Disha Students’ Organization – Constitution and Manifesto

Disha Students’ Organization
Manifesto

Foreword

Students and our young friends!

We are living through an unprecedentedly dark period in Indian history. The fascist forces, who believe in the ideology of Hitler and Mussolini, are in power today. Each and every voice of dissent is being crushed. The democratic and civil rights that were won through revolutionary struggles and for which too much blood was spilled, are being mercilessly snatched away from us. The toiling masses are being crushed under the loot and plunder orchestrated by the domestic and foreign monopoly capitalists. Never before has unemployment been this severe in independent India. Rising prices have hit the common working masses and middle classes the hardest. The working masses, who’re already reeling under the pressure of loot, exploitation, unemployment, and inflation, are being instigated by the ruling communal fascist forces to fight amongst themselves on the basis of religion and caste so as to render them incapable of recognizing their true enemy. Having learnt from their German and Italian fascist forefathers, the Indian communal fascists, too, are presenting a false enemy to the distressed and destitute masses. This ‘false enemy’ differs in different situations; it may be all Muslims, all Dalit people, all women, and/or all migrant workers. By creating this false enemy, the real enemy, i.e.., the profit-driven capitalist system and its most reactionary form of political power, fascism, is being hidden from us.
In times like these, we are ardently reminded of these words by the epochal revolutionary figure, Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh, who resides in the hearts of the students and youth of India:

“When a situation of stagnation grips people, they hesitate to make any kind of change. To break this inertia and passivity, it is necessary to create a revolutionary spirit, otherwise an atmosphere of degradation and ruin will prevail among us. The reactionary forces that mislead the people will succeed in taking the people on the wrong path. This stops the progress of man and leads to a deadlock. To transform this situation, it is necessary that the spirit of revolution should be refreshed, so that action can be born in the spirit of humanity.”

Friends! These words of Shaheed-e-Azam have perhaps never been so relevant in Indian history. Then need is now more than ever that we create a revolutionary spirit among the people, break the inertia and passivity. We need to act now, else this society plunges into a situation of degeneration and destruction, glimpses of which are already prevalent today.
What must one conclude from the continued riots, cases of mob lynching, and killings of intellectuals, journalists, and teachers who question the powers-that-be? The barbaric crimes against women have never increased as much as they have after the fascist barbarians came to power. The reason is evident. What else can be expected of the ruling party when so many of its ministers are rapists and miscreants themselves? An atmosphere of general frustration and desperation in the society is bound to give rise to various misanthropic tendencies. The number of heinous anti-Dalit crimes have also increased after the Modi government came to power. This, too, is not surprising in the least, because casteism and Brahminism are important aspects of Sangh Parivar’s fascism. The barbaric military repression of all oppressed nations has also increased rapidly after the fascists came to power. This is because ultra-nationalism, jingoism, and expansionism are also important elements of fascism.
Anyone who has not turned a blind eye towards communalism and sectarianism can clearly see that the current fascist Modi government is anti-worker, anti-youth, anti-student, communal, anti-minority, anti-women, anti-Dalit, anti-tribal, and is a government that blatantly oppresses the oppressed nations. This government works tirelessly in the service of domestic and foreign big monopoly capital and is shamelessly engaged in turning the whole country into fodder for their loot and plunder The “Ram Rajya” and “Hindu Rashtra” of Sangh Parivar, in fact, means that the working masses as well as the students and youth of this country are “free” to get exploited, with sealed mouths and empty stomachs, in the factories and offices of Ambani, Adani, Tata, Birla, and the entire big monopoly capitalist class. This is not a “rule of Hindus”, but the naked and barbaric dictatorship of the big monopoly capitalist class, whose victims are the toiling Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and the toiling Dalit people, tribal people, women, as well as the students and youth. This becomes clear to all after having observed the rule of the Modi government in the last nine years.
In an environment as dark and depressing as this, we, as students and youth, need to recognize our social role. We, as students and youth, are a part of this society. As a matter of fact, a progressive transformation of the society has never taken place without the agitation of students and youth. This is one hundred percent true for all the great revolutions in the history of the modern world and it stands true for today’s era as well. Let us briefly take a look at the socio-economic condition of our country today.

The Present Situation of the Country: Despotic Communal Fascist Dictatorship of the Capitalist Class and the Common Masses

Today, the socio-economic condition of the working class and the common masses of the country is the worst it has been since independence. The situation of unemployment in the country has never been this dire since independence. The level of consumer spending has gone down by 27 per cent in the last eight years. So today, people are spending less on food, clothes, fuel etc. than before. The high levels of poverty and malnutrition are not hidden from anyone. Statistics by the government have never been reliable, but they’ve especially been laughable since the advent of the Modi government. Leaving these laughable statistics aside, the truth is that today, almost half of the country’s population lives either below or close to the poverty line. According to the World Bank, two- third of the country’s population lives on an average income of $2 a day, which is about Rs. 150 per day. Is it possible for a working family with this income to eat nutritious food twice a day? Can they provide education and medical care to their children? If the number of unemployed is added up correctly and not by fraud, it should be somewhere between 27 to 30 crores. According to the National Family Health Survey, about 50 percent of the country’s children are malnourished, while 56 percent of women suffer from anemia and weakness.
The appalling conditions of hunger, malnutrition, child mortality, disability, sexual exploitation, and child labour in the country (there are 110 million child labourers in India according to UNICEF) severely affect children’s mental health, intellectual and physical abilities, which later makes it harder for them to perform decently in their studies.
Since the introduction of the Right to Education Act, education has become a fundamental right for children between the ages of 6 to 14 , but this formal and legal requirement that gets paraded as a fact hides the actual reality. First of all, in the government schools where children are being imparted education under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, do not even have proper arrangements for basic facilities like teachers, toilets, drinking water etc. About 18 percent of the total school going children do not complete their schooling and are forced to drop out due to poverty. This percentage is even higher among Dalits, Muslims, Adivasis, and women. The dropout rate starts increasing as we move up from primary education because of the interference of private schools in secondary and higher school education has increased phenomenally in the last 30 years. At present, 40 percent of the total enrollment in schools in the country is in private schools, even though the share of private schools among all schools in the country is 25 percent. At the same speed with which school education is being handed over to the market, the number of students dropping out of school is also increasing.
As far as higher education is concerned, the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) conducted by the Modi government in 2019 shows the gross enrollment ratio to be 26 percent; a figure that the BJP government has fabricated by including certificate and diploma courses etc. This is plain forgery. As a result, one can only take a guess as to what the actual figures are! In 2012, the enrollment ratio in higher education was 12 percent. It may be considered to remain between 12 to 13 percent today as well. This means that only 12 percent of the total youth who pass the 12th grade actually get the opportunity to avail higher education. Within this, most admissions are that of urban middle class students. That means, a large population of the youth does not have access to higher education. More than 85 percent of the youth never even get to see the doors of higher education campuses. Their share in higher education enrollments is declining. The reason is that the previous Congress governments, and now, in an unprecedented manner, the BJP government, have consistently reduced the expenditure on higher education. As a result, most universities, colleges, and technical educational institutions have been asked to raise their own resources. These universities and colleges now completely work on the market principle and are demanding exorbitant fees from students. The Modi government has taken several steps in the last six years to open up the higher education sector to domestic and foreign capital. The Modi government has outpaced the Congress government in the task of handing over the country’s higher education to the private capitalists. Is, then, the remaining 88 percent of the youth incompetent? Do they not have the right to get higher education?
The truth is that education has been turned into a commodity. Those who have money have access to better schools, colleges, universities, and technical educational institutions. Those who do not have money remain uneducated or drop out of school and join the ranks of unskilled or semi-skilled workers, At the most, they get educated from ITIs or polytechnic colleges and are forced to join the ranks of skilled workers. Although this, too, is now difficult for many. Even if they get employment, there is a 90% chance of them being forced to engage in back-breaking work for over 12 hours per day under a capitalist in the form of daily wage, contract, or casual work. It is no coincidence that 94 percent of India’s 550 to 600 million urban and rural workers are contract, daily wage and casual workers whose working hours exceed 10 hours in more than 90 percent of the cases. At present, given the condition of unemployment in our country, young people with graduate and postgraduate degrees are forced to wait in queues at labour chowks, work on assembly lines and as porters and construction workers.
The pro-capital policies of the fascist Modi government are making this situation worse. The fascist forces are continuously trying to lead the growing discontent and anger among the masses in a wrong direction and are trying to make them fight amongst themselves in the name of religion, caste, language, and region. Dozens of riots, big and small, have been instigated by the Sangh Parivar and the BJP in the country and this has especially been true for the last 30-35 years. Prominent among these were the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the subsequent riots and the 2002 state-sponsored riots and genocide in Gujarat. Apart from these, several riots have been carried out by the Sangh Parivar on a lesser scale. Examples of this are the incidents of Bhagalpur and Muzaffarnagar as well as the recent incident in Delhi. In times of crises, the petty-bourgeoisie that faces insecurity and uncertainty as well as the lumpen proletariat which suffers from purposelessness and dehumanization are especially swayed by communal frenzy because they lack the analysis required to identify their true enemies. In such a situation, the reactionary fascist forces succeed in making them believe in an imaginary enemy and in the dream of a charismatic dictator who will solve all their problems. With the economic crisis, poverty, unemployment, and inflation having become uncontrollable under the Modi regime, the Sangh Parivar’s riot machinery has started working overtime. Godi media has been constructing rumors, lies, and superstitions and the petty bourgeoisie as well as the toiling masses are being entrapped in non-issues and made to fight on the basis of religion, caste, and region. However, this cannot go on indefinitely. Today, students and youth have awakened and are raising their voice for the right to education and employment. During a time such as this, there is a dire need for a correct line and leadership in the student movement as well. We cannot hope to get rid of the present fascist regime merely on the basis of spontaneous movements.
This is indisputably the darkest period in Indian history. However, it is to be noted that for the toiling masses, the country before the advent of the Modi government wasn’t a paradise either. We, as students and youth, should be aware of the state that came into existence post-independence; the path of development that it followed, its character, and the effects of its rule on the people of this country.

