 Welcome and good morning. We meet here with a special interview edition of Newsclick and Communism Combat meeting with Ms Ayesha Kidwai, the President of JNU TA, the Teachers Association at Jawaharlal Nehru University. One year after the agitation in Jawaharlal Nehru University broke out last February, once again the university in the midst of a turmoil with teachers and students both agitating against the high-handed moves of the executive under current MHRD in trying to cut seeds, change admission procedures etc. Thank you Ayesha for talking to us. I just like to ask you today is 23rd of March 2017. Last February we saw the entire JNU campus being sieged in a way by the police and under the central government. Where have we come from and what is the present state of the recent agitation? One must understand that JNU unlike most other central universities for its size is primarily a research university. 67% of our students are research students. They hail from all corners of India about 60% are women and about 60 to 65% come from economically backward or socially deprived or categorized. So this is a very unique place where the focus is not killed but the production of knowledge. Whereas the environment if you look nationwide of research students in all universities is 0.5% according to an MHRD survey from 2014 and in central universities it is 3.5%. We are 67.5%. We also happen by some external metrics which we do not take all that seriously that we are the best ranked university full-fledged university in the country we just got the visitors award because for us the university state is actually not only determined by outports and api points but the fact that this is a teaching and learning environment. Now when you have a high-performing university which people would say intellectually elite maybe you can even call it but it is not socially elite. Can the UGC make a set of regulations whose intention is to decrease MPL, PhD and all that? Let me intervene here just for a minute that's the next question I wanted to ask that you have an act under which the JNU was formed it is a statutory which is a law the statutory law now you are seeing executive high-handedness through a May 2016 UGC notification trying to overturn overturn a law which is exists you have an academic council which says 1048 seats for MPL and PhD and you have the administration saying only 130 so the logger it is actually an illegal way of countermanding the act under which the university was formed. So how is this possible that the government does this? Well you see this is what is happening to us now is the future that faces India that to use the instruments of the courts executive orders ordinances to actually repeal the legislations that have been enacted by parliament. After much debate and after much movement. Even the UGC does not say that you know your law act does not exist in fact through these regulations it says that are accepted or determined by academic bodies it even mentioned the name of academic council but when these regulations were placed they were placed and immediately in the 141st academic council meeting teachers said I'm sorry this is and you know these are not in conformity let's try to the UGC and say that we've done this in the past in 2009 we've been able to make a successful case that don't be are adopting as much as we can. However this time made it so falsified academic council meeting was actually real you did a majority of academic council members made protests and these were imposed upon us. Since then we have been asking the UGC. Some students of the UGC even went to the court we said we are asking the court to rule on the validity of the UGC regulations. We are asking the court to tell the university that it must respect its own statutes even if we have to plagiarize the UGC guidelines. The vice chancellor is not the person who can do so but instead of listening to heeding to our friends the court gave a judgment which we do not accept which we are in the which for students I am the professor of opinion which ruled on the validity of the UGC guidelines something a prayer that was not before the court at all and one reason why this could have happened is because you know earlier universities even have administrations for corrupt and no political appointees. Thus you could not at the university reside from your own act. This time in court the university gave one written academic which upheld the act but its oral arguments were made by the additional solicitor general of India and after a small little case of a matter of 1000 students I cannot believe that the additional solicitor general of India should have 4 months time and it should come. So what do you feel is the game plan and JNU is obviously making your first target so what is the wider game plan in terms of identity. The wider game plan is to use the UGC as a means not only to determine what is to be what best you can give a degree but to determine what is thought to actually work for every space or so we will perhaps get instructions about which buy from the sunset cannon we can teach. This is actually happening across the country even in not only in UGC it's also from what I understand happening with NCIT, CDSA but I'm not sure about this but I'll tell you one other thing that happened is that there are in the 11th plan these centers for the study of discrimination and exclusion have also been closed down but now the UGC has a letter as a forgery JNU has a letter as a forgery that they want the committee and they actually want to close that down but the tragic demise of a Dalit student and that's what I want to come to it you know a particular incident has of course terrible ramifications but actually this move where now we have some about 1500 MA students many of them want to