JNU in Retrospect: Corrections

Prelude:

Quite some time back, I received an invitation from a former colleague at JNU, Professor R. R. Sharma, requesting that I write, in about 5000 words, my reflections on the time I spent in JNU for a collection that he was putting together. This was followed by a phone call from Professor Y. K. Alagh, our former Vice-Chancellor, telling me that he too was interested in the project that Professor Sharma had told me about and that he had suggested my name to Professor Sharma. In the circumstances, I agreed and submitted, after a few months, a piece entitled “JNU in Retrospect” to Professors Alagh and Sharma. There were some typos and the article needed to be shortened; I sent back a revised version. I was happy to note Professor Alagh’s one-word response, “Wah!”; Professor Sharma, in a conversation, said it was a good write-up. Waiting for the print to appear, we noted with dismay the fast deteriorating health of Professor Alagh, and ultimately, to our great regret, he passed away. So, the project lay in shambles under the control of Professor Sharma. The publisher had not been fixed, and on top of everything else, Professor Sharma, being ill, it seemed that the project itself was in terminal stages. One day, I heard that a publisher had been found and that the project was alive. I was a bit surprised when the proofs were not sent to us, and yet the book was out in November, with the title ” Nehru’s Luminous Legacy, The Jawaharlal Nehru University, Fifty Years and Thereafter”. When the book came to me, I was shocked, surprised, and bewildered. The article had been changed beyond recognition; “corrections” had been introduced, which made sentences garbled and their meaning altered, and the worst was when I found new data about myself. I took the publisher to task who feigned complete helplessness since everything had been done by either the Editor or someone that he had requested. The Editor thought that someone was cracking a practical joke at my expense. It was neither practical nor a joke. The publisher offered to withdraw the books printed and make the blatant errors right. He took away the extra copies that I had ordered for distribution among friends, promising that he would replace them with the corrected copies. I believed him. Now I learn that the uncorrected copies were sold during the Golden Jubilee celebrations of CESP. In the circumstances, I have no other alternative but to make available my original piece, since the errors are many. Further, I felt that since the word limit is no longer binding, I should reintroduce some parts which had been left out. Finally, it should be noted that I have not been associated with any other University as Pro Vice-Chancellor.

JNU in Retrospect

Anjan Mukherji 

I joined JNU on Monday, April 16 1973.  There was no Economics Department nor was there any room assigned to me; someone pointed to an empty room with no furniture. We got a small table from another room and a chair; the chair used to disappear every day and I had to look around in other rooms and drag a chair into my room. In this makeshift arrangement, one day I was told that the VC wanted to meet me! I called up the office of the Vice-Chancellor, G. Parthasarathi, from the nearest phone, and his office told me to come, so I walked down to his office. I talked to him for a fairly long time. He knew about my background in Mathematics and my PhD in Economics, and told me that very soon, we should have people in Economics and Mathematics. And he knew that the Indian Statistical Institute in New Delhi had also made me an offer and he said that joining JNU was the correct decision. Given the unprepared state of affairs, I was not quite sure that I had made the correct decision. Probably that showed on my face and he rang a bell and requested that I be taken to the Registrar. I had never met a VC before but I must say that I was impressed. And he told me something that I remember, that we should be able to build something great. 

My visit with the Registrar, Mr N.V.K. Murthy revealed another major character; he appeared at ease in most of the Indian Languages it seemed. He was speaking to me in Bengali; speaking to some one  else in another language, Tamil , effortlessly  switching to yet another, Malayali. Absolutely impressive. That I could speak only two, Bengali and Hindi, made me feel quite inadequate. He helped me take some important steps.  I had to choose between two alternative forms of pension benefits: CPF and GPF. I asked him for advice.  He said well you are young and you will probably quit and go off elsewhere; for you CPF it is. So CPF it was.  Little did I realize what an absolute blunder that choice would prove to be.. And I was set. Or so I thought.  