Seventy Years of Independence or Destruction of the Common Working Masses

“What is the purpose of the Congress? I have said that the present movement will end either in some compromise or in complete failure.
“I have said this because in my opinion at present the real revolutionary forces are not in the fray. This struggle is being waged on the strength of middle class shopkeepers and a few capitalists. Both these classes, especially the capitalists, cannot dare to endanger their property or possessions. The real revolutionary forces are in the villages and factories – the farmers and the workers. But our ‘bourgeois’ leaders do not have the courage to take them along, nor can they have such courage. Once these sleeping lions wake up from their deep slumber, they are not going to stop even after the goals of our leaders are fulfilled.
“What difference does it make to them (the public) if Sir Purushottam Das Thakur Das is the head of the Government of India instead of Lord Reading? What difference will it make to a farmer if Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru comes in place of Lord Irwin?
– Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh (‘Draft Manifesto of Revolutionary Program’)

In 1947, political independence was achieved in the form of a compromise as a result of the national movement under the leader- ship of the Congress. Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh had said that Congress is the party of the capitalist class of the country and even if political freedom is gained under its leadership, the only result will be that the white British will leave and in their place, ‘brown British’ will take charge; Lord Irwin And Lord Reading will leave, and in their place, Seth Purushottam Das, Thakur Das, and Tej Bahadur Sapru will sit on the throne. This prediction of Bhagat Singh proved correct within a few decades of independence. Within a year of independence, a grand saga of scams and scandals began in independent India with the Jeep Scandal of 1948, followed by the Mundhra scandal, the Cycles import scam in the 1950s, the Teja Loan scandal in the 1960s, and the Kalinga Tubes scandal in the 1960s. Scams like Nagarwala scandal, Maruti scandal etc. took place in the 1970s. That is to say, the capitalist class of India, true to its nature, was not satisfied with only legal loot and plunder but was also involved in illegal loot through frauds and foul play. By the time the three decades of independence were over, massacres like Belchi, Bailadila and Pantnagar had taken place and by the end of the fourth decade, the Hashimpura massacre had taken place. State-sponsored terrorism and violence continued unabated before and after this. During the Naxalbari revolt, thousands of youths were killed in West Bengal alone. In terms of state repression, too, the Indian bourgeoisie was in no way behind its colonial ancestors.
Even before independence, the capitalist class of India had deter- mined the trajectory of the capitalist development of India that was to take place after independence. The ‘Bombay Plan’ of 1944, also known as the ‘Tata-Birla Plan,’ clearly mentioned that for post-independence capitalist development, it is necessary that an entire structure of public sector be erected and that infrastructural or basic industries be placed under the public sector. The reason was that India’s capitalist class neither wanted to invest in these infrastructural sectors (since returns from it take a long time) nor had the capacity to do so. According to this plan, when the capitalist class of India eventually stood on its feet, these public undertakings were to be handed over to the capitalists. India’s capitalist class could not have built the entire infrastructure required for capitalist development on its own. That is why the slogan of ‘socialism’ was raised at the time. Under this slogan, in the nearly two and a half decades after independence, public savings were pooled through the nationalization of banks and the nationalization of the post and postal department. Along with this, insurance, railways, mines, and quarries were nationalized. On the basis of this, small as well as large savings of the people of the country were collected. On the one hand, infrastructure was built, within which the capitalist class was given opportunities to loot and plunder by means of contracts and commissions, and on the other, huge loans were given to big capitalists like Tata and Birla. These loans were waived off by Finance Minister P. Chidambaram during the first term of the United Progressive Alliance government. All of this was happening in a country where poor farmers and semi-proletariats commit suicides due to loans taken from usurers and students and youth kill themselves on account of non-payment of educational loans. The loans of common people are never forgiven and yet loans taken by corporate houses continue to be waived off!
To conclude, the capitalist class of India was able to stand on its feet through loans that they were granted from the hard-earned money of the people. Once the capitalist class became self-sufficient after having looted the savings of the working masses of the country, discussions on privatization and liberalization started from the mid-1980s and it began to be implemented to some extent during the Prime Ministership of Indira Gandhi and then the Prime Ministership of Rajiv Gandhi. However, it was during the Prime Ministership of Narasimha Rao and under the Finance Ministry of our “gentlemanly” intellectual Manmohan Singh, whom liberals have been remembering with sentimental fondness in the moonless night of the Modi era, that the neoliberal policies were inaugurated at full throttle and with much fanfare! All public sector undertakings in the country that were built with the hard-earned money of the people are since then being sold off at throw-away prices to the Adanis and the Ambanis.
This process was indeed set off by the Congress, however, it was the BJP which gave it impetus and carried forward this development with much more rapidity. It was under Vajpayee’s rule that the first ever privatization ministry was formed (respectfully known as the ‘Ministry of Disinvestment’) and the current regime of Narendra Modi has left everyone else far behind as far as this matter is concerned. Never has the Indian state identified with corporate interests so brazenly and shamelessly. This is not surprising; one of the characteristics of fascism is corporatism which means the merging of corporate interests with the state. However, the most important thing is that today, the country’s parliamentary leftists, Keynesians, reformists, adherents of NGO politics who engage in chest-beating when it comes to privatization and remember the ‘socialism’ of Nehru’s era with tears in their eyes, cry themselves hoarse on the dissolution of the Planning Commission, either do not understand or deliberately do not want to understand that all these misdeeds were not deviations from a ‘great plan’, but were part of the execution of that ‘great plan’, which the capitalist class of India had already formulated before independence in 1944 under the leadership of the likes of Tata and Birla. Understanding this trajectory of the history of Indian capitalism is also necessary to understand the different policies adopted by the ruling class on education in our country, which we will address in a bit.
The Indian bourgeois state that came into existence after independence proved to be no less oppressive and murderous than the British colonial rule. By the end of the 1960s, the dreams of prosperity that they lured people with after independence were also beginning to crumble. The reality of Nehruvian ‘socialism’ was beginning to unfold. Hopes were being shattered, dreams were being crushed. During this period, many agitations and revolts broke out in the country, which gave expression to the disillusionment of the working masses, peasants, workers, students, and youth.
The revolutionary peasant uprising of Naxalbari, which started in 1967, challenged the capitalist system, but since the leading forces of this movement did not succeed in undertaking the correct analysis of the country’s situation and fell prey to the deviation of revolutionary terrorism and adventurism, this revolt could not give the revolutionary movement the orientation it needed, although thousands of revolutionary youth, students, and activists sacrificed their lives for it. During this and immediately after this, a powerful youth and students’ movement also emerged in the country. However, a reformist leadership in the form of Jayaprakash Narayan succeeded in circumscribing that movement within an ambit which never allowed it to become a meaningful challenge to the system. Besides this, the 1970s also saw the rise of a powerful labour movement in the country, the culmination of which was the railway workers’ strike of 1974, which shook the entire system. But even here, the lack of political leadership equipped with an efficient and correct line, did not allow it to become a challenge to the entire system.
However, in this period of upheaval, the contradictions among the capitalist ruling classes, too, were deepening. The ruling Congress Party and Indira Gandhi’s government imposed Emergency on 26 June, 1975 to deal with the political crisis of the bourgeoisie. This act was carried out not by violating the constitution, but by staying within the ambit of the constitution. This also tells a lot about the character of the constitution of our country. This is not surprising at all, because the constitution was made by the Constituent Assembly which was elected not on the basis of universal suffrage but by only 11.3 percent of the people who come from the propertied classes; the less one speaks of the credibility of such a constitution, the better.
Moving further, throughout the period of the Emergency, civil and democratic rights were suspended in the country, the freedom of press was curtailed, all the rights of resistance of the workers and the common people were taken away, and many of the leaders of the opposition within bourgeois politics were jailed as well so as to prevent them from coming to power by capitalizing on the fierce anger and discontent within the people of the country.
But in the elections held after the end of the Emergency, the Indira Gandhi-led Congress was defeated and the Janata Party came to power. It was a reactionary right-wing government. The Janata Party was a strange hodgepodge built on a common anti-Congress program, however, this was the most dangerous thing done by the socialist leaders of this country who handed out an opportunity to the communal fascist Sangh Parivar who had been relegated to the margins of the mainstream bourgeois politics since Gandhi’s assassination. This act was first carried out by Lohia in his experiment of the Sanyukt Vidhayak Dal in the 1960s and then the Janata Party took it forward. It is worth mentioning that in this period, too, the parliamentary Leftists of India were accomplices in this crime. Even later, during the government of V.P. Singh, their oblique co-operation in the rise of communal fascists cannot be ignored. The reason was that like every reformist and Social-Democrat, the parliamentary Left underestimated the danger of fascism. However, first through Lohia’s experiment of Sanvid government and then with the help of Jayaprakash Narayan, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its electoral front once again entered mainstream bourgeois politics. It is also necessary to remember that even Jawaharlal Nehru, by giving a free hand to the forces of the Sangh Parivar for engaging in anti-communism and anti-China propaganda during the Indo-China war, had some role to play in this crime. With the formation of the Janata Party government after the Emergency, the return of the Sangh Parivar to the mainstream was complete. This also exposed the real character of the “socialists” of our country to a great extent.

The Rise of Fascist Social Movement in India

“Fascism can be combated as capitalism alone, as the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive, and most treacherous form of capitalism.”
– Bertolt Brecht

