Kolkata: It was raining at Jadavpur University on Sunday (August 30) when the students came back to the Open Air Theatre with their paint. A day before, their graffiti had been scrubbed off that wall on instructions from the authorities. They wrote it out again, Karl Marx and Ho Chi Minh, in the rain, on the wet whitewash.That is where the fight over Jadavpur stands. Workers arrived on the campus early on Saturday (August 29) with lime and sheets of white paper, and writing that had stood for years, on Palestine, on Manuvad, on Rabindranath Tagore and Pandit Raghunath Murmu and Che Guevara, were painted out or papered over. The men doing the work told The Wire the order had come “from above”. Now, every wall they cleared has been written on again.‘Either they will remain, or we will’On Friday (August 28), West Bengal chief minister Suvendu Adhikari had said of the university, “either they will remain, or we will.”What has followed is not a debate about campus politics. It is an attempt to clear a university of one kind of politics while another moves in.Beside the Golden Jubilee building, a new office of an employees’ organisation aligned with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has opened in the space that until recently housed the World View Book Store. How a bookshop inside a state university became a party linked office is not on any record The Wire could find. The office was shut when this reporter visited. There were no demands pasted outside it, no literature, barely a poster. A few saffron flags, and nothing else. In the part of the campus where classes are held and administrative work is done, no other party or organisation has an office at all.Students say the clearing has been selective, and that wall writing and publicity material belonging to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has been left untouched while their own has come down. Hoardings put up by the same BJP aligned employees’ body are up in several places on the campus.A poster at Jadavpur University encouraging students to join the ABVP. Photo: Joydeep SarkarThe phrase Adhikari uses about Jadavpur is not his own. Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduced “dimagi Naxal” in his Independence Day address, and it has been taken up by the BJP since. Adhikari has applied it to the university repeatedly.“I am saying in the same voice as the prime minister that dimagi Naxals have created a base here and carry out anti-national propaganda. Either they will remain, or we will. Why should there be writing on the walls about Palestine or in support of Kishenji?” he said.What that means in practice has already been demonstrated. During a recent ABVP mobilisation, men led by the local BJP MLA climbed over a university gate carrying weapons, broke the university plaque, entered the campus, burnt flags of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and assaulted students. No arrests have followed.“Why are the authorities silent after that?” asked Ayantika Pal, a student. “When a newspaper reported that attack, the chief minister threatened them and there was an attempt to attack that newspaper’s office. So where is our security?”‘Constitutional head of the state is speaking in the voice of a dictator’The students’ answer to the mobilisation outside the gates has been to ask for a vote. Jadavpur has not held student union elections since 2020, and the demand has become the organising point of the response to the BJP and ABVP campaign.“Let the chief minister send his party into a political fight. We are asking for student union elections,” Pal said.The argument rests on a number. In the last election to the university’s Internal Complaints Committee, ABVP polled fewer votes than NOTA, the none of the above option.“Even then, we are not calling for violence or misuse of administrative power. We are asking for a political contest!” Pal argued.Biswajit Roy, state secretary of the Democratic Students’ Organisation (DSO), told The Wire that the campaign was aimed at the Left as a whole, “The constitutional head of the state is speaking in the voice of a dictator, and his target is the Left. The Left student community will resist the policy of repression this government is imposing at Jadavpur and across the state.”Subhadeep Bandyopadhyay, an SFI leader at Jadavpur, said the university’s history was being turned against it.“Jadavpur University was born out of a fight against British arrogance. Our tradition is to hold our heads high. The chief minister of this state is spreading lies knowing them to be lies, and the leaders and workers of his party are still trying to attack students,” he said.He added that the campaign was producing the opposite of what it intended, “In resisting this attack, we are seeing many new students who never took part in politics directly joining our movement. We have not been taught to bow our heads to any threat.”A wall graffiti written in Bengali at the Jadavpur University that says “you said Jadavpur, I heard love”. Photo: Joydeep SarkarNeither the state government nor the ABVP has said whether it supports holding the elections.On Raksha Bandhan, saffron flags went up for nearly a kilometre outside the university. A stretch of road near the 8B bus stand was taken over for a BJP programme where Vande Mataram was sung, and the chief minister used his speeches around it to say that the students he calls anti-national would be dealt with. More than 24 hours after it ended, parts of the temporary structure were still standing on the road.On Monday (August 31) night, a large number of BJP workers from outside the area gathered again near Gate No. 4. Three women’s hostels stand inside that gate, housing around 500 students. Students say women going out to buy everyday necessities are now being threatened.Sharbari Basu, a student of the history department, said the hostility is not coming from the neighbourhood.