As India is fast shedding its colonial baggage, St Stephen’s College may find itself redundant, out of sync with today’s realities, and caught in a time warp
Cancel culture isn’t new in Delhi’s St Stephen’s College. But unlike in the past, this time it wasn’t a hush-hush affair. Maybe because the latest victim was a Supreme Court lawyer, known to give as good as he gets.
Hours after his invitation was cancelled following protests from the students of the Gender Studies cell of St Stephen’s College, lawyer J Sai Deepak wrote: “Quite a few people have reached out asking me as to what exactly transpired in this St Stephen’s episode. I will keep it factual with a few comments on the episode. Before I proceed, I would request everyone to be measured in their language given that students are involved.”
The students of the Gender Studies cell, which opposed the invite, used terms like “bigoted”, “sexist”, “casteist” and “misogynistic” for the Supreme Court lawyer. They also called Sai Deepak “Islamophobic” for his views on the recent Udupi hijab controversy that snowballed into a major controversy in the country.
This was not the first time Sai Deepak was a victim of cancel culture. (In 2020, his lecture on ‘minority rights’ too got cancelled at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia.) As for St Stephen’s, it too has been in such controversies, the most undesirable and provocative, especially in recent years, being a banner raised by a few of its students seeking Kashmir’s ‘freedom’!
As the Sai Deepak episode suggests, all’s not well within the high walls of Stephen’s. One group inviting and another group protesting is fine, and may seem a part of vibrant democratic culture. But if the cancel culture group is having the last laugh, then definitely it’s a cause for concern.
Firstpost is in possession of a 10 January 2022 letter which a section of Stephanians has written to the principal, informing him how the “junior member community is now reeling under the threat from radical ideological parties and religious extremists who are leaving no stone unturned to divide the secular and united fabric of the college community”. The letter mentions how SFI has breached the high walls of Stephen’s, which traditionally bars political activities on its campus. Taking advantage of the pandemic times, the Left-wing outfit has made an online entry as “SFI Stephens” and among many things, it “condemned” the “college workshop collaboration with the Israeli embassy and the Yad Vashem Center”.
The letter says, “While we all are aware of that our college does not permit political parties on campus, the students’ wing of Communist Party of India (Marxist) i.e. Students’ Federation of India (SFI) has illegally established their unit in college and misused the college name and crest. SFI St Stephen’s College has its own Instagram handle, Facebook page and WhatsApp group where the indoctrination and radicalisation take place.”
One can understand the level of intolerance and insensitivity from the act of the SFI Convenor, who is also the president of St Stephen’s Gandhi Ambedkar Study Circle (GASC). On Ganesh Chaturthi last year, a day very auspicious for Hindus, he shared a picture of Periyar breaking Lord Ganesh idols on the GASC official society WhatsApp group and captions it as a protest against Hinduism.
The letter brings out another incident that showcases the one-sidedness of discourse at St Stephen’s. During last year’s Durga Puja, there were attacks on pandals in Bangladesh. In that backdrop, one junior student requested his colleagues to send e-mails to the US Embassy to put pressure on the Bangladesh government about the “persecution and genocide of religious minorities” in that country. To this one student responded: “Hindu militants getting a taste of their own medicine. Interesting!” When the said message from this student created uproar for legitimising the persecution of a religious minority, the said offender received support from others.
In another case, when NotSoStephanian — a vertical of the college’s Media Cell — was selecting mentors for its mentor-mentee programme for First Years, one junior member objected to the selection citing their alleged closeness to the Right-wing ideology. “Primarily, there is apprehension that his perception was based on support to Israel during the Israel-Palestine conflict,” the complaint letter said. Interestingly, when a female junior member’s name was suggested, he said: “That’s better, yes she’s a Christian”.
Interestingly, when this issue was flagged with the Executive Council of Media Cell, after an initial shrugging off of responsibility, the council refused to see any religious or ideological discrimination in the said case.