After this, in 1980, the Sangh Parivar reorganized its electoral front in the form of the Bharatiya Janata Party and then began preparations to carry forward the task that had been going on for 55 years since its formation: this task was to build a reactionary social movement of the lower middle class and the middle class in order to serve the big capitalists of India. This movement served the interests of the big capitalists of the country, but the ranks of this fascist social movement comprised of mobs of petty bourgeois youth fed up with social and economic uncertainty. Such a movement requires an imaginary enemy, which the Sangh Parivar provided in the form of Muslims and Dalits. Right since 1925 and especially after independence till 1980, the Sangh Parivar established a wide network of its shakhas, built its own institutions ranging from schools to hospitals, infiltrated its people into various bodies of state power such as army, bureaucracy, judiciary, etc. However, till 1980, a broad reactionary social movement could not gather behind the Sangh Parivar.
The economic crisis that commenced in the 1970s and the crisis that arose with the Indian public sector capitalism reaching its saturation point in the 1980s created an atmosphere of acute economic insecurity and uncertainty in the society. This insecurity and uncertainty prepared the ground for reaction among the petty bourgeois classes. The Sangh Parivar and the BJP took advantage of the same. The Ram Janmabhoomi movement gave an organized fascist expression to this set of scattered petty bourgeois reactions. A frenzied fascist mob was created and organized on the basis of religion and culture and was told that the establishment of “Hindu Rashtra” and “Ram Rajya” was the solution to all its problems and Muslims were paraded as the enemy and held responsible for all problems.
During this, Indira Gandhi, first, and then Rajiv Gandhi, helped the Sangh Parivar even more by trying to appease the Hindu population through the “soft saffron” line. In addition, the Congress government in the 1980s, through its policies, gave rise to the Sikh religious fundamentalist, right-wing reactionary Bhindranwale, advantage of which was taken by the Sangh Parivar to strengthen its communal fascist politics across the country. The different factions of right-wing reactionary politics always help each other to flourish. Both require an imaginary enemy and both are based on identitarianism. The characteristic feature of identity politics is that one type of identity politics always strengthens other types of identity politics. The Khalistani religious fundamentalist right-wing reactionary politics and the Hindutva communal fascist politics of the Sangh Parivar also helped each other to thrive and flourish in the 1980s. The Congress government was also responsible for this, which gave rise to Bhindranwale for its political interests and who later proved to be a Frankenstein’s monster.
It is also necessary to mention here that the Social-Democrats of India, i.e., the parliamentary Left also played an important role in the rise of communal fascism in India. Everywhere in the world, the poisonous mushroom of fascism grows on the ruins and debris of the working class movement. India has had a long history of a militant trade union movement. However, its revisionist-reformist leadership never allowed it to go beyond the boundaries of economism and trade unionism. In a situation where the capitalist system is in crisis, i.e., when there is a feeling of discontent and rebellion among the broad cross-sections of the working class and when the petty bourgeois classes are living in desperate rage and blind reaction owing to the economic and social insecurity and uncertainty of their lives, two possibilities exist: the progressive potential, i.e., the establishment of a higher socio-economic order through a revolutionary transformation, and the reactionary potential; the emergence of a social reactionary movement out of the blind reaction of the petty bourgeoisie, which serves the capitalist system. The first possibility can succeed only when the working class is freed from the shackles of economism and trade unionism and when they are educated, trained, mobilized, and organized to wage a struggle based on politics, that is to say, taking the struggle beyond the question of wages and allowances to the question of state power. However, the parliamentary Leftists in India never allowed the working class movement to go beyond the question of wages and allowances and consequently, the working class was politically disarmed. The communal fascist forces have taken advantage of this since the 1970s in India, and have managed to strengthen its reactionary social movement by providing the blind reaction of the petty bourgeoisie, which was already fed up with socio-economic uncertainty, with a false enemy, mainly in the form of Muslims, Dalit people, and Communists. The vicious cycle of economism and trade unionism has harmed the politically disarmed working class and the toiling masses in the worst possible manner and its primary beneficiaries have been the big capitalist class of the country. The main accomplices in this crime were the reformist, revisionist, social-democratic parliamentary leftists of India, who never prepared the working class to wage a militant struggle against fascism and instead tied them to reformism as well as bourgeois legalism and parliamentarianism, even in situations where a potential for the former was strongly present.
In this manner, the fascist movement in India, riding on a wave of uncertainty, insecurity, and reactions born out of the crisis of the capitalist system, progressed forward. Its first major culmination came in the form of the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December, 1992 and then in 1998 in the form of the formation of the Vajpayee government. In the nearly six years of the Vajpayee government’s tenure, the BJP clearly demonstrated whose interests it really serves. From being an ardent advocate of “Swadeshi,” the BJP started to stir up a storm of privatization and unprecedented loot and plunder by domestic and foreign capital.
The policies of privatization and liberalization, though started by the Narasimha Rao government, could not have been implemented at such a rapid pace if not for the BJP government. The public sector undertakings built with the hard earned money of the people were slowly being sold to the capitalists at throw-away prices. For the first time in the history of India, the Ministry of Disinvestment was formed under the leadership of Arun Shourie, whose job was to transfer public wealth into the hands of capitalists. The privatization of Maruti and that of all Navratna companies was carried out during this period. Along with this, steps were taken to communalize the social psychology of the country’s populace, including revising the syllabus, appointing imbecile and communal people from the Sangh in all educational and research institutions etc. It should not be forgotten that the most barbaric state-sponsored riots and genocide in Indian history also took place in Gujarat during this period, amidst which Atal Bihari Vajpayee resorted to the gimmick of advising Narendra Modi to follow “Rajdharma”.Vajpayee was the soft mask of the Sangh and a statement such as this was necessary to preserve the effectiveness of that soft mask. However, in reality, no action was taken against the Modi government and it was given a free hand to ghettoize Muslims in Gujarat.
Owing to unprecedented inflation and unemployment resulting from precisely these economic policies of the BJP government, the Vajpayee government was defeated in the 2004 Loksabha elections. As a result, the United Progressive Alliance government led by the Congress came into existence. The parliamentary left parties were also a part of this. The reason for this was that, in view of the growing discontent and anger in the society at the time, the capitalist class of India needed to display some form of welfarism at least ostensibly. In the first term of the UPA government, with the special initiative of the parliamentary leftists and reformists, some reformist welfare laws were passed as Band-Aid solutions so they could cure at least some of the discontent that prevailed among the masses. Among these, the Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the Social Security Act, and the Right to Information Act were prominent. It is obvious that their aim was not to decisively solve the problems of employment, social security, or affirm the right to information, but to create a smokescreen so that the anger growing among the people could be pacified for a while. We know that these laws have ultimately done nothing for the people of this country. Even before the Modi government came to power in 2014, the task of making these laws ineffective and rendering their implementation meaningless had started.
In 2009, the UPA was again victorious, and in the second term, the policies of privatization and liberalization which were earlier implemented with some restraint, were now being implemented full-throttle. Meanwhile, the global recession of 2008 began. By 2011, it started affecting the Indian economy as well and by 2012-13 the crisis of the declining rate of profit was proving to be horrible for the Indian capitalist class as well. Many people mistook the defeat of the BJP in the 2004 and 2009 elections as the decisive defeat of fascism. However, only those who know nothing about the real nature and character of fascism believed this. Capitalist crises always prepare the ground for reaction as well as revolution. If the reactionary political forces are more organized and ideologically more prepared, they succeed in engendering a petty bourgeois reaction in the crisis-ridden capitalist society and this reaction may even take the form of an organized reactionary fascist social movement. If the revolutionary forces and leadership are ideologically weak and politically scattered, then its possibility further increases. After the crisis of 2008 and its devastating impact on the Indian economy by 2011-12, the socio-economic and political ground in which the capitalist class takes refuge in fascist reaction, had already been prepared in India.
With the deepening of the crisis, the Indian capitalist class, for their own interests and in order to increase the profit rates, sought to take away all the legal rights enjoyed by the working masses. It needed a free hand to exploit the labour power of the working masses of the country and had to deal with hurdles like labour laws, environmental laws, land acquisition act, laws pertaining to acquire natural resources, industrial laws, taxation system etc. To change all this would mean inviting anger and resistance from the masses of workers, toiling people and the poor population. That is why it needed the so-called “strong leadership”. It saw this “strong leadership” in the form of the fascist Sangh Parivar and Narendra Modi, who could implement all these policies with an iron hand and at the same time break the resistance of the people through riots, communalism, casteism etc. That is precisely why the capitalist class spent more than 10 thousand crore rupees on Modi’s electoral campaign and that is why he was presented as a “strong leader”, a “decisive leader”, an “anti-corruption leader”, a “clean leader” who will solve all the problems; someone who will teach a “lesson” to Pakistan and China and will establish a “Ram Rajya”. Media institutions were engaged in building a favourable opinion of Modi as well, because they, too, are owned by corporate houses. People believed that Modi’s “strength” was meant for them because they were vulnerable to the onslaught of the bourgeois propaganda machinery and had no access to the scientific analysis needed to understand the truth. The revolutionaries failed to take this truth to them in any meaningful way. As a result, Modi came to power with an absolute majority and thus began the Indian people’s nightmare which still continues and gets uglier and more horrible with each passing day.
The shamelessness and nakedness with which the Modi government has served India’s corporate capitalist class is unprecedented. The pace at which the Modi government has implemented the policies of privatization and liberalization has no precedent in the history of independent India. The privatization of railways, ONGC, Air India, BSNL, doing away with all kinds of regulation for domestic and foreign capital in the banking and insurance sector, unhindered freedom to the capitalists from implementing labour laws, environmental laws and all other regulatory industrial laws, slowly snatching away the rights of the working class to organize and unionize; the Modi government has undertaken these tasks brazenly and quite indiscriminately. With just as much obscenity, the Modi government has carried out the task of hiding these pro-capitalist measures from the toiling masses through the propaganda of lies, rumors, and sectarianism by the Godi media. Because of these policies of the Modi government, 120 million jobs were lost during its tenure. Even before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, 40 million jobs had been lost. The mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown imposed in a hurried, unprepared, anti-people manner led to an unprecedented collapse of the informal sector economy and the loss of nearly 80 million jobs. In September 2020, according to the data of NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau), 28 students committed suicide every day in India. In 2019, 42,480 poor peasants and daily wage labourers committed suicide. These numbers would have certainly increased in 2020. The reason for this horrifying scenario is the situation created by the Modi government, first through demonetization, then GST, and then an absolutely unplanned lockdown. Meanwhile, even during this, the Modi government continued to offer gifts to the Ambanis and the Adanis from the government exchequer, exempting them from all kinds of legal hurdles in looting the workers. During the lockdown, efforts were made by all the state governments to legally increase the working hours from 10 to 12 and to legally reduce the number of workers, with the Modi government and the BJP state governments being at the forefront in this case as well. There is a freeze on recruitment in all central departments and on the recruitment of teachers in universities. The unemployed are being looted by being sold examination forms for exams that never get conducted. On the slim chance that they do get conducted, the results are left unannounced, and even if they somehow do get announced, no recruitments take place. Three new ordinances have been brought in the agricultural sector, which aim to completely open the agricultural sector to the loot and plunder of domestic and foreign big capital. To sum it up, in only six years, the Modi government has carried out each and every task, for which the Indian big bourgeoisie had given it power. In this process, the Modi government has also undertaken the task of suppressing every movement, protest, and question with fascist ruthlessness.
The way in which the Modi government has systematically destroyed from within, the instruments of bourgeois state power and the institutions of bourgeois democracy, as well as established fascist hegemony over them, is a particular example in the case of fascist experiments in the whole world. The fascist infiltration in the apparatus of the state power had been going on for the last seventy years, however, in the last one decade, the results of this protracted work have come to the fore very rapidly. What can the people of the country expect from the judiciary today? Not a thing! The judiciary is openly passing judgments in favor of fascists by setting aside all bourgeois constitutional principles. Can anything be expected from the media? The entire corporate media is openly engaged in propagating communalism, sectarianism, and superstition in the entire society, dancing to the tune of fascists, and to call this journalism would be an insult to all its standards and principles. We have been witnessing a systematic fascization of the army, police, and armed forces in every communal riot in the last 40 years. The condition of bureaucracy is no different either and it can be seen that fascist infiltration has existed within in it since a long time. In a nutshell, fascists have seized the entire state machinery and are in control of it. There is no remedy or recourse available anywhere. Unlike the Nazi and Italian fascist rise, the process of the fascist rise in India did not happen in a few years but over several decades. It has had a long gestation period, in which it has adopted the strategy of a long war of position, rather than a war of movement. With the formation of Modi’s government, we are witnessing a new phase of the completion of fascist rise in India. Since the entire state machinery is in the hands of Modi-Shah’s fascist government, pro-capitalist policies are being implemented blatantly at an unprecedented speed, communal riots and conflicts are being instigated, and the people are being unashamedly divided through the use of media; communalism, sectarianism, and casteism are being publicly promoted without any reserve and every voice of resistance is being brutally crushed.

However, despite all this, the Modi government is failing to suppress the resistance of the people. On the contrary, with the disappearance of all kinds of parliamentary and legal opposition and platforms, as well as the rising unemployment and growing socio-economic insecurity and uncertainty, peoples’ resistance, too, is on the rise. However, these resistances, though militant, are still only spontaneous and scattered. They need a clear political leadership and program, without which they can deviate, fail, and even assume reactionary forms. Therefore, on the one hand, while these spontaneous youth and workers’ resistance are welcome, on the other hand, they have their limitations, and transcending these limitations requires building a clear-cut political program and leadership.
In our view, there shouldn’t be any need to explain that the revolutionary students and youth of India cannot expect anything from the bourgeois electoralist parties, including the parliamentary Left, in order to get rid of this “national” nightmare of the Modi era. There is only one way to free oneself of this: to build a countrywide revolutionary mass movement and to build a revolutionary political leadership and program and in this the students and youth, too, will have to understand their central important role. One cannot fight against fascism without fighting against capitalism.
But as students, first of all, we must fight to build a revolutionary student-youth movement within the campuses and also outside the campuses on student-youth issues. We must link this entire struggle with the anti-capitalist and anti-fascist struggle at the national level. To determine a clear orientation of such a student-youth movement, we ought to take a look at the changing education policies during different phases of development of Indian capitalism as well.

