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Kolkata: It was raining at Jadavpur University on Sunday (August 30) when the students came back to the Open Air Theatre with their paint. A day before, their graffiti had been scrubbed off that wall on instructions from the authorities. They wrote it out again, Karl Marx and Ho Chi Minh, in the rain, on the wet whitewash.

That is where the fight over Jadavpur stands. Workers arrived on the campus early on Saturday (August 29) with lime and sheets of white paper, and writing that had stood for years, on Palestine, on Manuvad, on Rabindranath Tagore and Pandit Raghunath Murmu and Che Guevara, were painted out or papered over. The men doing the work told The Wire the order had come “from above”. Now, every wall they cleared has been written on again.

‘Either they will remain, or we will’

On Friday (August 28), West Bengal chief minister Suvendu Adhikari had said of the university, “either they will remain, or we will.”

What has followed is not a debate about campus politics. It is an attempt to clear a university of one kind of politics while another moves in.

Beside the Golden Jubilee building, a new office of an employees’ organisation aligned with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has opened in the space that until recently housed the World View Book Store. How a bookshop inside a state university became a party linked office is not on any record The Wire could find. The office was shut when this reporter visited. There were no demands pasted outside it, no literature, barely a poster. A few saffron flags, and nothing else. In the part of the campus where classes are held and administrative work is done, no other party or organisation has an office at all.

Students say the clearing has been selective, and that wall writing and publicity material belonging to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has been left untouched while their own has come down. Hoardings put up by the same BJP aligned employees’ body are up in several places on the campus.

A poster at Jadavpur University encouraging students to join the ABVP. Photo: Joydeep Sarkar

The phrase Adhikari uses about Jadavpur is not his own. Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduced “dimagi Naxal” in his Independence Day address, and it has been taken up by the BJP since. Adhikari has applied it to the university repeatedly.

“I am saying in the same voice as the prime minister that dimagi Naxals have created a base here and carry out anti-national propaganda. Either they will remain, or we will. Why should there be writing on the walls about Palestine or in support of Kishenji?” he said.

What that means in practice has already been demonstrated. During a recent ABVP mobilisation, men led by the local BJP MLA climbed over a university gate carrying weapons, broke the university plaque, entered the campus, burnt flags of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI), the student wing of the........

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