All this “makes it really difficult for junior members to feel safe while participating in any group discussion or academic competitions related to social sciences because of the presence of individuals who are ready to judge, assign ideologies and then actively discriminate in selection for various opportunities,” the letter said.
The complaint letter, which was sent anonymously, given the fear of being targeted on the campus, provided WhatsApp chats including the audio notes as proof. These students claim they are yet to see any action.
“We are not surprised. After all, what can we expect from the administration when the principal of the college acts helpless and says he can’t provide security to Sai Deepak? It’s not Afghanistan. But when he showed his helplessness, we had no option but to cancel. The ecosystem is so illiberal here that only one set of opinion, views can be expressed openly and without fear,” said a student who was part of the group that had invited the Supreme Court lawyer.
Looking back
But is this a recent phenomenon? Is it just the byproduct of the hate Modi brigade? Looking closely, one finds the malaise is deeper. While cancel culture may be on the rise, including on campuses worldwide, St Stephen’s has its own ghost that traumatises it way too often.
Two decades ago, during my student days in Delhi University, there was something about St Stephen’s that stood out: Its innate sense of entitlement and elitism. For someone who had studied outside Delhi — in Bihar and Nagaland — it was hard for me to miss a dozen Stephanians in the university’s History (Masters) classes: They would appear cut above the rest. Not because of their intellectuality, but because of their attitude. They believed they were different. They were the ‘brown sahibs’ among us. They believed it. Quite pathetically, the rest of us believed that too.
Looking at those bright but largely entitled and elitist students of St Stephen’s, I could understand why the college became the hub of Naxalism in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The Stephen’s high walls had cut its students off from the mundane realities of life. What we encountered daily as a way of life would come to them as discovery. Because the students, mostly hailing from privileged backgrounds, lived most of their lives in a bubble which was easy for a radical professor/activist to burst. All they needed was one radical teacher, and the college had quite a few at that time to mould these young, bright romantics. They had it easy all their lives, now they wanted to do something big and adventurous. This explains Stephen’s heady, but short-lived romance with Naxalism.
It so happened that in my first job in a newspaper, The Pioneer, in the early 2000s, there was a regular columnist who was among the early converts. Ajoy Bose was sent to Delhi by his bureaucrat father, worried about his son getting infected with the virus of Naxalism that had then engulfed the campuses of Calcutta. But as fate would have it, St Stephen’s too had by then become the hotbed of young students who adored Chairman Mao and believed in Maoism’s manifest destiny!
In an article written much later, Bose recalled his journey to Bihar, along with fellow Stephanians, in a “dirty, crowded, unreserved compartment” to forward the cause of Naxalism. “Despite the stench and shoving, all of us felt a wonderful empathy towards the grimy peasants that packed the compartment. We felt we were finally in touch with the real Indian masses with whom we were to make a revolution,” he wrote. These young idealists were in for a surprise when they reached their destination. They were told by their local comrades, much to their mortification, that the “grimy peasants” with whom they shared warm bonding in the train were actually “the local landlords we were supposed to annihilate”!
Rabindra Ray, himself a Stephanian and an early convert, in his seminal book, The Naxalite and Their Ideology, locates the roots of the Naxalite phenomenon not in the poverty of the labouring rural population, but in the psychological traumas of the urban educated youth. Though the epicentre of the insurgency and its cadre are primarily rural, it was the intelligentsia that provided legitimacy and respectability to an otherwise nihilistic ideology.
St Stephen’s core problem lies in its elitism and the sense of entitlement, which ironically also made it one of the most sought-after educational institutions in the country. Its very name became aspirational. But it was this elitism that got St Stephen’s on the wrong foot vis-a-vis Naxalism. And this very elitism is today making it wary of New India, which is assertive about its identity, proud of its roots, and ambitious about the future.
The college got it wrong in the past, and yet thrived. But today, as India is fast shedding its colonial baggage, it may find itself redundant, out of sync with today’s realities, and caught in a colonial time warp. The problem with St Stephen’s College, sadly, isn’t just confined to cancel culture. It’s very DNA is a problem.
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