What should a University stand for? I cannot find better lines than the following penned by Jawaharlal  Nehru: “A University stands for humanism. For tolerance, for reason, for the adventure of ideas and for the search of truth. It stands for the onward march of the human race towards ever higher objectives. If the Universities discharge their duties adequately, then it is well with the Nation and the People.” These lines used to be printed on the front cover of the JNU telephone directory.  Looking at JNU over the last few years, the University has neither stood for any of these ideals nor did it perform its duties adequately.  

There are three parts of any University: the Students, the Faculty and the Administration.  A fourth institution, the Government, sometimes influences what happens within the University. Largely though during the last fifty years or so, the only influence the Government exerted was through the appointment of the Vice Chancellor.  We have had 12 Vice-Chancellors in JNU till date. Mr Parthasarathi, while leaving, visited each one of us in our offices to bid us goodbye and wish us luck. This did not happen with anyone else. The Vice-Chancellors generally adopted an attitude of ‘benign neglect’: never attempted to do anything. In my opinion the first Vice-Chancellor had a decisive impact and left an impression. Before I say something more about this, let me describe a scene from an Academic Council Meeting in 1974; there had been some instances, of what some teachers said were students misbehaving. And things had become ugly, as they do, when handled badly and the matter had come before the Academic Council. The teachers spoke and the students made their representation. It was clear that had there been a debate, the students would have won hands down: they spoke much better. Anyway, since I was relatively junior and new, I was sitting quietly and watching what happened. Mr Parthasarathi requested the students to withdraw so that teachers could deliberate. The students left without any further fanfare and after gates were closed, the Vice-Chancellor rebuked the teachers who were baying for the blood of the students. I remember what he said: please remember that you may be speaking to a future Prime Minister of the country. So, respect them.  Later on, when they will walk into your room you will stand up, said the Vice Chancellor. You should be fair and look at their current blemishes kindly. Punish them of course, but punishment should never be out of line with what has been done.  This vision that the Vice Chancellor painted before us remained for some time to come. And he was not far away from the truth. I myself have had a future Nobel Laureate and a future Finance Minister in my class; I often used to say when I started teaching a batch, that maybe someone from their midst would do such foundational work that I will be able to teach future batches; even this came to be true; amongst our alumni there is a Foreign Minister too and any number of senior bureaucrats and researchers spread allover the world. JNU alumni adorn media houses, the offices of publishers and there is even a distinguished Cinema Director.

Not too many Vice Chancellors communicated the same feelings. Except Professor Alagh who, when the students went on a hunger strike, on what he considered to be unreasonable demands, decided to sit down on hunger strike himself, after informing the Chancellor that he was doing so and that his salary for the days he would remain on hunger strike be deducted. This was the JNU ethos that we admired and that should have been talked about. Maybe if this ethos had survived, the distressing incidents of recent times could not have taken place. The picture that Partasarathi had put before us, the standards of behavior that people like Alagh set for us, unfortunately did not last. The following is an attempt to discover what might have led us astray. 

Returning to the early days, I learnt to my utter disbelief that three students had been admitted into the MA economics programme (non-existent); my senior colleague and some others were teaching some courses in the Political Science Centre and some economists in the Regional Development Centre were teaching too. I was suddenly asked to teach something. With the advice from some seniors, I started to give some lectures on Linear Economic Models. It was totally unplanned and the entire thing for the three students must have been horrendous. If you have to teach Linear Models you have to teach some basic things first, and then it struck me that people who were suggesting that I teach Linear Economic Models had no clue what that entailed. This prepared me to the way that JNU was to take decisions going ahead. Well-meaning at best, but with little understanding of what was at stake.  

The admission to the M.A. Economics programme actually took place once the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning (CESP) was formed by means of an office order some time in July 1973 with Krishna Bharadwaj, Amit Bhaduri and myself and with the announcement that Prabhat Patnaik and Utsa Patnaik and Sunanda Sen were to join. The first three being available, handled the entire admission process. And by August lectures had to be started; the curriculum for the programme was drawn up again by the three of us supervised by Professors Sukhamoy Chakravarty, Ajit Biswas and K. N. Raj. It was exhilarating to chart out the entire programme for M.A. in Economics. Often, I felt inadequate, I did not know enough to chart out the course of the entire curriculum and Professor Chakravarty would speak confidently and forcefully about a large number of things, and seemed to be at ease with everything under the sun. Professor Chakravarty had taught me when I was an undergraduate, and as I had felt then, I still felt that there were so many things yet to be understood.  

