 Hello, you're watching People's Dispatch and today we bring you news from the frontlines of the student struggle in India, the 17th National Conference of the Student Federation of India, one of the country's most important student organizations recently concluded in the city of Hyderabad. We have with us Nitish Narayanan who has been elected the vice president of the organization. Nitish, thank you so much for joining us. So first of all, I'll ask you a bit about the conference before going into some of the details of the current struggles going on in the country. So the SFI conference, the Student Federation of India conference had the slogan, educate all, employ all, unite all. So could you maybe take us through why these were identified as the three key axis of this conference? We actually met after four years since we had our last All India Conference, 16th All India Conference, which was held in Shimla in northern part of India. Then the pandemic came in between, it actually lagged the conference one year. We used to meet in every three year. So this time when we met for our All India Conference, representative of SFI units in different states representing four million members, around 720 delegates participated in the conference. And the conference happened at the background of the pandemic and also the new education policy, which was passed by the central government recently in India, and also the continuing onslaught on the students and the education system in India. That's why we decided the conference will take place with the slogan of educate all, employ all and unite all. Educate all means the students in India, which is one of the largest community if you take in any parameters in the entire world, deserve a much better life. We deserve a much better life, much better society. And even in India, even today, India could not achieve that the all of its children goes to school, enrolled to its school. India stands at 107 in the Global Hunger Index. Out of 127 countries in the list. So India is the country where the largest number of children who goes to sleep every day with an empty stomach for them. Even the entry to school education system itself becomes a struggle. Only 45 percentage of Indian students who are enrolled in the first standard completes the school education and goes beyond school education means for the higher secondary school, even among them in the total student population, only 27 percentage of Indian students goes for higher education for the college level education among every 30 students who are enrolled in the higher education in India 20 are in private institutions, which means only those who can afford to pay huge amount of fees, which is increasing on an everyday basis almost can enter to the higher education, which means that a huge chunk of Indian students are either forced to drop out from their studies or they are denied admission to higher education. We feel it is very important for a healthy democracy, for a meaningful democracy, every single children have access to a better, robust public education system that is not the reality of India. That is what in short, educate all means that we need every single children in India to be educated pandemic has escalated the situation, especially the education of the children of deprived sections, women, the students and the children of tribal students, working class students and all, all this background is there. That is why educate all becomes a major important slogan. There we demand a robust public education system to be built and spread in India. Definitely, once you are educated, what is the status means India is the country where the largest number of unemployed youth and unemployed educated youth lives. Means there are no jobs and more than that, there is a huge privatisation going on where the youth in India are supposed to get job in the public sector enterprises, every single public sector undertakings are being privatised in India. Currently around 10 lakh posts are vacant, not filled, which are under the central government in various sectors. So there is a huge unemployment. There is a huge labour reserve army. The people who have studied something are forced to do some other job with a very minimum wage. There is also unemployment. There is also under-employment and there is also very serious threat on the job security. So that is why the slogan, the youth organisation in India is also taking up the slogan of employment for all, education for all and employment for all is a slogan raised by SFA from 1980s itself for the last four or five decades. To achieve this, we do not see a positive stand from the central government, every single policy is to crush the aspiration and dream of the young community in India. The only way to achieve this is to wage a mass struggle, uniting all sections of students, not only students, every single section of academic community and the people who believe education should be strengthened. Along with them, we also feel the students should join with the workers, peasants, unemployed youth and all the oppressed sections in this country. Country is going through a very divisive policies. People are divided over the religious lines. This policy is being pushed by none other than the central regime. It's the government has become the agents of the policies of religious fundamentalism. It is a threat. It is a challenge actually to unite all beyond the religion, caste or any, even language or any other thing. So the question is to achieve education and employment. We have to unite all that is what educate all, employ all and unite all comes as our slogan for the conference. One of the interesting things you mentioned is the new education policy of this government. It has caused, of course, a lot of controversy and we've carried reports, for instance, of SFI being in the forefront of many of the struggles against it of raising a wide variety of objections to it, both in the appropriate fora and on the streets. So could you maybe tell us for our benefit of international viewers also why this new education policy is so disruptive according to the SFI? For those who wanted to learn the dangerous aspects of new education policy, prior to the All India Conference, we had published a book which is called Education or Exclusion, The Plight of Indian Students. It is published by the Student Struggle Indian Researcher. Both are the journals of Students Federation of India, along with Leftward Books. So this book can be brought by from the Leftward website. So I request all the viewers to visit the Leftward website and get this book. This book actually deals the dangerous agendas of new education policy from various aspects, from the pre primary level to the research level. How is it going to affect or destroy the education sector in India? In short, new education policy aims to enhance, intensify the commercialization, communalization, which is the religious fundamentalism in India and also centralization in education. India is a country of vast diversity, huge diversity in terms of languages, culture and geography and even the governing policies and different sort of things. It is understood that India cannot afford to have a single policy, which is applicable for every part in India because due to these different situations in different places. That is why education was in the concurrent list earlier. Concurrent list means education was the responsibility of both the state governments