialism to its destruction, and the government of the day, whichever government happened to be the government, and communal politics, and it will carry whatever arrives next. Students who never met each other across fifty years have walked out of the same gate chanting the same rhythm with a different word in the hole.

What it did on Thursday to earn the place in that line in the banner was straightforward enough. Men carrying saffron flags broke through police barricades, reached Gate 4, threw eggs and bricks and shoes over it, and climbed. To climb they needed a foothold, and the foothold available was the university’s emblem, bolted to the ironwork. A section of it snapped off under them. It was then trampled.

Jadavpur’s long history of resistance

The emblem was designed by Nandalal Bose, the artist who supervised the illustrations in the original manuscript of the Constitution. For........

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