There were several Economists employed in other departments or Centres, but we at the CESP kept to ourselves and my suggestions to involve some of them were hardly ever favorably met.  The Centre continued to grow but still maintained an aloofness from the rest of the University which was often held against us.  But among us, inside the Centre, there was a great deal of bonhomie and friendly chatter.  

Students continued to flock to CESP. And by the early 80’s, we had managed to attract the best students from Delhi University, apart from the best from Kolkata and other parts of the country. How did the rest of the economics profession see our department? They did not look upon us with any affection. Many students passing out of CESP looking for teaching jobs in say Delhi University colleges were often ridiculed and sarcastically asked, can you compute how much labour is congealed in this chair? This was a sarcastic reference to Professor Krishna Bharadwaj and her expertise on the works of Piero Sraffa. In fact, I was for a long time, the odd one out, amongst the faculty. And come to think of it, right through my long stint at the JNU, I remained just that, although there were some additions to my tribe. 

It is a bit difficult to talk about what I thought went wrong with the University so hereafter, I shall speak about the Centre I know the best and about which I had first-hand information. I often complained that the usual refrain from my colleagues that we were different from the rest was a big mistake. We ought to have argued that we were better, which for most of the time I firmly believed. I think we were better since we taught things from first principles. It was not a bits and pieces approach, by any of us at the beginning. The second reason we were better was the emphasis that we placed on India in our curriculum. Our better students could talk about things happening in India with some degree of confidence.  Which students with similar record from other Economics departments could hardly do.  Our better students could in addition speak on theoretical aspects as well. But there was a neglect of standard economic theory in the curriculum which percolated into treating the entire area as non-existent or worse. Some ‘important’ colleagues did say that our curriculum encompassed all schools of thought, but clearly some schools of thought were emphasized over others in their thoughts and deeds. This made the discussion on Indian economy slanted politically and helped set up a false narrative about the Centre and indeed about much of JNU, which would create a lot of damage. But the apparent bonhomie inside the Centre continued. 

In 1982, there was the first upheaval in JNU; not so strangely, perhaps, it began with students from Kolkata whose results had not appeared by the time the admissions at JNU closed. So the temporary admissions given to some with results still awaited created a problem for the administration. Students given this temporary admission were sitting in classes appearing in mid-semester examinations and appearing at end-semester examinations as well and we wanted to see them through to the next semester. Not so, said the administration, who argued that the faculty had no right to allow the students to appear in examinations. Things became quite heated on both sides and Sheila Bhalla and I, arguing on behalf of the Centre, since the Chairperson, Ramprasad Sengupta, was down with some throat infection and had been advised to maintain silence, realized that there was nothing very much that we could do and I was really looking for an opportunity to hit out. The then Rector, Professor M. S. Agwani claimed that Universities abroad would only consider the JNU marksheet as being the valid certificate when they consider students for admission and I remember with great glee, accepting the opening and telling him that he was mistaken: it was what people like Anjan Mukherji said that mattered most to Universities abroad. Which was correct of course, but that basically upset everyone. In retrospect, I wonder what would have happened if someone had made the same argument in the present regime. But this also shows what JNU was then. Professor Agwani became the Vice Chancellor and I was then to become the Chair of CESP but whatever he may have thought of my outburst privately, whenever I had the occasion to interact with him, he was correct.  

But there was trouble brewing. Our first Vice-Chancellor’s admonishments were being largely forgotten by the administration but fortunately, several senior Faculty members remembered and when the police entered the campus, they helped the students under siege. It was at the behest of these faculty members that the Vice-Chancellor finally relented and withdrew charges. But this incident changed matters drastically. The admission policy of JNU changed. The link between faculty and students changed. I remember once in a discussion, a colleague sneeringly asked me whether I felt paternalistic towards the students! They don’t consider you to be their father though, he continued. Mr G. Parthasarathi’s admonishments were being forgotten. 

