JNU: JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY

            JNU: JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY

-          AACHAL BURANDE

                    

                         Jawarharlaal Nehru university is the foremost university in india. It was   established by an act of Parliament in 1966. It ranked number one in India by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) with a Grade Point of 3.91 (on a scale of 4). JNU is ranked no 2^nd among all universities in India by the National Institutional Ranking Framework, Government of India, in 2017. JNU also received the Best University Award from the President of India in 2017. In  1969, three years after its establishment by Parliament, JNU brought frontier disciplines and newer perspectives for old disciplines to the Indian university system. The excellent teacher- student ratio seen here as it is 1 teacher per 10 student. The mode of instruction which encourages students to explore their own creativity instead of reproducing received knowledge, and of exclusively internal evaluation, were also new to the Indian academic landscape and have stood the test of time. The Nehruvian thoughts, objectives , principles are embedded in the university.

           

 The Jawaharlal Nehru University has produced two important issues for public discussion. The first focuses on the limits that sedition (patriotism?) places on freedom of speech. It asks, for example, whether shouting anti-India slogans, by unknown persons as the First Information Report says, constitutes a ground for booking the students’ union president under sedition laws. If fine distinctions were to be made between slogans, protests, speeches, dissent, and incitement, and further between fuzzy and definite consequences of such actions, would not only some free speech expressions be considered seditious? These are crucial issues for our constitutional democracy today, and the JNU case has presented our courts with a great opportunity to give us a doctrine on the limits to free speech in India. Will we see in the court’s judgment its finest hour, as when, in the Kesavananda Bharti case, it set out the Basic Structure doctrine which places limits on the amending power of Parliament, or will it be its darkest hour, as in the Habeas Corpus case where unrestricted powers of detention under the Emergency were permitted? Will Justice H.R. Khanna be the court’s guide, or will it be Justice P.N. Bhagwati?

             The second issue, entangled in the first, is with respect to the place of JNU in the postcolonial nation’s public life as the university nears its 50th year. The first decade of JNU, a magical period during which gaining of perspective and learning the power of ideas and of democratic deliberation. It covered the period of the Emergency and of the years immediately after, when a traumatised nation delved deep into its inner resources to discover what it stood for and what it stood against. It was a time for serious reflection.