In the aftermath of the cancellation of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), as well as the postponement of the University Grants Commission-National Eligibility Test (UGC-NET) and the NEET-PG examinations, by the National Testing Agency (NTA), student groups across the country took to the streets to protest both the unjust composition and actions of the NTA. On July 3, 2024, several members of student wings of the Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A), including the Students Federation of India (SFI) and the All India Students’ Association (AISA) were detained by the Delhi Police during their demonstration at Jantar Mantar.
In an interview with The Edict, Insha Husain — part of the Undergraduate Council and a member of AISA— revealed that this was the third such detainment that protestors had faced in the span of a week. Her interview highlighted the nuanced motivations of student protesters, mostly unreported by the mainstream media.
The Protests
Multiple detentions did little to mar the intensity of the protests, with numerous student associations coming together to express their disenchantment with the NTA and the Minister of Education, Dharmendra Pradhan. The detentions did, however, according to Insha, make it tougher for those students unassociated with student organisations to speak out. Being “taken to police stations three hours away” and being treated poorly by those in uniform are not easy things to stomach for the uninitiated, said Insha. That could be why the police have come down on these protests with such a heavy hand, she continues.
There are thousands of students affected, and this could snowball into something larger – “the government is actually scared”. With its vast adverse impacts, the postponement of the exams has become a widely discussed topic by the Opposition parties in the combative and widely-watched first session of Parliament – the potential for a true mass movement is there for all to see. The latest mishaps with the NEET could well be the final “nail in the coffin” for the NTA, and the authorities, in their rapid crackdown on protesting students, seem almost to recognise that reality.
Not Just NEET
The immediately striking aspect of Insha’s words was that the botched exams, which have left thousands of students in the lurch, are merely the tip of the iceberg in terms of the Left’s concerns. These demonstrations were not, for the most part, reactionary displays of anger against the inadequacy of corruption-free educational infrastructure in the country. The protestors' grievances were with the very existence of the NTA: a closed-off, non-accountable entity that represents, according to the protestors, the decline of the Indian education system.
The NTA, set up in late 2017, is an autonomous institution with an opaque structure that runs the entrance examinations for a large proportion of Indian public Universities. It is the world’s largest testing agency, but has only one executive governing body, with no known data on its general membership. Critics argue that the NTA, and the unified entrance exams that it has mandated across universities, represent the centralising tendency of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This is also the crux of Insha’s and the protesting student groups’ argument, whose primary demand is to scrap the NTA.
The introduction of exams like the Common University Entrance Test (CUET), which “nullified the independent University exams” for admissions and ensured that the “descriptive method was completely done away with” is, according to Insha, an attack on the Indian education system. In the humanities especially, the reliance on singular answers as a means to ensure college education has been linked with the anti-plural instinct of the BJP-led Indian Government. Insha adds that objective, centralised, multiple-choice exams based exclusively on the syllabus prescribed by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) are systematically “casteist, and extremely exclusionary” to those who are not “North Indian, privately educated from the CBSE”. This is not pure conjecture – professors from both Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University have commented on the dwindling diversity of their classrooms after centralised common examinations were introduced.
It is also worth noting that education is a subject in the Concurrent List (that is, a subject that both State Governments and the Union can legislate on), and the centralisation of entrance examinations effectively nullifies the rights of India’s federal units. This has been, for instance, a long-standing concern that the state of Tamil Nadu has had with the NEET examination. It is known that grades are better indicators of student performance than one-off standardized tests, and Tamil Nadu’s decision to broad-base their education has yielded positive results in the past – an outcome that common exams like the NEET subverts.
The protests, according to Insha, represent not just a “loss of faith” in the BJP-led Government but the students’ lack of trust in the higher education system itself. This affects those at the margins the most — if students don’t trust the Government’s ability to provide them with hassle-free higher education, those with marginalised backgrounds will be the first to drop out of the education system altogether.
Ashokan Exceptionalism
When asked about the relevance of these protests to Ashoka, a private university in Sonepat, India, Insha immediately turned the question on its head. “We live in the same city!” she exclaimed. The Ashokan tendency to “assume a position that is separate from the rest of the country” is a dangerous one — something she tried to address in her Presidential campaign for the 2024 Student Government elections.
At a more practical level, she stressed the importance of discussing education policy – a fact of university life even in the insulated bubble of Sonipat. The introduction of the National Education Policy (NEP), for instance, is a government policy that changed the way Ashoka students approached their studies just as much as it did for those in Central Universities. At stake for the protestors at Jantar Mantar was not simply the future of students who had been unfairly treated in certain exams, but the very meaning of Indian Higher Education; a conversation that Ashokans should instinctively engage in.
The role of the Ashoka University Student Government (SG) in all this is a complicated one for Insha. “Ashoka for a lot of reasons, tends to have a lot of media attention”, she said, pointing to the virality of the Young India Fellowship Convocation, and the protests of the Social Justice Forum (SJF) as examples. As a result, the administration feels the need to clamp down on “bad PR” for the university. The Student Government’s attempts to protest for Palestine at the 2024 Undergraduate Convocation were thwarted with relative ease by the administration – all it took was one threat.
Echoing the words of her Vice-Presidential campaign, Insha claimed that a move towards a Union that has greater autonomy would strengthen Ashoka’s attempts to mobilise for larger student causes. This isn’t the first time Ashoka representatives have called for a Union; viewpoints on the matter have historically differed.
A Union is, theoretically at least, a more representative body than the current Student Government – and would, more importantly, draw its funding and strength from outside the Ashoka administration – rendering it more secure.
Perhaps it was with this sense of security that Professors wore Keffiyehs to the Undergraduate Convocation, or Chancellor Mukherjee opened the YIF Convocation by breaking “all protocols of a Chancellor’s Convocation address” and requested the gathering to hold a one-minute silence to “mourn the victims of the violence being perpetrated in Gaza, Ukraine, and closer to home in Manipur”.
The Student Government system is, however, the reality under which we operate. Whether or not Insha and her collective, the United Students’ Front, can use their position within it to mobilise students and integrate Ashoka with the larger university community remains to be seen — what is certain is that the Left at Ashoka is far more than simply the archetype of angry revolutionary zeal – but a set of acutely coherent individuals with deeply thought out positions.
The writer is the co-editor-in-chief of The Edict for AY 24-25. Insha Husain is a part of the undergraduate council of the Ashoka University Student Government.
(Edited by Srijana Siri)
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