From Hailey Road in New Delhi to rain-soaked Sevak Road in Siliguri, from Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi to the English and Foreign Language Institute in Hyderabad … a vast section of the student community in India has found common cause in protesting the police atrocities against students of Jadavpur University (JU) in Kolkata. In an absolutely shameful and draconian display of state power, the police force was unleashed on a group of students who had laid siege at the JU vice-chancellor’s (VC) office with a charter of demands over the issue of molestation of one of the university’s female students on campus.

While the culture of gheraos and protests is nothing new to campus politics in India, what sets last Tuesday’s late-night horror saga apart from other such incidents is the way brute force was used to crush a primarily peaceful agitation and it was done at the behest of none other than the VC, Abhijit Chakraborty, himself. According to a section of the media and JU students, it was Chakraborty who had sought help from the police to crush the students’ agitation.

In the din of allegations and counter-allegations, fiery debates and discussions that have followed since, one harsh truth that has emerged is the growing paranoia and impatience of an administration in Bengal that seems hell bent on proving Henry David Thoreau wrong on the dictum that “that government is best that governs the least”! Worse still is a blatantly partisan policy in dealing with growing indiscipline in the education sector in the state. In the last one year, several incidents of violence have occurred in students’ union elections, which even resulted in the death of a police constable at a college on the southern fringes of the city. Lumpen elements have often been involved in on-campus violence, though the state government has chosen to be selective in cracking the whip, keeping party affiliations and allegiances in mind. When the VC of a university in north Bengal was heckled and injured by a group of unruly students earlier, the administration preferred to airbrush it as a minor aberration, though similar incidents in some other institutions were dealt with an iron hand.

While one can certainly question the moral paradigm of laying siege at the VC’s office until late at night, there can simply be no justification for the way policemen from the anti-rowdy section pounced on the agitating students and literally plucked them out of the JU campus. The ferocity of the lawkeepers against a bunch of unarmed agitators could better have been reserved for hardened criminals!

The state Education Minister, Partha Chatterjee, has gone on record saying that the government will not tolerate politicisation of the academic field. But is he and the state government at all bothered about the kind of message that is being sent out to the wider world? A government that already finds itself neck-deep in the embarrassment of the Sharadha ponzi scam now has landed with muck on its face with the utterly inept handling of students’ grievances. Couldn’t the JU issue have been better handled with some more tact and patience on the part of the VC and the state administrators? This reminds one of an incident in the mid-1990s in Kolkata. After two students of the city’s premier St Xavier’s College were rounded up and kept in custody at Park Street police station for a night on flimsy grounds, the entire college took to the streets the next morning, bringing traffic to a standstill. Tempers flared, sit-ins continued and the situation had all the ingredients to get out of hand. But the administration stepped in to defuse the tension. An unconditional, off-the-cuff apology from the then chief minister Jyoti Basu was all it took to calm frayed nerves. The officer-in-charge of Park Street police station was summarily moved out and that was the last one heard of an unsavoury tale.

The problem with the current regime in Bengal is its obsessive, compulsive preoccupation with seeing demons where there are none. It urgently needs to come out of this self-made maze of conspiracy theories that it now finds itself so hopelessly trapped in. It ought to realise that every victim who complains of rape or molestation isn’t trying to belittle the government or the ruling ilk; every student who opts to protest a certain issue of immediate concern isn’t really trying to politicise the campus or the academic arena; and if someone resorts to a comical representation of a political debate, he or she is not necessarily an enemy of the state. It is indeed shocking and deplorable that a government that prefers to provide legal assistance to a member of parliament when he publicly resorts to incitement to rape and murder of rival party workers, does not find reason enough to allow a civil discourse to assuage a group of agitating students.

In the three years since Trinamool Congress (TMC) came to power in Bengal, riding on a very decisive anti-Left mandate, the political and intellectual space in the state has got increasingly constricted into an ‘us-and-them’ dialect – something that the erstwhile ruling Communist Party of India had thrived on for decades.

And that is unfortunate. After 34 years of Left rule, the tectonic shift in Bengal in the form of a much-vaunted ‘change’ was high on hope and optimism. However, with virtually every passing day, the idea of ‘change’ that the people of Bengal had opted for so wholeheartedly seems to be losing its way in the dreary sand of political one-upmanship. The JU incident is unfortunate to say the least, but there may be more to come.

By organising a rally in Kolkata on Monday, to counter the students’ protest rally held a couple of days earlier, ruling TMC has yet again made heavyweather of an issue that could have been dealt with more tact. Muscle-flexing by the establishment has only further sullied the image of a government that seems determined to pursue a course of political hara-kiri!