But things had really started going downhill.  If I have to put a date to it, it would be around the mid-90’s ( Professor Bhardwaj died in the March of 1992) when we noticed that the top students would write our admission tests, would be chosen but decline admission. Some of us would worry, but the remaining seemed unconcerned that the so-called good students were not coming any longer. The problem as I now realize, was that the so-called good students were the ones who could think independently and maybe would realize that the emperor wore no clothes.  That there was really little to choose in the narrative that we were different; we were caught out and were found wanting.  

The signals were there from the beginning.  I should say that there were stray isolated incidents first and could be overlooked. The incidents I have in mind related to our unwillingness to engage with anyone who was not our friend and follower. Even as early as 1974, when Amartya Sen was a Visiting Professor at JNU, instead of visiting CESP, he was a Visiting Professor at the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies; that was odd enough but he was not invited to the Centre for even a talk What made things worse, was the horrendous incident of a really outstanding scholar from the UK, Professor Partha S. Dasgupta; now, he is Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta; he was distinguished enough then and he wrote to CESP wanting to visit the Centre for a term and he was willing to give some lectures; no money was involved,  as he wanted to spend time with his father who was then staying in the Campus. CESP turned him down. I was then on leave and had taken an appointment at the London School of Economics and I have never felt more ashamed at the decision of my colleagues. These were public events; I mention them as a sign of the festering malaise; and there were some manifestations of this in private too.  A bit later, there was the incident of the Ford Foundation offering to the CESP some funds for the purchase of computers and books; it was flatly rejected by the faculty in a meeting; I recall asking what was wrong about accepting the money from Ford Foundation or even a fellowship from them.  If I did so, I was told, the faculty would think less of me! Fortunately, JNU did not lose this grant since it was picked up by another Centre. Yet, some years later, when some of these members of CESP who had objected and denied facilities to students at the Centre, formed some NGO, they did not think twice about accepting Ford Foundation money to either go abroad or hold conferences.  I did raise it with a senior colleague, only to be told that he too disapproved of their accepting the money from Ford. But that did not stop them.  By their token, we should think less of them. And that is exactly what began to be played out. 

Over time though, the false narrative that I have alluded to, continued to gain ground, and solidified; and students pursuing other fields, no matter what they achieved or did, would be studiously ignored. These achievements were good by any standards; the area of Law and Economics was developed at the Centre, and students produced first rate papers published in good journals and were considered among the best in the country. There were faculty members supervising students carefully and producing competent scholars not only in various topics in theory but also in areas such as Industrial Organization, Environmental Economics, Applied Industrial Economics, and other areas of Applied Economics. No one really talked about achievements which would be of little help to the narrative that was being nurtured. Some students in the doctoral programmes of the CESP published papers in International Journals; even the chapter of a M.Phil. dissertation appeared in an International Journal. While these students were well thought of outside the University, within the University circles, they were just forgotten and overlooked since the flavour was not right.    

Right from the beginning there was this feeling within the Centre and to a large extent, within the JNU, that something great was happening within the University. Great things were indeed happening, but people did not realize what were these great things. Thus, what won general appreciation and acclaim, were never great while what were great achievements went unappreciated and sometimes even ridiculed. JNU did not really care about teaching and research unless it was of a particular type. There was no scrutiny of work by independent scholars. In fact once, a UGC visiting Committee had “experts” who were trying to deny grants because we were doing research in spite of not having grants, so why should we be supported? And they presented some of us with Cards containing pictures of some deity with his blessings. 

So far as matters at the CESP were concerned, many of us were at fault. We really wanted to avoid possible conflict within the Centre. Promotions became routine and merit was never looked at. The faculty should have noted with concern, the departure of several colleagues who were excellent teachers; apart from being available to students all the time they added sufficient breadth. Instead, what came to be valued is working on projects and lecturing elsewhere.  This was talked about within smaller sub-groups though and this made the Centre weak from within. Although for most of my time there appeared to be a calm within the Centre; it was a false calm and the predominant part of the faculty, those who routinely nurtured the false narrative, appeared to start taking full advantage of this calm. It was indeed the calm before the storm.  

But we did get some outstanding students: absolutely first rate by any standards. I say this not only on the basis of their performance in the programme but what they achieved in later life. Let me speak about some really outstanding students that came to us for their M.A. and since there were many, I shall choose among the students who I felt were really outstanding. I believe the students are the centre-pieces of our performance. Accordingly, I shall choose some who I felt ought to have been singled out in any reckoning but were largely left unsung since they were outside the narrative.  

I shall mention them in the order of their appearance on the scene at CESP. First to appear was Sudhakar Rao Aiyagiri in 1974.  He was working towards a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in IIT Delhi when he decided that the work was not what interested him and he wanted to study economics. My advice to him was to study economics formally that is join a master’s programme. He applied to our programme and qualified. In fact he perhaps topped the list of candidates admitted that year. His performance was extraordinary. Sudhakar Rao did extremely well at the end of two years and on the strength of our recommendation went to Minnesota for his PhD. At that time, Minnesota had the strongest doctoral programme in economics. The bitter cold probably got the faculty and students to spend more time with each other, and one after another, outstanding students emerged. The choice of the programme had been mine and Sudhakar Rao went along with it cheerfully. I was to run into Professor James Jordan, a very well known faculty from Minnesota, a few years later and enquired about Sudhakar. Two things emerged after our conversation: first, that they knew him as  S. R. Aiyagiri,  and that he was probably their GOAT (greatest of all time). I felt relieved that my prediction that he would do great work had come true. He did outstanding work in the general area of macroecomic theory. Very very unfortunately, he died in 1996, at the pinnacle of his career, shortly after he accepted the position of Professor of Economics in one of the strongest departments in the area of Macroeconomics, the University of Rochester. A proper appreciation of his career appeared in the piece “S. Rao Aiyagiri, My Student and My Teacher” by the very well-known Macroeconomist, Neil Wallace. A special issue of the Quarterly Review of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in the Summer of 1997 was published in his memory and contained this piece. 

The second person in this category, to appear in front of us was in 1978, Sunil Gupta, who too is unfortunately no more. He did not pursue what would undoubtedly have been an outstanding career in academia, spent his entire life working for the tribal in Madhya Pradesh, was a true Gandhian in thoughts and deeds. In later life he was known as Sunil, dropping his title. He was really remarkable. Fortunately, there are people who hold him in high regard, and the Sunil Memorial Trust holds annual Sunil Memorial Lectures delivered by important scholars and activists.   So while he was talked about among friends and fellow students, there was little recognition from the University. He was a remarkable scholar and his presence in the classroom kept us, his teachers, on our toes and helped us to learn a lot.  

And finally, Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee appeared in our classrooms in 1980. What can I write about him that has not already been said?  Except to note that neither the University nor the CESP   said anything about this great recognition. Were people embarrassed? I am surprised that none of my colleagues  spoke to the media immediatey after the award, since everyone from the media made a beeline to my door: apparently, they were all directed towards me; it has never happened in the past and I suspect it never will too in the future. On one channel, I was asked what does this award mean so far as the attack on JNU and its faculty was concerned? Does any other University boast of a Nobel awardee among its alumni? And what about two Cabinet Ministers and any number of bureaucrats, corporate honchos, those employed in publishing houses, media personnel, at all levels and some even at senior positions? Universities and research Institutes, all over the country and in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the US, had many members of faculty who were our students, and we needed a defense?  

When Amartya Sen received the same prize, he received great adulation; at a meeting to felicitate Amartya Sen in the School of Social Science, only one or perhaps two, spoke about Sen’s work favourably; the rest spoke rather disparagingly about Sen and his achievements.  But the then Vice-Chancellor, Professor Asis Datta,  had the good sense to organize a special convocation to award Sen a honoris causa doctorate. And JNU got R.K. Laxman to sketch for the invitation letter for the event which showed the Common Man garlanding a beaming Sen. This was a JNU effort; while some of us may have been engaged in preparing the citation, but that was for the Vice Chancellor, the CESP once again was not involved in this.   But for Abhijit, our own student, it was all ho hum! Some even took cheap shots at the fact that Abhijit was no more an Indian citizen. And the congratulatory letter from the faculty, I understand, mentioned that the Centre was happy that Abhijit has recognized his JNU roots. I would have pointed out that the shoe was on the other foot: this was the first time that faculty of the Centre was acknowledging even the existence of such a scholar. Only once before, Abhijit had come to give a talk at the Centre. But he visited Delhi regularly and often spoke at the Delhi School of Economics!   Apart from that solitary instance, we never made any effort to ask him to come.  But what made my day was the phone call from the man who has a small kiosk in one of the Munirka complexes, who has maintained our old watches and clocks over many years. Just because he had seen the TV programmes and learnt that Abhijit had been my student, his congratulatory messages were something really extraordinary and I will always treasure them. At least he seemed to have realized that this was something that should be appreciated. 

Thus, what made JNU great were the students: really exceptional students. Some of us tried to keep talking to them and learning from them. One established himself internationally. Unfortunately, the other two did not get the chance. But it is clear to me that had they lived, and continued as they were doing, each would have got international recognition of the highest order.  The amazing thing is there were many others who should have been talked about. Many others were there doing good work given the constraints placed on their functioning; some even did outstanding work with international scholars acclaiming their work to be of the highest order.  By and large, it was the Faculty and the Administration which let the University down. Of course there were exceptions. 

Apparently, the Centre’s attempt to be different mentioned earlier, began to be passed off as  ‘hetrodoxy’.  In a Conference the other day, I asked the meaning of the phrase heterodox economics. The only meaning that I could get was that heterodox meant not mainstream, or not the standard approach. What then was the mainstream? Day was not night and night was not day. Thus, vagueness was in vogue. A student who achieved some importance in later life, during his student days, claimed that he would score very high in term-papers written for some teachers by first smoking pot! I do not know how much weight one should put on this story, but given the way things were done, it appeared believable.  And the division of the faculty into factions was detrimental to the Centre.  And more recently, when a senior colleague in a written response to some students, lambasted those who taught mathematical economics and game theory as being no better than drug pushers, the false bonhomie that existed was shattered.  

 It was not clear to most of us how empty the JNU or CESP middle was; the thin veneer did not take long to crumble when someone came along with a hammer.  Most blame the current disposition; certainly, they should be held accountable for what has happened on their watch;  but the ones prior to the current also contributed in many ways to make the JNU kernel vague and crumbly. They just made it easier for the floodgates to open during the present regime. The general belief among all and sundry that JNU was a single monolithic structure, strongly favoring “left” scholarship was established over the previous years.  And for this warped single story behind JNU, the starting point was the attitude of those who claimed we were ‘different’ and encouraged students to spread the same message. It’s a great pity they were able to succeed in these short-sighted efforts. And while we were aware of the solidifying false narrative, we did not make any effort to counter it. 

Reflecting on the almost four decades spent in JNU, Charles Dickens’ immortal opening lines come to mind: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, ….. it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” 

It appears that we are currently in the midst of the winter of despair. Is there some chance of a spring of hope too? Good students will keep turning up since JNU remains one of the top ranked Universities in the country. I hope that there would be some competent members of the faculty who would help them. One of the students in the first batch that I taught at JNU, told me that he had thought before coming to JNU, that teachers were generally losers, the most useless bunch of fellows who did not even know the subject they were supposed to teach. Only after coming to JNU he felt that his opinion had to be altered; he noted for the first time, that there were teachers from whom he could learn some things and there were some faculty members who he thought of as worthy of being emulated. This was in 1973-4. Would students that come to JNU today feel similarly? 

Students will continue to come to JNU and many among them may be able to provide the spark, provided their mentors remember the pitfalls of the past. Remember we still don’t have a PM among our regular alumni (we may have a PM from Nepal though, among the alumni and we do have a PM from among our students of the parttime courses;  it may not be generally known,  that during 1977-79, P. V. Narsimha Rao studied at the Centre for Spanish Studies and obtained the Diploma and Certificate in Spanish.  I wonder why this has not been as widely recognized as it ought to have been.) and there are many other international awards and recognition to win and get before we can achieve the dream of our first VC. As Alexander Pope wrote in his An Essay on Man, “ Hope springs Eternal in the human breast”.