The Changing Education Policy of the Ruling Class: A Reflection of the Different Phases of Development of Indian Capitalism

The development of the education policy of the Indian ruling class can be seen and studied through the lens of the different stages of the trajectory of development of Indian capitalism. In 1948, the University Education Commission was formed under the chairmanship of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. For secondary education, the Mudaliar Commission was first constituted in 1952 and then in 1964, the Kothari Commission was formed. The National Education Policy was formulated in 1968 on the basis of the recommendations of the Kothari Commission. After this, in 1979, another National Education Policy draft was presented. These were some of the major documents presented on the issue of education in the phase of public sector capitalism.
On a careful reading of these documents, it becomes evident that the ruling class of India had been determining the education policy according to its needs in the phase of public sector capitalism. As far as university education was concerned, the emphasis was on imparting a liberal, bourgeois education and on creating an intellectual workforce for the apparatus of the state. The emphasis with respect to school education was on creating a skilled workforce. Although most of these commissions’ recommendations and documents pertaining to education policy promised to spend 6 percent of GDP on education, the Indian state never fulfilled that promise. On the central level, this expenditure has reduced to around 1% and even after considering the combined expenditure of all state governments, it remains between 3.5-4%. All these policy documents spoke of bridging the gap between the rich and poor in education, implementing uniform schooling etc., but all of it proved to be a sham. To implement the uniform school system, there was a need to end the private school system, but all the governments worked to instead increase their influence. Government schools served to create a skilled and semi-skilled intellectual and manual workforce from among the children of the poor (the ones who had access to schooling), the lower middle and middle classes, while private schools catered to the affluent and upper classes so as to lay the ground for their children to be future bureaucrats, technocrats etc. In the constitution that came into force after independence, the policy-directive principles mentioned that school education should be made free and compulsory for children of 0 to 14 years within ten years of the implementation of the constitution. This was followed by the 86th amendment which added 21A to section 21. This changed the age group from 6 to 14, which meant that the state completely abandoned its formal promise of care and education for children in the early stages of childhood. All of us are however aware that Directive Principles have no meaning as they are not legally binding on the government. That is why, they are just a deception and hoax for the masses, no matter the various merits mentioned in them.
In the same period, engineering colleges and medical colleges were set up to assemble a class of scientists, technologists, teachers, trainers, doctors etc. for the ruling class through scientific and high technological education. Along with this, technical educational institutions were created for imparting technical education and to build a skilled manual workforce. These needs and requirements of the ruling class are clearly mentioned in the documents related to the education policy of this era. At the same time, these documents also emphasized on the creation of a “national consciousness”, which was to act as a counterweight to the class consciousness developing due to the sharpening class contradictions in the country. The place of the toiling population in this “nation” was gradually becoming clear.
To sum up, all the documents pertaining to education policy that came out just before the beginning of the 1980s were set to meet the needs of the Indian capitalist class at the time, which were as follows: creation of an educated workforce from the middle and upper middle classes in order operate the state apparatus, creation of a skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled but literate mental and manual workforce for state-owned capitalist enterprises and private capitalist enterprises, creation of scientists and experts through technological teaching-training institutions. The path of capitalist development that the Indian capitalist class had taken required these things to be fulfilled.
The education policy of 1986 reflected the changing needs of the Indian ruling class since the 1980s. This period was the saturation point of public sector capitalism. Now, private capitalism had begun to suffocate within the regulatory framework of the public sector. It needed a free hand to exploit and plunder labour and nature. These aspirations were expressed by Rajiv Gandhi, who at that time spoke about ending the ‘inspector raj-quota raj’, making business easy, the ‘computer era’ etc. In 1986, the Rajiv Gandhi government came out with the New Education Policy which presented a framework for the initiation of privatization in the education sector.
The same framework was presented in a more evolved form by the education policy of 1992, and by this time, the privatization and liberalization of the economy had already begun openly. The process of privatization in education continued to progress steadily during the Congress government and the United Front government, but it gained real momentum during the tenure of the Vajpayee government.
This was followed by the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government, with Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the Prime Minister. It was during this period that the Vajpayee government introduced a National Curriculum Framework in 2000. The basis of this document was the “Birla Ambani Report” presented by Kumar Mangalam Birla and Mukesh Ambani on education. This report clearly says that the government should lay emphasis on preparing workers for industry through education, create an environment of competition by commercializing education, set up private universities, privatize higher education and charge the education fees entirely from students. The National Curriculum Framework of 2000 was based on this report. This document introduced the concept of ‘value based education’ apart from communalizing education in the name of “nationalism”. According to this, children should be given education according to their class. In other words, technical education like ITI, Polytechnic etc., is to be imparted to the children of the poor and lower middle class and the courses of engineering, medical, management, B.A., M.A. as well as research are to be reserved for the children of the rich and upper middle class. In this document, it was said that there is no ‘signaling effect’ of graduate and postgraduate degrees, that is, they do not invite employment, and therefore, the presence of a large scale graduate-postgraduate population in the society will create a social crisis. Obviously, the Indian capitalist class, which had taken long strides in the policies of privatization-liberalization-globalization, now wanted to withdraw from the verbal promise of providing employment to the large student and youth population and the argument that it is not the job of the government to provide education and employment, was repeatedly being planted in the minds of the people. Apart from this, the task of a planned and systematic communalization of education had started during Vajpayee’s prime ministership as well. The revision of textbooks, propagation of jingoism and communalism in the same, opening up astrology departments in universities, establishing myths related to the construction of airplanes, atom bombs etc. in the Vedic period etc. happened systematically during this period.
In 2004, due to severe inflation and unemployment and the changing needs of the Indian capitalist class, the BJP-led NDA government was defeated in the Lok Sabha elections and replaced by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, whose first term saw enthusiastic participation by India’s parliamentary Left. The privatization of education continued during the United Progressive Alliance government from 2004 to 2014, however the process of communalization of the curriculum at the central level was halted during this period. A 2009 memo from the Ministry of Human Resource Development explicitly advocated disinvestment in education. In this, a huge cut of 15 percent in the funding being received by the universities was considered. Universities were instructed to raise their own funds for their libraries, laboratories, and infrastructure and conduct fewer seminars etc., and were told not to rely on the government for funds. Having any kind of expectation from the government had evidently become the sole prerogative of the Ambanis, Adanis, Tatas, and Birlas etc. This can be discerned from the fact that between 1993-94 and 2003-04, the real expenditure per student decreased by 21 per cent. Needless to say, it has been constantly decreasing post this period as well. The government expenditure on higher education is not even 0.5 per cent of GDP.
The United Progressive Alliance government won a lot of accolades by bringing in the Right to Education Act, which made school education compulsory and free for children between the ages of 6 and 14. However, we are all aware of the reality of the quality of education and the facilities being provided in government schools under this act. It is a well- known fact that on a large scale, children are sent to schools only for mid-day meals under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and within that, news citing numerous scams, the serving of rotten food, the slow removal of nutritious food such as eggs, milk, and porridge from the list of food items etc. has come to the fore several times. Moreover, the provision of making school education free only up to 14 years shows that the ruling classes need only a literate semi-skilled workforce from the common poor masses. For the children of the rich, expensive private schools exist that provide excellent education in the fields of swimming, horse riding, arts, science etc. But the task of the children of the poor is reduced to getting ready to join the ranks of literate wage slaves for the capitalists! As a matter of fact, this Right to Education Act makes a mockery of the real right to education. There is no provision for government spending on education, it promotes class-based hierarchy of education in schools and colleges, does not speak about equal education for all, provides no meaningful provision to improve government schools, and does not even mention regulation of fees in private schools. A reservation of 25% of the seats for poor children is not nearly enough for the education of working class children. This act also gives complete freedom to contractualize teaching positions. This law is merely a deception for the common working population. The fact is that the education policy implemented by the bourgeoisie in independent India has always promoted a class-based hierarchy in education to meet the various needs of the ruling classes, and in the past three decades, especially, it has laid total emphasis on the commercialization of education. The judiciary of the country has also lent complete support to this task. To understand this, one need only skim through the Mohini Jain Judgment, Unni Krishnan Judgment, and the T.M.A. Pai judgement.
With the global economic crisis of 2008 and its clear-cut impact on the Indian economy by 2011, the Indian ruling class began to feel the need for a fascist government. There was a huge discontent among the masses against rising unemployment, poverty, inflation, and scams in the country. It was in these conditions that the BJP, under the leadership of Narendra Modi, emerged victorious in the 2014 elections with the tremendous help of corporate houses.
After the coming of the Modi government, the reduction in the education budget and the pace of privatization and liberalization has increased even further. Scholarships for students, stipends for Dalit students etc. have been discontinued, research grants have been cut drastically, no stone has been left unturned in opening the doors of the education sector for domestic and foreign capital; this process reached its culmination with the introduction of the ‘Foreign Universities Bill’ etc. Teachers are being retrenched, vacant posts are not being filled and the only recruitments that are taking place are that of contract and guest teachers. In the education sector, the process of informalization is continuing in its own form. Students are being forced to resort to correspondence courses due to rising fees and the rise of fees is such that a sizable population has been left out of these correspondence courses as well. A large population of the youth has given up hoping for a regular, good quality university education.
With the state having taken a step back from the responsibility of education, the capitalist class has set up a whole system to loot the students and youth who hail from humble families through the education market, which take the form of private coaching institutes, private hostels, online education etc. This is a terrible apparatus to loot the students and youth and to ensure millions and billions in profits for the capitalist class.
Apart from this, the task of communalization of education is also being carried forward rapidly. The task of revising school text- books, changing university curriculum etc. has been continuously going on. The filling of right-wing and communal Sanghi “intellectuals” in all the faculties and the appointment of Sanghis in almost all the central research institutes has also happened on an unprecedented scale during this period. The appointment of conservative Sanghis to leadership positions in schools, colleges, universities, and research institutes should not come as a surprise in a country where open forgery takes place in the submission of degrees of the Prime Minister, the Education Minister, as well as several MLAs and MPs.
The New Education Policy of the Modi government is a document to implement this policy of privatization, liberalization, and fascization at an even faster pace. The main slogan of this New Education Policy is to end the responsibility and accountability of the government in the field of education, open its gates to private capitalists, reduce the seats, increase the fees, and clear the way for communalization of education. It is a document of centralization at the level of curriculum setting and the complete elimination of regulation by the government in all other matters.The New Education Policy, 2020 of the Modi government advocates ending the affiliation of colleges with universities. According to this, all universities and colleges will be made fully autonomous and work under a governing body. This governing body will not be elected; two-thirds of its members will be private funders, government representatives, and “people-oriented intellectuals” from the society.
These “people-oriented intellectuals” will obviously be elected by the government’s Education Commission and there shouldn’t be any doubt in the fact that this governing body, in the name of “people-oriented intellectuals”, will be filled with communal fascists. The decisions regarding the curriculum and the way it is supposed to be taught will evidently be decided by the lords and masters of the “Hindu Rashtra” who, after all, dance to the tune of the Ambanis and Adanis.
Besides, the government will make a huge disinvestment in education, all colleges and universities will be asked to raise their own funding, which simply means that all colleges and universities will come under the grip of private capitalists and the commercialization of education will increase to an unprecedented extent. The miniscule number of sons and daughters from common families that do manage to reach campuses today will be barred from it as well. For them, the only way left would be to clear the 10th and the 12th grades, or the ITI or polytechnic courses, at the most, and become a skilled worker only to get exploited as a wage slave in the factories of the rulers of “Hindu Rashtra”, i.e., the Ambanis and the Adanis. The only other choice would be to live on the starvation line by joining the ‘reserve army’ of the unemployed.
The government has decided to end its complete control over the recruitment of teachers and their service contracts, which would mean that the private capitalists will get to decide recruitment policies. This would further mean that educated youth, who have received research degrees and passed qualifying examinations like the NET, will now be hired on contract and daily wages. There are many other provisions in the New Education Policy which completely privatize the education sector and make complete arrangements to open its doors to domestic and foreign capitalists, but they need not necessarily be discussed here. The Modi government has decided to take the process of commercialization and communalization of education to its culmination in its second term and this is the main objective of the ‘New Education Policy 2020’.
Due to this, the atmosphere of desperation among the students and youth has increased to an extent that has accelerated the rate of suicides among them in an unprecedented manner. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, 10,159 people committed suicide in 2018. The conditions created by the present capitalist system and its education policy have led many a youth, with heads full of dreams, to choose the painful path of ending their lives with their own hands.

