The Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) administration’s decision to enforce the mandatory 75% attendance rule for students has sparked an outcry.
On November 21, 2024, students protested in large numbers against the decision, also calling for the conduct of the students’ union elections (which have not been held since 2019). However, the administration’s response was heavy-handed. They filed FIRs against nine current and former students and suspended six of them, thereby threatening to put their future career prospects in jeopardy.
Seemingly baseless accusations have been hurled against them: plotting to murder the Vice-Chancellor, vandalism, and property damage. The administration alleged that the students damaged the VC’s car, but eyewitness accounts suggest otherwise. The protestors engaged in sloganeering and demonstrations to demand a meeting with the VC. However, the VC ignored them, following which students tried to stop her car. On November 22, 2024, students reassembled to demand the dropping of all FIRs, the resignation of the proctor, a fair attendance policy for all, and the reconstitution of the students’ union.
Mass protests against compulsory attendance are situated in a conjuncture wherein AMU is enjoying a temporary breathing space due to the Supreme Court judgement regarding its minority status. On November 8, 2024, a seven-judge bench of the Supreme Court overruled the 1967 S. Azeez Basha vs Union of India case, which had held that AMU could not be considered a minority institution. The factual determination of the minority character of AMU has now been left to a smaller bench. Insofar as the retention of minority status will allow the university to provide adequate representation to Muslim students, the priority should be to create an institutional space where quality education can be offered to one of the most marginalised communities of India.
The implementation of compulsory attendance appears as a zealous, punitive method of maintaining quality. Its objective is to force students to attend classes regularly. However, the question that needs to be asked here is, why do students need to be forced? What explains their unwillingness to learn? According to the administration, the students are simply lazy, a failure that they avoid facing by staging useless, disruptive protests. In its more charitable version, the chastisement reads as follows: as citizens of a Third World country with sparse educational resources, it is the duty of students to properly utilise the opportunity to learn that they have been given. This view presupposes that education is a ready-made asset that just needs to be activated by the students through the stringent and guided use of their mental faculties. The social and national role of education is established as an unquestionable fact that students have to merely accept. However, what if there is no universally agreed upon role of education? What if the very idea of education is subject to acrimonious debates?
In Third World societies, the legacy of colonialism is such that there is no pre-existing productive wealth (including educational structures) that can just be tapped into to empower the masses. In Western European countries, education, modernization, and capitalist production preceded the installation of universal political franchise by centuries. This meant that politics was tasked with the rechanneling of a capitalist surplus towards welfarist ends. In India, by contrast, there was no capitalist surplus that could be used for socially productive policies. Additionally, at the time of Independence, the country had a literacy rate of 12%, while countries like the US, UK, France, and Germany had near-universal literacy rates.
Taking into account the reality of colonial pauperisation in the Global South, Che Guevara argues in Socialism and Man in Cuba that “[a] complete education for social labor has not yet taken place in these countries, and wealth is far from being within the reach of the masses through the simple process of appropriation…There remains a long way to go in constructing the economic base”. Since there are no pre-existing productive forces that can simply be appropriated, development in the Third World is a creation from scratch.
In the First World, capitalism was supposed to explode due to the exhaustion of all its possibilities, due to a filling up of all spaces of development. The plenitude of social wealth, the sheer expansiveness of the productive capacities of capitalist expansion, would fill the arena of politics, flushing out the dead skin, the outer shell of capitalist blinkers. However, there is no such social plenitude in the Third World. The solidity of an inherently powerful and explosive productive wealth is replaced by the loose, fraying mesh of a greatly underdeveloped society. In other words, a space of absence where there was supposed to be the fullness of productive forces. Instead of the wealth of productive forces, one only has the chaotic play of social relations. Insofar as one begins from these social relations, from these spaces of absence, one has to create humanity itself, as the functioning of humanity is not guaranteed by the logic of productive forces. As Che says, one has “to build the new man and woman.”