and the union government. Earlier in the initial years, it was completely with the state government that in different states need different kind of policies and approaches to enhance an education system. The role of state government and also the role of local government is very crucial in building a better education system that is being taken away. Second, this new education policy also proposes a further higher privatization in India. Already, especially higher education, it's been privatized heavily in India. One of the most privatized education system is there in India that is going to further develop. With this, there is a very serious threat of religious fundamentalism being injected to syllabus and also the education policies. So this is going to enhance. Third thing, there is also this education policy has a colonial character. We have said it in detail in the book. Why do we call it as a draconian policy? Which means during the time of colonial regime in India, there was an education policy which aimed to create a new community, which will be Indians in their words, which will be Indians in color and blood, but British with the loyalty and the taste, which means they wanted to create a new community, educated community in India, which will work as their clerks or the servants for their colonial project. The same thing is being reflected in the new education policy also. The major objective of new education policy in India is not to enhance the democratic ethos, not to create a knowledge society, not to produce knowledge. Knowledge production is not the aim, but to create a new community, which will be trained in terms of a new labor market, which is controlled by the corporates in India. So who will go to higher education? Only those who are privileged, who can afford private education and who will not challenge. It is a very important aspect that who will not challenge the regime or the existing system. This new education policy doesn't make students who think independent or who means who contribute to strengthen the democratic system, but to become a mere followers of the present regime, which is corporate, which is communal, which is patriarchal, which supports the caste system, which means there is a new education policy. We call it as a new exclusion policy. It institutionalizes exclusion, which ensures that deprived section doesn't go to higher education. According to the new education policy, there is a research policy. According to that, all the researchers are going to be funded by a central agency, which will decide which research should be carried forward in India, which means the researchers which speaks from the side of the people, which wanted to change the society will be stopped now, will have no institutional support anymore in India. In this way, there is an all-round attack on the education system, not only the education system, the very constitution in India itself. And finally, a larger question. I mean, the last three to four years have seen many challenges for the student movement. We've seen, of course, that a student movement has been in the forefront of some very big protests that have taken place in India around the CAA bill, for instance, the farmers struggle, they have been involved. We've seen that repression of student movements have continued in various ways, some of it direct repression, some of it through administrative efforts of neutralizing student movement, organizing in the first place. We've also seen the pandemic has brought its own challenges to organizing students because many have not been on campus. So how does the SFI sort of see the road ahead for organizing students itself? What are the challenges and what are the plans? The conference has actually discussed in detail how to expand the student movement more in the coming days. Definitely during the pandemic, the campuses were closed in many states almost for two years, which means that literally there are no activity, there are no space where you can organize people, you can get people into a process of politicization and you can build a stronger organization. Along with that, the government, the central government in India, the right wing government has used this time as an opportunity to further intensify their anti-student policies. In terms of online education, where students do not have to come to campus, there will be no democratic spaces, no culture of debate and discussion, all those things happened and this posed a huge challenge before the student movement in India. But we are confident that in the conference, even during the pandemic, the activists of Students' Federation of India went on to the villages with the slogan of bring back students, the students who were forced to drop out during the pandemic to get them back to the campuses. Also, a subway activist mobilized students in the local level, made local level units and fought against the online education, the institutionalization of online education. In that way, the momentum, we could keep the momentum during those periods. Second thing is, there is a huge attack on the campus democracy. The largest democracy in India doesn't believe that the students has any democratic rights, means in almost every state, except a very few states like Kerala, everywhere the student politics, students union election are banned, which means students are made as second class citizens. This banning of student movement came along with the neoliberal policies which started in India in 1990s because the regime in India felt that it would be the student community, the organized student community which will come first to resist any kind of onslaught on education. For them to escalate the anti-student policies, they wanted to make sure that students will keep mum, students will be weakened, they won't be organized. So even in the new education policy, there is no mention of campus democracy. Students are made as second class citizens or third class citizens, but still remember in India, in every state, students are getting organized. Despite of this huge threat, that is what we have seen when the Anti-Constitutional Citizenship Amendment Act came. It was Indian campuses which came first to protest against this thing. Every threat coming on democracy also becomes a challenge or threat or attack on the education here. So our duty is to politicize the students, to bring the students to this larger democratic consciousness and get them organized. We are going to organize students to do that. We also in the recent years also SFI could expand its organization to different states where organized student movement was not existing like the state of Buzharath which is one of the hardcore center of the right-wing politics in India. Even the place which is Jammu and Kashmir which literally had been turned as a prison. Yes, place has become a prison by the central government. There are also attempts made by SFI to organize students there and to build a larger movement. That will continue. Thank you so much, Nitish. So there we have it. Nitish Narayanan, Vice President of the Students Federation of India reaffirming the fact that the struggles of the students will continue inside classrooms on campuses, on the streets for a better education system, for better livelihoods for all and for a better democracy for India. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch. For more videos on People's Struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel.