The students and alumni who marched at Jadavpur on Friday (August 21) carried a long strip of painted cloth between them, and what was written on it rhymed.Jadavpur dichche dak, gerua santras nipat jak (Jadavpur is calling, down with saffron terror).The flags that were standing behind it, that tells the story: the Democratic Students’ Organisation (DSO), affiliated to the Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI), the Students’ Federation of India (SFI), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)), and the Revolutionary Students’ Front (RSF), which has spent years arguing that both of the other outfits are the problem.They do not march together. They have been each other’s opposition on that campus for decades, in reading rooms, in union elections, occasionally with their hands on each other. On Friday, they were holding the same banner.The slogan rhymes because it is meant to be shouted by people walking. Bengali protest slogans are built in couplets so that several hundred people can hold the rhythm together without anyone leading them.It is old, and it is not really a slogan at all. It is a form with a gap in it.Nipat jak, down with it, is the fixed half. What goes in front is the variable, and this campus has been filling that space for as long as it has existed. The same metre has carried imperialism to its destruction, and the government of the day, whichever government happened to be the government, and communal politics, and it will carry whatever arrives next. Students who never met each other across fifty years have walked out of the same gate chanting the same rhythm with a different word in the hole.What it did on Thursday to earn the place in that line in the banner was straightforward enough. Men carrying saffron flags broke through police barricades, reached Gate 4, threw eggs and bricks and shoes over it, and climbed. To climb they needed a foothold, and the foothold available was the university’s emblem, bolted to the ironwork. A section of it snapped off under them. It was then trampled.Jadavpur’s long history of resistanceThe emblem was designed by Nandalal Bose, the artist who supervised the illustrations in the original manuscript of the Constitution. For Jadavpur, he designed a lamp with three flames encircled by lotus petals. Men shouting nationalist slogans used that symbol as a foothold while attempting to enter the campus. The image made its own argument.This is where the saffron camp repeatedly misreads Jadavpur. It calls the university a Left fortress and assumes that removing red flags, breaking union rooms or branding students “Naxal” will remove the source of opposition. But Jadavpur’s resistance is older than the organisations now active on its campus.The university traces its institutional history to the National Council of Education, formed during the Swadeshi movement after the 1905 partition of Bengal. Its purpose was to build education under national control and challenge the authority of the colonial establishment. The institution that later became Jadavpur University was not created to teach obedience. It was created because the government of the day was considered unfit to decide what and how young people should learn.The money came from Subodh Chandra Mullick, from Brajendra Kishore Roy Chowdhury, from Rash Behari Ghosh. Rabindranath Tagore sat on the committee. Aurobindo Ghose became the first principal of the Bengal National College and resigned from the post in 1907 rather than allow the sedition case against him to embarrass the college.Which is to say that Jadavpur’s anti-establishment temper is not a habit picked up from Left student organisations sometime after independence. It predates the Indian republic and it predates organised communist politics in Bengal. It was not added to the institution. It was the reason for the institution.The march against ABVP on Friday (August 21) where the participants are carrying a a long strip of painted cloth with the words “Jadavpur dichche dak, gerua santras nipat jak. (Jadavpur is calling, down with saffron terror)” written on it. Photo: SFI West Bengal Facebook pageThat instinct has outlasted every government it has met. The campus has resisted Congress governments, including during the years of state repression against Naxalite students. It challenged the Left Front when the Left controlled Bengal.In 2014, the Hok Kolorob movement confronted a Trinamool Congress-appointed administration after police entered the campus and assaulted students protesting the handling of a sexual assault complaint. Tens of thousands walked through Kolkata. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was nowhere in it. The administration in question was functioning under a Trinamool government, and the vice-chancellor lost his job.There is a detail in that history which has returned to the gate this week. Nikhil Das, now the president of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) affiliated Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad’s (ABVP) Jadavpur University unit, was among two students arrested in connection with the 2014 molestation allegation. He spent several days in judicial custody. Das now says the case was dismissed and that he received a clean chit in 2018. However, The Telegraph reported that police could not confirm whether he had been acquitted.The point is not to retry an unresolved case through political argument. It is that the ABVP has chosen as its most visible face on this campus a man whose name recalls the incident that triggered Jadavpur’s largest movement in recent memory. Everything the organisation says about the university’s so-called anti-social activity must pass through that history.Its politics is fragmented, argumentative and sometimes vicious. The institution has real failures. Ragging, factional intimidation, collapsing infrastructure and an administration with a long habit of not being present when it is needed. Swapnadeep Kundu, a first-year student, died in 2023 after alleged ragging in a hostel, and no amount of admiration for the university’s dissenting tradition answers for that.The saffron camp, however, keeps drawing the wrong conclusion from all this. It looks at the fragmentation and assumes the space belongs to it. It treats anger about ragging or disorder or administrative failure as an opening for ideological takeover.That assumption has been tested at the ballot twice, and it did not survive either time. The ABVP contested Jadavpur’s union elections for the first time in 2020 and celebrated afterwards, having come a distant second in the engineering faculty, which state BJP leaders offered as evidence of inroads. It did not win a single office-bearer’s post anywhere in the university. Earlier this year, in the elections to the Internal Complaints Committee (ICC), the body that hears sexual harassment complaints on campus, the ABVP finished behind NOTA.Confrontation used to manufacture visibilitySince persuasion has not worked, confrontation has been used to manufacture visibility instead, and the sequence is by now familiar enough to be written down.In February 2016, after Jadavpur students expressed solidarity with the students’ movement in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi, ABVP supporters marched on the university and teachers stood at the gates to keep outsiders out. In May that year an ABVP-backed attempt to screen Vivek Agnihotri’s Buddha in a Traffic Jam produced clashes and another attempted breach. Dilip Ghosh, then the state BJP president, called Jadavpur a hub of anti-nationals.In September 2019, around 200 ABVP supporters, some carrying sticks and bottles, entered the campus and ransacked the Arts students’ union room. Cycles and stalls were set on fire. Ghosh followed the violence with a promise that BJP cadres would conduct a “Balakot-like surgical strike” against what he called the university’s anti-national and communist hubs.Even Swapnadeep’s death was absorbed into this script. Suvendu Adhikari described Jadavpur as a centre of anti-national and anti-social activity and demanded that such forces be driven out. A specific and terrible failure inside a hostel became an indictment of the university’s entire political culture.But these interventions have repeatedly produced the opposite of what was intended. Jadavpur does not respond well to organisations that turn up holding a monopoly on patriotism. It was built out of a refusal to let the state monopolise education. Its students disagree about nearly everything, but an outsider arriving to adjudicate which of them is sufficiently national tends to produce the unity that ordinary campus politics cannot.Every government that has forgotten this has eventually been reminded. The saffron camp keeps trying to show that Jadavpur can be entered and disciplined. Each attempt has only explained why the place has spent more than a century refusing to be.This is why saffron attempt for takeover keeps failing, and why it is likely to fail again.