Closing the space of absence that presides over Third World economies means suppressing any resolution of the developmental question. By pretending that a proper method of education already exists, one prevents robust discussions on how education can address the country’s structural problems. So, instead of claiming to possess a foolproof method of education, we have to first open up the space for debating what exactly constitutes education. Protests against compulsory attendance create precisely this space. At a fundamental level, students’ attendance at educational institutes implies that they have a stable social link to the campus. Their regularity and punctuality evince their interest in the courses being taught at the institute. Growing absenteeism, on the other hand, gives the opposite impression: students no longer enjoy a stable social link with the institute. Their absence during classes mirrors the broader absence that plagues Third World societies – the absence of an education that aligns with students’ interests, and the absence of a historical structure that can guarantee social wealth.
The sclerotic mindset of administrators is trained to hound out absences and revel in the security of presences. In practice, this translates into the attempt to cover up the poverty of formerly colonised societies through fantasies of a strong developmental programme that just needs to be implemented properly. For the administrators of AMU, the institute already has an infallible pedagogical arrangement. The only problem consists in the students’ unwillingness to follow this arrangement. In order to deal with declining diligence, the administration resorts to violence. If students are not attending classes and calling for reforms, FIRs should be filed against them. Repression is the only response that the status quo manages to orchestrate when confronted by the absence of a dignified human life. What if we begin with the abjectness of absence? What if the poverty of our country is not a blemish to be concealed but a laboratory where creative social experimentation can begin?
The sight of students marching for their right not to attend classes is an abject scene that foregrounds the insufficiency of existing educational policies. Protests against compulsory attendance in AMU took place as the end-semester exams neared. The worry was that the failure to meet the attendance requirements would prevent students from taking the examination. From the administration’s perspective, examinations can only be taken by those who diligently ingest the curriculum through regular attendance at classes. Thus, students are expected to have a motivated attitude towards the examination system. They should optimistically participate in classes so that their educational worth can be measured in meritocratic terms. However, the students’ demand to take exams without attending classes trivialises the value of meritocratic measurement: examinations are not hallowed reflections of one’s worth but instruments of power that have to be circumvented through minimal efforts. While the motivated attitude of regular attendance sanctifies examinations as a genuine expression of learning, the disinterested attitude of absenteeism seeks to cheat its way out of them, treating exams as mere obstacles to be overcome.
An apathetic attitude towards education is not a form of childish frustration but a serious critique of the ruling system. It reveals the litany of failures that are inherent in the educational structure. That is why the issue of compulsory attendance has significant potential to branch off into other, interconnected issues. A note circulating during the protests noted how absenteeism is part of a wider failure by the administration “to uphold its part in the social contract that you enter when you take admission in a course.” The refusal to conduct students’ union elections, the ensnarement of students in torturous bureaucratic procedures, the teaching of outdated material with the “charisma of a sleep-deprived zombie,” the “stamping out student voices and ordinances, bending over backward for fascists in power whilst betraying everything Sir Syed stood for” – all these are background conditions that give rise to student apathy.
The toxic mixture of bureaucratic authoritarianism and unreformed, monological learning is expressed in the introduction of modular courses like Vocational Courses, Value Added Courses, etc. With the addition of these courses, students are being fed fragments of everything without comprehensively learning anything. The time dedicated to core courses has decreased. This is an inevitable component of the neoliberal education strategy, which fragments learning into pieces of information that have to be memorised quickly, instead of encouraging extended discussion on core topics. In this structure of education, teachers become the conveyers of pre-constructed knowledge, while students become passive objects to be fitted into the machinery of endless exams. The regime of undemocratically crafted information, rather than the creative play of learning, ensures that students are equipped with fragmented skills that prepare them for informal, precarious jobs rather than stable occupations in which individuals are actually interested. In the words of Prabhat Patnaik:
[T]he policy of pushing people into career-oriented courses, into vocational training even before they have had a minimum number of years of general education, is typical of a government that wishes to wash its hands off its responsibility towards young persons. It offers them neither a proper education so that they can become citizens of the republic, nor a proper job. It just wants to dump them on the market with a modicum of training, and then let them fend for themselves.
In a context where the education system is being structurally transformed to prioritise the production of cheap labour over nurturing critical thinkers, it is crucial to seize the opportunity provided by the minority judgment to advocate for internal reforms at AMU. Even if this means being consigned to the lower domains of meritocratic inferiority, it is still preferable to perpetuating a system designed to crush student lives.
Lokayata 