“All the shopkeepers in the area, local residents, auto drivers and hawkers are affectionate towards us. We have had a good relationship with everyone here for so many years. But top BJP leaders and ministers keep calling us terrorists and anti-national. That is giving their goons courage. A sense of insecurity has developed after the BJP attack. Students have developed a fear of the BJP and ABVP,” said Basu.Tapan Saha, a pavement vendor outside the campus, offered the only optimistic assessment anyone gave. “It seems the unrest may stop now,” he said.There is no sign of that. The ABVP’s state secretary Neelkantha Bhattacharya has set a deadline, demanding arrests, an investigation by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiry into two office-bearers of the Jadavpur University Teachers’ Association (JUTA).“We have given time until next Wednesday. Within that period, those who attacked us must be arrested, there must be an NIA investigation against the ‘dimagi Naxals’, and we will submit documentary evidence to the governor showing that two JUTA office-bearers are involved in PhD corruption and demand a CBI investigation into the matter. Our movement over Jadavpur will continue every day!” Bhattacharya told The Wire.The demand for a central agency investigation into a state university’s PhD process is unusual, and the teachers’ association has rejected the underlying allegation outright.“The allegations being raised by one organisation regarding PhDs are baseless,” said Professor Partha Pratim Ray of JUTA.“We are ready to face any kind of investigation. But we have only one request. Please stop maligning Jadavpur University for political purposes.”“A chief minister is the chief minister of everyone. He is saying ‘us and them’ in the language of the Sangh Parivar. Is that constitutional?” said Anjil Das, a student of the mathematics department, objectioning to the language used by the chief minister’.CPI (M) alleges past links between CM Adhikari and Maoist leader KishenjiAdhikari has asked repeatedly why Jadavpur’s walls should carry writing in support of Maoist leader Kishenji. The question has reopened a chapter that is awkward for more than one party.Through the Maoist insurgency in Jangalmahal, and around Lalgarh in particular, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), (CPI(M)), alleged that the Trinamool Congress(TMC) and sections of the anti-Left mobilisation worked alongside Maoist backed forces against the Left Front government.A quote by Karl Marx written over a wall at the Jadavpur University. Photo: Joydeep SarkarThe People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCPA) became the principal organisation of that agitation. The precise organisational relationships between the Trinamool Congress, the PCPA, Maoist leaders, the BJP and the RSS remain contested and unproven, and repetition by political parties has never amounted to evidence.What is on the record is that Kishenji publicly backed Mamata Banerjee. “I want to see Mamata Banerjee as the chief minister of West Bengal,” he said. Banerjee took office in 2011. Kishenji was killed in an encounter with security forces in Jangalmahal later that year.Political artist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya’s portrait whitewashed. Photo by arrangement.The CPI(M) has now turned the memory back on Adhikari. State secretary Mohammed Salim alleges that recordings exist of telephone conversations between Adhikari and Kishenji from that period.“After bringing in the Maoists and getting CPI(M) workers massacred when they needed them, and then killing Kishenji in an encounter, we want a high-level judicial investigation!” he said.No such recordings have been produced. A claim that they exist is not proof that they do, and their contents and provenance would have to be independently verified before they established anything about an alleged relationship between Adhikari and Maoist leaders.Parents accuse govt of branding meritorious students as traitorsThe writing Adhikari objects to is narrower in his description than in fact. In the rain this week, the portraits and names still legible on the campus included Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Che Guevara, Pandit Raghunath Murmu, Lenin and Rohith Vemula.At Gate No. 4 a portrait of Tagore stands with his lines beside it, warning of what happens when delusion arrives disguised as religion. A poster has since gone up above it carrying photographs of Modi and Adhikari. Modi asks what is happening in Jadavpur. Adhikari answers, “Vande Mataram is happening in Jadavpur!” The exchange is imagined, but the pairing is the point. The campaign against the university is being run in the prime minister’s language.A poster of the SFI at the Jadavpur University. Photo: Joydeep SarkarSouvik Biswas, a student in the arts faculty, said, “The graffiti reflects the thoughts of meritorious students who have only recently become adults. There are writings here opposing Manuvad, opposing the brutal aggression against Palestine, and many writings about loving the university. There is no question of anti-nationalism in this. But students raise questions because they have the democratic right to question the government and the authorities.”The “dimagi Naxal” label has reached families. Students say some parents took their children home when the trouble started. Others were unmoved. Seema Sen, a parent, wrote on social media, “Never before has there been public anger against a government so quickly. Branding meritorious students as traitors is the kind of declaration that comes from political frustration!”The ABVP has given the university until Wednesday (September 2). The whitewash is still going up. On Tuesday evening, the wall at the Open Air Theatre was wet and covered in writing again.Translated from the Bengali original by Aparna Bhattacharya.