Students, Society, and the University: Our Tasks

This is the current reality of our society, system, and education system. We, as students, cannot remain aloof from this reality. We have seen how these predatory and profiteering policies have affected us students as well. Schools, colleges, and universities are a part of the society, and do not exist outside it. Every event that happens in the society has an impact on them and in turn, schools, colleges and universities contribute their bit in changing the society as well. There is not a single revolution that has taken place in the modern world so far, in which universities have not played an important role. The French Revolution, Russian Revolution, the Chinese and Vietnamese Revolutions, have all had students from schools and universities play an important role. Apart from this, students have played a leading role in every movement against injustice; India’s independence movement, American civil rights and black liberation movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement in Europe and America, China’s May 4, 1919 movement, the youth movement of India in the 1970s have all had students and youth leading them and being in the front ranks.
Universities are a part of society. The conditions prevailing in the society affect every aspect of the university, too.. In the current environment prevailing in our society as well, we, as students, will not only have to decide our role within the university but will also have to determine our place in the ongoing struggle in the society. The wheel of the chariot of history is soaked with the raging blood of the youth. Only the fire of young blood will cure the intolerable conditions that prevail in our country today.
But of course we must first start the struggle from where we stand! In the places that we study and fight for our rights! Therefore, first of all, it is very important to understand the institution of the university and its position in the current capitalist society.
The university, as it exists, is made to run as a factory to produce instruments to serve the interests of the ruling classes in our society. The students and the common working masses have no role to play in the entire process of its curriculum setting, its construction, its functioning and management. The institution of the university also plays a role in ensuring the hegemony of the capitalist ruling class in the present society. The method adopted by it for systematizing, teaching, and training all the branches of knowledge and sciences does not end up imparting education to all the members of the society in an equal and democratic manner. It gives different types of education to different classes.
These higher education institutes provide the upper and the upper middle class youth with an education that ensures the creation of a small class of scientists, technocrats, bureaucrats, intellectual representatives of the ruling class, which is necessary to smoothly run the rule of the ruling class. This education is reserved for a very miniscule section of the society.
Further, the education that the middle-class and lower-middle-class youth receive, transforms them into useful intellectual and manual labour for the ruling class. We are taught in a manner that ensures our turning into useful workers and employees for the capitalist class; ones that can fulfill the positions of workers, managers etc. in their enterprises. In the event that we aren’t able to avail such work, we are free to be a part of the reserve army of the unemployed and increase its strength, thus ensuring a reduction in the bargaining power and the average income of employed workers and employees. Capitalists also need a large unemployed working population to have cheap labour power readily available whenever they make new investments and carry out expanded reproduction.
The sons and daughters of a vast majority of workers and toiling masses do not even get access to these institutions of higher education. A large number do not complete their schooling at all. There are some whose schooling ends once they finish the 12th grade.. Fewer are those who go on to do ITI, polytechnic etc. after 12th and are able to become a skilled worker, although many of them are also found working as porters or ground-men. This population is kept deprived of the education of history, science etc. They get opportunities to study only to the extent that they can become skilled or semi-skilled workers.
These tasks are undertaken by higher education institutions and universities. On the one hand, universities produce a small class of scientists, technocrats, bureaucrats, politicians, and intellectual representatives for the ruling classes. On the other hand, they create an educated skilled workforce, which, when employed, runs the profit-making machinery of the capitalists smoothly, and if left unemployed, reduces the bargaining power of the employed population and ensures the supply of cheap labour power that capitalists always need.
Moreover, what we are taught and how we are taught makes us accustomed to think about reality in a way that is better suited for the existing rulers instead of exposing it as it is. As the Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano has said: “In a land where a child dies of hunger every minute, one is taught to see things through the eyes of the ruling classes.” The continuous conflict over university curriculum is no coincidence; it happens because the curriculum is always designed to accustom the new generation of students in the university to think from the perspective of the ruling class. Conflicts among different models of different parts of the capitalist class exist over this as well.
There is no democratic control of the broad cross-section of working masses over the university. The decisions regarding the syllabus, pedagogy, recruitment of teachers, arrangement of fees etc., facilities, are entirely taken by the thinkers, politicians, bureaucrats, and technocrats engaged in the service of the ruling class. Consequently, the university itself becomes a factory that produces a small professional class that runs the machinery of capitalist rule, producing a vast population of skilled and semi-skilled manual and mental labour. At the same time it, in itself, is a factory which produces profit for the ruling classes.
But at the same time, universities and all other educational institutions also play an ideological role for the ruling classes. On the one hand, they continuously produce and reproduce the division of mental labour and manual labour and thus play an important role in producing and reproducing the relations of the existing capitalist society as well.
On the other hand, they also carry out the task of ensuring the ideological hegemony of the ruling classes. The education system run by ruling classes in an unjust system functions in a way that creates faith in the existing system and in the ruling classes, describes the existing system as natural, describes greed, selfishness, competition as human nature and creates reverence for unjust rules and laws. This work continues unabated from schools to universities. It may, in some places, be carried out directly, and in others, indirectly. It is not without reason that the ruling class takes so much interest in the task of formulating the curriculum of schools and universities and more often than not, a tussle exists within the various factions of the ruling class over this as well.
For the above reasons, universities are not just places to acquire knowledge and science. A class struggle continues in the field of knowledge and science itself. The institutions engaged in the teaching and training of knowledge and science do not escape classes; a class struggle continues there as well. Those who control the power try to operate these educational institutions according to their class interests, and on the other hand, the youth hailing from humble homes refuse to passively accept these efforts. There is an ongoing struggle on the questions pertaining to what to teach, how to teach, who should teach, as well as who should study within the university, the fee structure of the university, the number of that seats should be available etc..
The entire education system is inseparable from the political, economic, and social system of our country; it is a part of it. The classes which control the entire system of our country, are the ones that run the education system. A complete change in the education system and the university cannot take place until and unless a revolutionary transformation, the like of which Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh spoke of, leads to a change in the entire system of our country. We cannot create a human-centric, democratic, secular, and egalitarian education system, one over which 90 percent of the toiling masses exercise their revolutionary control, until the control of the working classes is established over the production, governance, and the entire structure of the society in the country.
Therefore, in the long run, the fight for a democratic, secular, egalitarian, and human-centric education system is linked to the struggle for a socialist society.
However, this does not mean that there is no need to struggle for democracy, secularism, democratic control by the working masses, scientific and rational education etc. in universities today. Instead, for the society to progress further, a struggle based on all these questions should immediately be started in university campuses as well as in other parts of the society, i.e. factories, farms, offices etc.

Disha’s Slogan: The Future Belongs to Us!

“Youths, ye soldiers of the Indian Republic, fall in: do not stand easy, do not let your knees tremble. Shake off the paralyzing effects of long lethargy. Yours is a noble mission. Go out into every nook and corner of the country and prepare the ground for future revolution which is sure to come. Respond to the clarion call of duty. Do not vegetate. Grow! Every minute of your life you must think of devising means of that this your ancient land may arise with flaming eyes and fierce yawn.”
– Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh

These words of Bhagat Singh have become relevant even today in a different historical context. ‘Disha Students’ Organization’ believes that in the light of these words of Shaheed-e-Azam, the students and youth will today have to understand their role within schools, campuses and the society and will have to engage in fulfilling it whole- heartedly.
We have to fight for a school and university system where there is equal and free education for as per their interests, where a democratic, secular, scientific education, which ends the distinction between mental and manual labour, is available which has the ability to build a true and complete human being. The struggle for such a university has to start today itself. This struggle would mean free and equal education for all, training in productive labour from the childhood for all, the struggle for a uniform school system in the whole country, for the means to teach and train in their own language for every citizen, to end all kinds of caste discrimination in university campuses, to end the discrimination against religious minorities and women, and the struggle for the right to employment guarantee.
Campus democracy is also an important issue in the struggle on all these issues within the university campus. Campus democracy in the true sense has never been implemented in most of the universities in our country. The campuses where campus democracy was found to some extent, were the result of the militant struggle of the students. The policies of privatization, liberalization, and the privatization of education in the country have led to the shrinking of whatever little democracy that was left on campuses. However, in the current phase of fascist rise, the pace at which the remnants of democratic spaces in the campus have been eroded is unprecedented.
Students’ unions are available only to the students of a few universities. So, there is no right to democratic representation. Even in places where this right is achieved, it has been made incomplete and lifeless by implementing the recommendations of the Lyngdoh Commission. Also, all the platforms and places for the exchange of ideas and struggle within the campuses are being abolished, the presence of khaki uniforms is being increased within the campuses, private security companies are being given the right to repress students, and at the same time, the university administration is leaving no opportunity to harass every student who raises a voice for campus democracy.
On the other hand, the students’ organizations of all the bourgeois electoral parties have been given complete freedom to make the campus a hotbed of hooliganism, a hub for the naked display of money power-muscle power, and a training center to become MP-MLA. In particular, the “student” gangs of the Sangh Parivar have been given a free hand to spread fascist violence and terror within the campus. In recent times, we have seen these hooligan gangs carrying out fascist attacks on the students in Jawaharlal Nehru University, Aligarh Muslim University, Delhi University, Jadavpur University, Banaras Hindu University, Jamia Millia, Mumbai University, F.T.I.I. as well as the attacks on struggling students and democracy-loving teachers in various universities. In such a situation, the struggle for democracy within the campus has also become an important and central issue of the student movement, one that has always been on its agenda.
However, the student movement does not only mean the movement inside the university campus. The student movement takes a position on every issue which affects the exploited and oppressed people of the country. Along with fighting for the basic rights of democracy, secularism, equality, education, and employment within the campus, the student movement also raises its voice against exploitation and oppression across the country. A student is a human being, a citizen of the country, a member of the society and also a worker. They cannot remain unaffected by the issues of exploitation and oppression of workers in the country, they cannot remain silent on the caste oppression against the vast toiling Dalit population, they cannot accept the inequality between men and women, and they cannot remain unconcerned towards the struggles of the oppressed nations and nationalities, too. In short, they cannot remain indifferent to the ongoing injustice, exploitation and inequality in the society in any form. This is the reason why the student movement is concerned with the injustice and exploitation continuing in any form in the society, the reason why it raises its voice against it and also fights against it. From the national movement of our country to all the great revolutions of the world, the student movement has played an important role. Many revolutions had started with student movements. Even today, the student movement cannot be confined to a struggle on various issues of the university campus; it will transcend the boundaries of the university and associate itself with every struggle for justice and equality in the society.
No student organization which is the student front of a bourgeois electoralist party can undertake the task of building such a revolutionary student movement. All these bourgeois electoral parties represent some section of the capitalist class. In such a situation, the task of building the student movement against policies which have been made by their parent parties, will be left unfulfilled. As far as privatization, liberalization and commercialization of education is concerned, all the bourgeois electoralist parties are united and whenever they are in power, they implement it in their own way. Obviously, the student organizations which are lackeys of these parties cannot fight against them.
The parliamentary Left parties have also not lagged behind in taking care of the interests of the capitalist class. Everyone is also aware of what the Left Front governments in West Bengal and Ker- ala have done during their rule. The toiling masses and the common students and youth of the country have not forgotten the misdeeds of the Left Front government in Singur, Lalgarh and Nandigram. They have not forgotten the fact that Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, the Chief Minister of the Left Front, had instructed the striking workers and claimed that the era of strike strategy was over and that labour will have to walk hand in hand with capital. These parties consider China, which has become a model of privatization and liberalization and the naked oppression of the working class for the capitalist countries, to be a socialist country. These parties can be called “Communist parties” only by people who get deceived by appearances. Today, the reality of these parliamentary left parties, which have got engulfed in the quagmire of revisionism and opportunism, has also come in front of the common masses. However, many sharp and serious youth often join their student organizations because they are attracted by the image of Bhagat Singh, which is used by all these so called left student organizations. We appeal to all such serious and intelligent student friends to think deeply on the above questions.
We believe that a revolutionary student organization should not be formed on the basis of ideology but on the basis of a revolutionary common minimum program. Student organization is a mass organization and not a party which is formed on the basis of a certain ideology. If it aims at mobilizing and organizing the broad masses of students, it should build a revolutionary common minimum program that represents the interests of the poor and lower middle class students coming from humble homes, one that believes in the principles of democracy and secularism, that opposes casteism, patriarchy, and national oppression and that is justice-loving and progressive. ‘Disha Students Organization’ believes in organizing every student and youth who agree with its common minimum program and constitution. Not being based on an ideology does not mean that the student organization is apolitical. Certainly, it has a politics, but it is based on a revolutionary common minimum program, not an ideology. If this is not the case, then a student organization cannot be a mass organization in the true sense.
A revolutionary student organization can definitely support a revolutionary party, if the program of that party confirms the common minimum program on the basis of which the revolutionary student organization is formed. Notwithstanding this, that student organization does not become the ‘student front’ of that party. If this happens, that revolutionary student organization will not remain a revolutionary mass organization in the true sense.
‘Disha Students’ Organization’ is a federation of all student organizations and forums agreeing on the above ideas and agenda. The common minimum program of ‘Disha’ is based on the above basic considerations.
‘Disha Students’ Organization’ is an organization of students and youth who have not given up on dreaming, who have maintained their commitment towards justice and equality, who have not lost the spirit to fight for change and progress and who are dedicated to the struggle for an egalitarian, just, democratic, and truly secular society.
‘Disha Students’ Organization’ is an organization of students and youth who do not accept political and social oppression on any basis; caste, gender, sexual identity or choice, region, language, religion, ethnicity, or on the basis of nationality. ‘Disha’ is dedicated to fighting against all these forms of social and political oppression.
‘Disha Students’ Organization’ is committed to building the India of Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh’s dreams. This dream was not unscientific or irrational, but it was a program presented by the most brilliant revolutionary of modern India on a scientific basis: the construction of a socialist India in which the working classes have the right over production, governance, and the entire structure of the society and where the decision-making power is vested in their hands; where islands of wealth aren’t built around an ocean of tears; where the youth of the country do not have to spend their life in unemployment, destitution and desperation; where the toiling population is not destined to live a life of poverty, illiteracy and starvation. A system in which the purpose of the entire production and its distribution is not the profit of a handful of capitalists, but where the entire production and distribution is conducted in a planned manner, so that all social needs can be met. Only such a system can free us from poverty, hunger, inflation, malnutrition, unemployment, illiteracy, uncertainty and insecurity, environmental destruction, communalism and sectarianism, wars, national oppression, casteism, patriarchy and all kinds of social oppression. This was the dream of Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh and ‘Disha’ is committed to contribute in the struggle to fulfill it. ‘Disha’ will always participate according to its capacity in any revolutionary movement to make this a reality.
‘Disha Students’ Organization’ is an organization of students and youth who believe that education and employment are the fundamental rights of every citizen of the country. It is the responsibility of the state to provide equal and free education to everyone. The people of India were shamelessly betrayed by limiting the right to equal and free education in the directive principles of state policy of the Constitution of India. There is a need to create a huge and powerful student movement on a countrywide scale to force the Indian bourgeois state to accept it as a fundamental right. Along with this, considering the right to live as a fundamental right but not considering the ‘right to work’ or the right to employment guarantee as a fundamental right was also a betrayal done by the Indian rulers to the people of India. That is why ‘Disha’ considers one of its central tasks to build a country-wide militant mass movement to compel the capitalist class to accept employment guarantee as a fundamental right.
All these struggles are not isolated. The reason is that all these struggles have a common enemy of the common working people: the existing capitalist system and the capitalist class. The question of illiteracy and unemployment, economic exploitation, social justice, poverty and inflation, caste oppression, patriarchy, or national oppression; all these are not natural disasters, but various forms of exploitation, oppression, and repression engendered by the system. These are not accidental, but are systematically produced and reproduced at every moment by the existing profit-oriented system. This system rests on the exploitation of the labour power of the vast toiling population and in order to maintain this exploitation, it gives rise to various forms of social and political oppression and repression.
Therefore, our long-term goal is to destroy the profit-oriented capitalist system and build a socialist system based on the fulfillment of social needs. But one of the fundamental problems of revolution is to establish the correct relationship between the general and the particular, the long-term and the immediate. This long-term goal can also be achieved only when revolutionary mass struggles on the day-to-day issues of the broad toiling masses, such as the right to education, the right to employment, the right to food, the right to housing, the right to healthcare etc., are waged immediately.
We, as students, also have to build a militant student-youth movement within and outside the campus around the central slogan of ‘Equal and free education for all and employment for all’ which will also address all other issues affecting the students such as campus democracy, the increasing fees and decreasing seats, the right to hostels, caste discrimination in university recruitment, questions of caste and gender oppression within the campus, question of oppression of religious minorities and questions of facilities such as scholarship to students, library, cultural-intellectual centers etc. and mobilize and organize the students on them as well. The entire struggle for radical socio-economic-political change can be taken forward only by linking these struggles together and by linking them all with the struggle of workers, poor peasants, unemployed, women, toiling Dalit people, and oppressed nations. ‘Disha Students’ Organization’ is committed to work continuously towards this goal.
We hope that we will succeed in fulfilling these objectives in the times to come. We invite every young, justice-loving, equality-loving rebellious heart to be our co-traveler in these struggles. The world is on a threshold, the present order is groaning under the weight of irreconcilable crisis, the creation of the new requires the destruction of the old, but when the old decays and the new cannot be born, such are the times of the most decadent of things. It is the masses who make history, not heroes, and therefore it is them who create the new. But in this process there has always been an important role of the students and youth who have linked their dreams, their aspirations, and their hopes with the pain and struggles of the common working masses, who have chosen the side of the toiling masses; the ones who produce everything, but are forced to live in misery, unemployment, and destitution themselves. The wheel of history moves forward with the spirit, sacrifice, and dedication of such youth. Today history is asking them in the words of Bertolt Brecht:
‘What are you waiting for, and for how long? The world needs you!’

Disha Students’ Organization
Program

1) Disha Students’ Organization believes that the building of an education system which is human-centric, democratic, secular, egalitarian and which will eliminate the distinction between physical and mental labor completely, is not possible in the current profit-centered, misanthropic, communal, casteist, patriarchal, and unequal socio-economic system. Students and youth will be able to have such an education system only with the destruction of the profit-oriented capitalist socio-economic structure and the building of a socialist system, in which the working class will be entrusted with the production, governance, and maintenance of the societal structure and they will be the ones with the right to take decisions regarding the same. Disha Students’ Organization will participate in every revolutionary mass struggle and revolutionary mass movement for the creation of such a system. Adhering to the message of Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh, we will study to fight and fight to study and take the message of revolution among the poor toiling masses everywhere; from villages to city slums, and play our part in the revolutionary radical transformation of the entire society.
2) However, we have to start this fight from where we are located today. Disha Students’ Organization believes that the struggle for equal and free education for all, right from school education to higher education levels, must be started immediately. We believe that equal and free education for all is the fundamental right of every citizen and an extensive student-youth movement should be built for this in the right manner. This is the first central slogan of the program of Disha Students’ Organization. As a part of this, we also raise the demand for the complete abolition of privatization in education and the implementation of a uniform school system. We further demand the implementation of the old promise made by the Indian capitalist system; at least 6 percent of the GDP should be spent on education. Furthermore, as an immediate demand, we ask that the government immediately stop the policies of fund cuts, disinvestment, and withdrawal of scholarships in education.
3) Our second central slogan is: the right to guaranteed employment is the birthright of every citizen. Without the right to work, the right to life becomes meaningless. The ruling class of India had freed itself from this responsibility by limiting the right to work under the directive principles of state policy in the bourgeois constitution of India. However, we will not tolerate this deception. We believe that building a countrywide student-youth movement in order to get the ‘Bhagat Singh National Employment Guarantee Act’ passed which guarantees permanent employment to every citizen or otherwise provides for liveable unemployment allowance, is the need of the day.
4) The Indian ruling class has been conspiring to eliminate every little remnant of democracy that has been present within the university campus for a long time and these conspiracies are progressing at an unprecedented pace in the era of the fascist regime. All the bourgeois electoral parties give a free hand to their student fronts for indulging in the dirty politics of ‘money power-muscle power’ and to indulge in hooliganism and bourgeois politics in the campus, but stall every effort of the students to conduct progressive politics in a true sense. They instruct the students to “not engage in politics”, while they themselves turn the entire campus into hubs of hooliganism and training centers for be- coming MPs and MLAs. In addition, all the democratic institutions, forums, and places within the campus are being closed down so the students are dissuaded from discussing, debating and thus mobilizing and organizing themselves on the vital issues of the society and the campus. In today’s time, we consider the fight for the right to freedom and democracy of the students within the campus as our third central slogan. Under this, our main demands are the rights of student unions in every campus, the rights of democratic institutions, forums and places in the campus, and the complete abolition of the police system and private security guards inside the campus.
5) Today, people have no say or control in the operation, management etc. of the schooling system and the higher education system. In such a situation, there is no democracy of the general masses as far as the education system is concerned; the curriculum setting, the recruitment of teachers, their service contracts, the functioning of educational institutions etc. Therefore, we demand that democratic committees made up of teachers, employees, parents, and representatives of civil society be formed to run and manage the schools. Also, for the management and operation of every aspect of the university, joint committees of teachers, students, staff and representatives of civil society must be formed. Without this, the education system would completely be under the control of the ruling classes and they would continue to use it as their instrument.
6) The contract system should be completely abolished from schools and all institutions of higher education. Teachers and staff should be permanently recruited and they should be given permanent employment. The existence of the abominable contract system in institutions of education is shameful. No teacher can ever teach in peace with the sword of retrenchment hanging over their heads. That is why informalization should be completely eliminated from the field of education.
7) Apart from this, informalization of education among students should also be stopped. The current system is increasingly making regular campus education a privilege of the rich while instructing students from humbler homes to pursue “correspondence” or “distance” education. Needless to say, the capitalist system wants these common students to not unite, mobilize and organize in the campus but instead work as a cheap labor power in the informal and unorganized sector for the capitalists, even before the completion of their education. This is a step taken to promote the depoliticization of students, which we strongly oppose. This informalization of higher education must be stopped immediately.
8) We believe that all citizens should be taught about mental and manual labour right from the very beginning. That is, technical education in the field of productive labour should be made compulsory for all citizens, beginning at the school level, so that steps can be taken to end the distinction between manual labour and mental labour in the society, so that the education can actually create complete human beings instead of incomplete ones.
9) Every student should have the right to study in the language of their choice, irrespective of the university campus in the country where they study. We strongly oppose the imposition of Hindi, English, or any language anywhere and also oppose the linguistic identitarianism and chauvinism that have arisen as a reaction to this.
10) We believe that there is a need to wage an uncompromising struggle to make the institution of university a truly secular institution. The Indian state and constitution calls itself ‘secular’ but its model of secularism is the model of ‘Equality of all religions’ (Sarva Dharma Samabhava), which has nothing to do with secularism in a real sense. In fact, this type of argument allows majoritarian communalism to flourish. For example, how does one justify the conducting of religious prayers, religious festivals, and religious events in schools in a so-called secular country? Secularism in its true sense means the complete separation of religion from social and political life, which naturally includes the complete separation of the university and the entire educational system from religion. This means that to follow any religion or to not follow any religion is the private right of every citizen and it should not have anything to do with their political and social life. We are determined to fight for such a truly secular social and political order.

