Education: Nursery for Anarchy

Trying to justify his tortuous foreign policy to the rest of the world, India’s Prime Minister Nehru was already suffering embarrassment. But last week he ran into embarrassment of a different kind. When he tried to deliver an address to 50,000 students in Calcutta, his audience began yelling, pushing and shoving until Nehru finally threatened to leave. Eventually, he managed to finish his speech. But he had lived through one more eruption of one of India’s most perplexing problems. In recent years, India’s students and young people have become the nation’s most consistent troublemakers.

Before independence, student riots and demonstrations—as long as they were against the British—had the backing of a powerful voice. “In a country groaning under foreign rule,” said Mahatma Gandhi, “it is impossible to prevent students from taking part in movements for national freedom.” Then the foreign rule ended; but the riots, strikes and demonstrations kept right on. Says one professor: “The university today has become a nursery for anarchistic values.”

Almost anything can set the students off. In Aligarh five years ago, they killed a teacher who refused to promote those who had failed their exams. In 1953 Allahabad students raided the railway station, sabotaged trains, fired public buildings. Last year, when eight students were dismissed after another riot, the rest of the student body caused so much trouble that the university closed for a month. In the state of Bihar students launched a four-day reign of terror because the State Transport Authority refused to grant them special bus fares. They hurled bricks at police, raided a bank, burned the national flag. When the police finally opened fire, five people were killed. This fall more riots started at Aligarh, resulted in 24 deaths.

Why do India’s youth carry on so? Some officials insist that they are victims of Communist agitation. Anthropologists at Calcutta University have pointed out that the real cause is poverty: one in three students in Bengal comes from a family with an income of only $6 a month.

Of all the causes of the intransigence, the most telling is perhaps the persistent perversion of Gandhi’s teaching. Says Vice Chancellor Rai Bahadur Syamnandan Sa-haya at Bihar University: “Students did participate in our political agitations against Britain . . . This psychology which developed and grew for 25 years will take some time to eradicate.”