come back to JNU many of them the only place that they can afford to even dream to do a PhD is JNU because our fees is 220 rupees for six months because we have been able to use our act to argue that this is the responsible state to have a slow fees it's still not safe to live in Delhi but research students get an on their fellowship all other universities in the country have implemented these guidelines because they do not have a body of research students already who will protect. Can you just explain to the viewer what this composition and how it impacts on the under privilege what we call as Dalit backward minority students and and how their entry is so vital to be able to have a more representative student makeup. I would make you ma'am to point this not only about personal justice it's also about the production of knowledge that is that diversity is necessary to ask you questions and to provide you answers to deeper understanding in every way. So the way that right now we have state mandated reservation which is 27.5 OBT 15 percent ST and 67.5 ST and also there is a 3 percent for persons with disabilities. Now every university is supposed to have that and these fees are a percentage of a total number. So if my total number is just one then at the most there should be one more reservation and then there will have to be universities also you don't have to think to get that. Now in India we don't only do that we don't only do reservation we have a system which has been there from the really almost is the birth of freedom was discontinued for eight nine years a system of deprivation for and this follows from the first schedule of our act which says that we are required to provide education to the poorest of the poorest in India from all corners of India. This system of deprivation for us can go up to an excess of 12 months over and this is given to if you are a person who is from a backward region as defined by the portal system on India. If you have been to if you've done your schooling in a government school with the fees last paid then you get more points. If you are an SC movement you can SC women from a backward area with the you can get up to 12 months extra which means that people it's like actually measuring a social handicap you know. And the reason why we do it is of course we like you know the social justice is clear to us but how will there be new questions. So you can do it it's important for science it's important for social science it's important for humanity and why DNU has been at the top for decades now is because students like this ask these questions and they do the research. Why research in JNU is meaningful it's meaningful for students it's meaningful for society it's meaningful and held in very high esteem internationally. Now a political question that we see that this kind of creeping up of privatization of higher education has not happened overnight even the earlier UP1 and UP2 governments were trying to do this they introduced the semester system in DU they tried to do all this but the particular edge that this government has brought to the attack on JNU how would you differentiate between the earlier attack which is a general attack on private education which is now added to with an ideological sunk kind of an attack. You see I think you have to draw an ideal on it's like an ideological basket that you have to adjust to it's not only so first of all it's very easy to distinguish between what has happened in the past and now there were no rules made specifically specifically for JNU there were no selective implementations but the attack on JNU is I think for a number of reasons and draws one from the stand which is a very strong stand in the BGB and the RSS which is an anti-reservation stand right I mean it is no accident that periodically every three or four months somebody or the other in the RSS reservation is back. It is not any surprise that Harsik Patel and the JARC who are dominant groups in are now demanding reservation their slogan is reservation for us or not at all and it's the not at all which is being implemented because the dominant groups, numerically dominant, politically yeah they will hog up the reservation right one stand of that and JNU is aside from its left and democratic culture it's the one place where reservation social inclusion right actually has had an impact on university figures beyond that 22.5% so that this is not a system that you want to implement particularly because it is also world-class because of this not despite so there's this one stand that there is a deep environmental agenda because if you look at the attack that what has happened in 9, wait a student, a Muslim student in HACA, a legislative HACA was then beaten up and has now disappeared off the face of it. Since October 28th and we don't know where he is and nobody is asking except his mother you know despite he was number the protest despite he has not been found so you're facing an aspect there which was this campus has been always an ocean of security for everybody who left. One line Professor Kidwai to end this interview with what would you like to say one last thought my last thought is that I think that as a you know people we really have to understand that just freedom of speech and expression is not the way to fight you know we can't say otherwise but we have to reclaim this discourse of life and that discourse is not limited just to freedom of speech and expression. So I think it's important for all of us to realize that the battle in JNU within JNU being fought so bravely by the teachers and students is not a battle of that campus but a battle that all Indians should understand is critical for the production of fair and just knowledge for the future. Thank you so much Professor Kidwai for this time. Thank you.