In addition to these purely education and employment related demands, the student-youth movement raises every demand raised by the entire working masses. A revolutionary student-youth movement can be identified by this fact alone. In addition to the above-mentioned demands pertaining to education and employment, Disha Students’ Organization also considers the struggle for the following demands as an integral part of its program, affecting both the campus and the society.

11) Right to food should be the basic right of every citizen of the country. Without this it is meaningless to talk about the right to live. The situation of hunger and malnutrition in the country is dire. On the other hand, food grains continue to rot in government and private godowns. In such a situation, the government, by fixing and straightening out the public distribution system, should ensure that not a single citizen goes hungry and falls prey to malnutrition. It is our natural right as a human being. ‘Disha’ is committed to participate in the struggle for this right.
12) We believe that equal and free healthcare is the birthright of every citizen of the country. For the right to public health, we are determined to fight for the complete end of privatization in the healthcare and medical sector. Along with this, the entire system of medical education should also be restructured and private medical colleges should be nationalized. The commercialization of a humane profession such as medicine begins in private medical colleges. As long as commercial medical education exists, quality, equal, and free healthcare cannot become a basic public right and will remain the privilege of the rich and upper middle classes. Every student is also a citizen of the country and they cannot remain indifferent to all the problems of the people of the country. Millions of people in our country are deprived of their right to quality, equal, and free healthcare. We believe that this, too, is an issue of students and youth and we consider it our duty to fight for this right.
13) Every citizen should have a permanent roof over their head, that is, the right to housing. Universal state housing system is our birth-right. The homeless population and the population living in slums are more than 360 million in India. This is the population because of whose hard work we, as students, are able to reach the campuses of education. These campuses have been built by them and we consider it our responsibility to fight for their rights.
14) Similarly, the struggle for the essential rights of the people like clean drinking water, sanitation, free public transport etc. cannot be viewed separately and we consider it as a part of the agenda of the student-youth movement.
15) We consider the struggle against casteism and Brahminism, both within and outside the campus, of utmost importance. But at the same time, we understand the reality of the politics of reservation and reject the pseudo binary of standing for or against it. We oppose the upper caste savarnist conspiracy to snatch away reservations which already exist and at the same time we consider it our duty to fight against the non-filling of reserved seats in universities and other educational institutions. It is the struggle for a democratic right and one against the corruption carried out by casteist people. However, we consider the creation of new caste identities and making people fight among themselves in the name of reservation, as a part of the ‘divide and rule’ policy of the ruling class and strongly oppose it. Only the struggle for free and equal education and employment for all, and not the slogan of reservation, can be a general long-term political slogan which can rally the broad cross-section of the toiling Dalit population for the right to education and employment.
16) We are a firm advocate of gender equality and believe that patriarchy is an important form of social oppression for the capitalist system which it skillfully uses. Patriarchy and values of sexual and gender discrimination lead to oppression and inequality against women on campuses and within society. At the same time, we oppose the violation of the democratic and civil rights of people with alternative sexual/gender identities, homosexuals, transsexuals, transgender people and believe that no state or party has the right to interfere with the personal gender identity or choice of any citizen and that it is completely a personal matter of every citizen. We are committed to the struggle against patriarchy and gender inequality and consider it an integral part of the anti-capitalist struggle. Within campuses, too, we consider the struggle against inequality towards female students through rules and regulations of hostels and colleges, such as imposing curfew hours etc., as a very important struggle. We are committed to implement the system of co-education from the beginning. At the same time, we are determined to fight for the implementation of the basic right of ‘Equal Pay for Equal Work’, both within and outside the campus. Anti-sexual-harassment committees, in which students, teachers and staff have representation, should be constituted in the universities for a fair and impartial investigation of the issues of sexual harassment.
17) Disha Students’ Organization unconditionally supports the right of self-determination of all nations and strongly opposes the barbaric national oppression being carried out by the Indian state in Kashmir and North-Eastern states. The workers, students, and youth of those countries who suppress other nations are cursed to be victims of the oppression of their own state. That is why we support the struggle of all oppressed nations. We are in favor of the largest possible state formed voluntarily, but no justice-loving and progressive youth can be in favor of a state formed on the basis of oppression. At the same time, we oppose the ideology of national- ism in all its forms and manifestations.
18) We strongly oppose the persecution of any religious minority community in the country. Today, the condition of Muslims is particularly horrifying because the communal fascists of India are currently in power and they have mainly targeted Muslims as a false enemy. But at the same time, there are communal fascist attacks on Christians as well. These incidents give birth to reactionary fundamentalism even in these oppressed religious communities, thus helping these different fundamentalisms to feed on each other and to thrive and flourish. Along with this, we strongly oppose the attacks on atheists and rationalists. We believe that it is also the responsibility of the student-youth movement to arouse, mobilize, and organize the masses against communal fascism and other religious fundamentalisms.
19) Disha Students’ Organization is against the violation of the democratic and civil rights of the people and against all forms of state repression and violence. We believe that the struggle for these rights is inseparably linked with the student-youth movement, just as the struggle for them is also linked with the workers’ movement, the anti-caste movement, the anti-communal fascist movement, and the women’s movement. We are committed to repealing all repressive black laws, some of which were enacted by the British during the colonial period to oppress the Indian people. At the same time, we consider it essential to fight for the dissolution of the paramilitary forces specially created to suppress the democratic rights of the people.
20) In today’s era, environmental destruction is happening unprecedentedly all over the world. The capitalist system, blinded by profit, is destroying the conditions of human life on earth. We do not seem to be in a position to withstand another century of this inhuman system. In such a situation, an important part of the struggle against the capitalist system also becomes the struggle against environmental destruction. The system holds the masses responsible for the destruction of this environment and thus puts the responsibility of saving it on the people themselves. We consider it an important task to expose this conspiracy and to bring before the masses, the criminal role of this profit-oriented capitalist system in the environmental destruction that is taking place. There is a growing awareness among the youth about environmental devastation, but they need to correctly identify the enemy responsible for it.
21) The capitalist system always takes the help of archaic, superstitious, and conservative ideas prevalent in society to keep the masses and the general student-youth population imprisoned in ignorance. ‘Disha’ believes that the promotion of rationality and scientific thinking in the society becomes a task of the student-youth movement and we, as students, should take it up with enthusiasm.
22) The slogan ‘Serve the people’ is a very important slogan for a progressive youth. Whether a youth is a revolutionary or not, can be identified by determining whether or not they can attach themselves with the sufferings and pain of the people and whether they believe in serving the people or not. We believe that students should go to the toiling poor population and carry out reform work among them not in a reformist way but in a revolutionary way. Reform work among the masses in a revolutionary way means that we refrain from creating an illusion among the people about there being some good-hearted people in the society who will do the poor some good. Not at all. While carrying out these reform works, we will put the entire capitalist system in the dock, mobilize and organize people against it for all rights like education, employment, healthcare, and housing.
23) We consider the exposure of all bourgeois electoralist parties, the exposure of their funding, and the unmasking of their real masters in front of the people and laying bare their entire character, as part of the tasks of a revolutionary student-youth movement. ‘Disha’ is determined to fulfill this task at every possible opportunity.
24) We consider NGO politics an extremely dangerous imperialist conspiracy. Its function is to cover up the crimes of capitalism, to make the people accustomed to mendicancy and alms-taking through reformism, to promote identity politics, to entangle the youth who are desirous of change in the illusion of being ‘salaried revolutionaries’ and to make a dent in the revolutionary recruitment centers. Exposing the politics of NGOs on every front and occasion is an important task of the student-youth movement as their infiltration is on the rise even within campuses.
25) We support every people’s struggle against the loot, exploitation, and oppression of the capitalist system happening anywhere in the country and consider it as an essential task of the student-youth movement; it may be the struggle of workers and employees against privatization, retrenchment and lockout, change in labour laws and exploitation, the struggle of toiling tribal people against displacement and barbaric repression in Orissa and Central India, the struggle of toiling Dalit people against caste oppression, the struggle against communal fascist laws such as the CAA and the NRC, or the struggle of women against anti-women crimes.
26) We strongly support the struggle of the common working people, the oppressed nations and races around the world against imperialism and capitalism. We especially advocate the heroic struggle of the Palestinian people against Zionism and consider it our responsibility to participate in the academic boycott and ‘Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions’ movement against Israel in our own country.

Disha Students’ Organization
Constitution

Article 1
Name of organization
The name of the organization will be ‘Disha Chhatra Sanghatana’ in Hindi, ‘Disha Vidyarthi Jathebandi’ in Punjabi, ‘Disha Vidyarthi Sanghatana’ in Marathi, ‘Disha Vidyardhi Sangham’ in Telugu, ‘Disha Vidyarthi Sanghadhana’ in Malayalam and ‘Disha Students’ Organization’ in English. The abbreviation will be ‘Disha’ in all Indian languages including Hindi and English. The name ‘DISHA’ will be retained as the organization expands to other linguistic regions and will be translated into the local languages. The structure of the organization will be federal in nature.

Article-2
Flag and Emblem
The ratio of the organization’s flag will be 3:2. It will split vertically into blue and red. The blue coloured portion will be 1/3rd of the flag and the red coloured section will be 2/3rd. In the middle of the red coloured portion of the flag, there will be a fist holding a yellow coloured pen, above which there will be three yellow-coloured five-pointed stars. ‘Disha’ in Devanagari and English will be written below it.
The colour blue symbolizes the energy, courage, and fairness of students and youth. The red colour stands for the fervour, militancy and sacrifices of the revolutionary struggles of the students and youth. The three stars are a symbol of the ideological sharpness, steely solidarity and revolutionary people’s partisanship of the students and youth. These three stars also symbolize the mobilization of the youth of the proletariat, semi-proletariat, and middle class against capitalism and imperialism. The five angles of the stars symbolize the unity of the struggles of the revolutionary students and youth of the five continents. The clenched fist and the pen symbolize the revolutionary thoughts and unshakable determination of the youth.

Article-3
Goals and Objectives
i) Our long-term goal is to overthrow the existing profit-oriented capitalist system and imperialism and to build a human-centric socialist system, and for this, to mobilize and organize common students and youth to participate in a broad revolutionary mass movement.
ii) Our central immediate task is to mobilize and organize the vast general student and youth population under the central slogan of ‘Equal and Free Education for All and Employment for All’. As part of this, opposing privatization and commercialization in the education sector as well as opposing the reduction of seats and increase in fees, demanding a uniform school system, and also fighting for the implementation of the ‘Bhagat Singh National Employment Guarantee Act’.
iii) To fight for democratic rights and a democratic space within the campus. As a part of this, fighting for a democratic student union, fighting for democratic institutions, forums, and places in the campus, as well as ending the presence of police and private security guards in the campus.
iv) To fight for bringing the entire education system under the democratic control of the people. As a part of this, the entire management and operation of the university and curriculum determination should be brought under the control of elected committees of students, teachers, employees, and representatives of the civil society, and the entire management and operation of schools and curriculum determination should be brought under the control of elected committees of the parents, teachers and representatives of the civil society.
v) Ending all forms of informalization in the education sector, may it be in the form of irregular recruitment of teachers and staff, or in the form of correspondence education of students.
vi) To make teaching and technical training of productive labour compulsory for all from the very beginning in the education system so that the distinction between manual and mental labour in the society can be eliminated and the education system can enable the building of a complete human being.
vii) Every citizen of the country, wherever they live, should get a complete right to education in the language of their choice and no language should be imposed anywhere.
viii) To make the country’s state system as well as the entire education system truly secular. Under the guise of the illusory principle of ‘Sarva Dharma Samabhava’, communal majoritarianism is given fodder to flourish. Secularism actually means complete separation of religion from political and social life and establishing it as a private question of the individual.
ix) To carry on an uncompromising struggle against the ideologies of casteism, Brahminism, and patriarchy within the campus and in society as well as against the repression of all oppressed religious minorities. This includes the struggle against creating new identities and the upper caste savarnist conspiracies to reservations that already exist, which lead to common students and youth fighting among themselves in the name of reservation, and against the corruption involved in the non-filling of reserved seats; Also, it includes the struggle for the right to co-education for all women from the very beginning and the right to equal pay for equal work, the struggle for equal rights for women within campuses, and the struggle against anti-women crimes.
x) The right to food, the right to equal and free public healthcare, and the right to housing are fundamental rights for every citizen. Without these, the right to live has no meaning. One of our goals is to continuously struggle against the state for them.
xi) To support the right of self-determination of every nation, to strongly oppose the oppression and repression of oppressed nations and nationalities. We are in favor of the largest possible state formed voluntarily and democratically, but not in favor of any state formed through coercion.
xii) We are committed to fight against state repression in all its forms. Under this, the abolition of all the black laws and the abolition of all the special paramilitary forces created especially for the repression of the people, are also a part.
xiii) To fight relentlessly against the destruction of the environment by the capitalist system and to expose its truth to the common masses.
xiv) To propagate the ideas of rationality, scientific temperament, and enlightenment among the students and youth and among the entire working masses. It includes fighting against the archaic, superstitious, and conservative ideas which are used by the exploitative ruling class.
xv) To oppose and expose the imperialist conspiracy of the NGOs, which make the people victims of mendicancy and alms-taking, tries to temporarily solve their revolutionary discontent, hides the crimes of capitalism, shows illusory dreams of working as ‘salaried revolutionaries’ to the students who desire change and targets the revolutionary recruitment centers.
xvi) To expose to the people the reality of all bourgeois electoralist parties, their class character, and their funding sources.
xvii) To implement the revolutionary principle of ‘Serve the public’ and to do reform work in a revolutionary way by rejecting reformism, and in the process, to put the capitalist system in the dock for employment, education, food, healthcare, and housing.
xviii) To participate in the struggle for the legitimate and just rights of the people in their day-to-day life.
xix) To support the struggles against capitalist exploitation, plunder, oppression, and repression across the country, may it be the struggle of workers for their rights, the struggle of tribals against displacement and corporate plunder of natural resources, the struggle of the Dalit working people against caste atrocities and violence, or the struggle of women against barbaric crimes and for freedom.
xx) To stand in solidarity with and support the struggles going on against capitalism and imperialism around the world, may it be the struggle against racism in the US, the struggle of the Palestinian people against racist Zionist imperialism, or the struggle of exploited workers, oppressed women, and oppressed nations and nationalities around the world.

Article-4
Membership Rules
Section 1: Conditions of Membership
i) Any Indian citizen of 15 years to 45 years of age who is a student in any form of formal or non-formal education or research scholar, if they accept the manifesto, program, and constitution of ‘Disha Students’ Organization’, pays annual membership fee, and works according to its program to fulfill the goals and objectives of the organization.
ii) The annual membership fee of the organization shall be Rs.10.
iii) Membership shall ordinarily be for one calendar year.
iv) Those students who agree with the manifesto and program of the organization can become federal members of the organization or platform: ‘Disha Students’ Organization’.

Section 2: Rights of Members
i) Every member shall be free to choose and be elected to any post in the elections to the organizational bodies without any coercion or condition.
ii) Every member shall have the right to resign from their post or membership of the organization.
iii) Every member shall have a complete right to represent themselves before the leadership of the local body, before the intermediate leading bodies, or directly before the highest central leadership.

Section 3: Duties and Responsibilities of the Members
i) It will be the duty of all the members to work according to the Constitution of the organization for the goals and objectives set in the manifesto and program of the organization, to propagate them, and to implement its program and to participate in the programs, campaigns and, movements of the organization.
ii) It will be the duty of all the members to implement the decisions of the National Conference or the lower-level conferences and higher committees.
iii) It will be the duty of all the members to implement the decision passed by the majority in their unit or committee.
iv) It shall be the duty of every member to read and disseminate all the publications of the organization.
v) No member shall adopt such a lifestyle nor participate in any form in such forums, functions, and organizations, which goes against the goals and objectives and program of the organization.

Article-5
Organizational Structure and Rules
Section 1: Organizational Structure
i) National Conference
(a) Only the National Conference shall have the right to formulate or amend the manifesto, program, and constitution of the organization and shall be the highest decision-making body of the organization.
(b) The National Conference shall be held once every three years and all the delegates attending it shall be elected by their local units, committees, or concerned organizational bodies. The same procedure will be followed for state level conferences.
(c) The National Conference will review past activities and actions and determine future policies and actions.
(d) The National Conference shall elect the National Council whose membership shall be odd numbered and shall be decided by the Conference.
(e) The time, place, and agenda of the National Conference will be decided by the Central Council, details of which will be shared at least 45 days in advance.

ii) Central Council
(a) The Central Council shall be the highest decision-making body between the two conferences and the number of its members shall be determined by the National Conference.
(b) The Central Council will review the implementation of the decisions passed by it, through the Central Executive and give appropriate directions to it.
(c) The Central Council can call a special conference at any time on the demand of two-thirds of the members of the organization.
(d) The meetings of the Central Council shall be held every six months.
(e) After being elected, the Central Council shall elect the Central Executive within 48 hours.
(f) The presence of at least 60 percent of the members in the meeting of the Central Council will be considered as a complete quorum.
(g) In the event of resignation or death of any of its members, the Central Council may co-opt a new member in their place.

iii) Central Executive
a) Between the two conferences, the Central Executive shall be the highest executive body of the organization and shall implement the decisions of the Central Council.
b) The number of members of the Central Executive shall be an odd number and shall be decided by the Central Council.
c) The Central Executive shall hold its meeting every three months and the presence of sixty percent of the members in the meeting shall be mandatory.
d) The Central Executive can call a meeting on 2 days’ notice if there is a need for an emergency meeting.
e) After its election, the Central Executive shall elect the following office bearers within 24 hours:
President
Vice president
General Secretary
Treasurer
f) In the event of resignation or death of any of its members, the Central Executive may co-opt a new member in their place.

iv) Under the Central Executive and the Central Council, there will be units and committees organized on the basis of states or other definite regional units.
v) There will be grassroots level units at university/college/school or other educational institutions or at the village/city level.
vi) Powers and duties of office bearers
a) The President shall preside over all the meetings of the Central Council and the Central Executive. In their absence, this task will be fulfilled by the Vice-President and in case of their absence, the Central Council and the Central Executive will elect the President of their meetings.
b) The General Secretary shall be responsible for the functions of the Organization’s headquarters, shall be the custodian of its property and archives, and prepare the agenda and reports of the Central Council and the Central Executive and will present them in the meetings. The General Secretary will also present the reports passed by the Central Council in the National Conference.
c) The President and the General Secretary will represent the organization on all forums.
d) The Treasurer, with the help of the General Secretary, will review the finances of the organization and prepare the financial report and also present it in the National Conference. The Treasurer will also inspect and review the finances of all units/committees.

vii) Regarding the lower committees and their conferences
a) There will be state level conferences in all states, in which the representatives will be elected from all the districts in the ratio of representation decided by the Central Council. State level conferences can be held only after the first national conference. The State Committees will be responsible to the Central Council and the Central Executive.
b) There shall be District Committees subordinate to the State Committee, whose conferences can be held only after the first conference of the State Committee. In these conferences, too, the representatives will be elected in proportion as decided by the Central Council. The District Committees will be responsible to the State Committees.
c) Wherever there are five members, they may organize themselves as a local/college unit. There will be an elected in-charge of this unit. This unit will be responsible to the committee immediately above it. These basic units will be responsible to the District Committee or the State Committee.

Section-2: Rules related to membership of affiliated organizations
a) Student forums and organizations that agree with the manifesto, program, and constitution of Disha Students’ Organization can be made federal members of Disha Students’ Organization.
b) The affiliated organization may have its own manifesto, program, and constitution which does not negate any aspect of the manifesto, program and constitution of Disha Students’ Organization.
c) The presence of the National Delegation of the ‘Disha Students’ Organization’ will be mandatory in the conferences of the affiliated organization, which will be entitled to participate in its discussions, but giving it the right to vote will depend on the decision of the affiliated organization.
d) In the national conference of ‘Disha Students’ Organization’, the presence of the representative body of the affiliated student organization in a certain ratio/number will be mandatory and it will have the right to participate in the discussions, but will not have the right to vote.
e) The affiliated organizations will have to send regular reports of their work to the Central Council of Disha Students’ Organization.

Article-6
Provision for disciplinary action
(i) If the conduct of any member of any unit of Disha Students’ Organization is found contrary to the goals and objectives of the organization, does not implement its program or behaves contrary to it, violates the constitution of the organization or the directives and instructions of the leadership, and damages the reputation of the organization, then the organization will have the right to take disciplinary action against them, which will include a warning, suspension, expulsion, or cancellation of recognition in case of units.
(ii) The concerned committee or the concerned committee authorized by the Central Executive will have the right to take disciplinary action against the member whose conduct goes against the constitution and the program. The concerned committee will have to send every such decision to the committee above it for approval.
(iii) The unit against which disciplinary action has been taken shall have the right to give its explanation before the concerned committee and to appeal to the above committee and then to the Central Executive.
(iv) A member against whom action of suspension or expulsion has been taken shall have the right to appeal directly to the concerned committee, then to the higher committee, and then to the Central Executive.
(v) If found working against the goals and interests of the organization, the Central Executive will have the right to cancel the recognition of any lower committee, any local committee, or any basic unit. In case of cancellation of recognition of the above committee of the local committee, it will be mandatory for the Central Executive to get the approval of its decision from the Central Council. In case of cancellation of recognition of any committee, the Central Executive may reconstitute the said committee after consulting the committee immediately above it or the committee above it.

Article-7
Rules regarding constitutional amendments
(i) The National Conference will have the sole right to amend the constitution. A two-thirds majority will be necessary for this amendment.
(ii) Any member, unit, or committee and the Central Executive and Central Council will have the right to propose amendments to the constitution.
(iii) If any amendment is proposed, it will be mandatory to send it in writing to all the units, three months before the National Conference.

Article-8
Right to make rules and regulations
(i) The Central Executive shall have the right to make any rule or bye-law without altering the basic structure of the constitution of the organization, provided it does not alter the aims and objectives of the organization.
(ii) The Central Council reserves the right to cancel or approve these newly made rules and bye-laws.
(iii) The National Conference reserves the right to cancel or approve these newly made rules and bye-laws.

President: Varuni Purva
Vice President: Priyamvada
General Secretary: Awinash
Treasurer: Srija