Technical Students' Politics in Orissa: Problems and Prospects

Technical Universities(which include about a hundred colleges in private sector and only three in public sector) in Orissa are not allowed to have any official students’ Unions. There were, and still are, long debates on whether students should “enter” politics or not among the bourgeois intellectuals and politicians. This, ridiculous notion of “entering” politics is popular among the masses in front of whom, the State, through its Ideological Apparatuses, has been able to pose politics as something external to the very being of the masses, creating an impasse for many issues to be interiorised and keeping in-tact the politics of re-presentation.

The months of January and February are months of ‘festivals’ in Universities. Students organize and participate in cultural events. What is seen there clearly, is a domination of bourgeois hegemony. Capital articulates dissent so as to atomise individuals lending them the spirit of capitalism – competition. Consciousness of class is, through various means, attempted to be de-limited. The less articulated finds its expression in the totality of cultural formation in these Universities which include alcoholism and dope.

‘Primitive accumulation of capital’ at the moment of reproduction of labour-power is the subsumption of labour by capital at these concrete instances. Labour’s cry against this subsumption cannot be articulated by the morality of the working class at other subaltern locations but this cry is being commodified and sold at other loci of capital’s extraction of surplus value. (Several companies fund these Jan-Feb events in order to get advertised and consumerise the University more and more). The media also does the dual task – extraction of surplus value from the cry of labour and fragmenting labour into sociological antagonists.

There have been, but, attempts by groups to form associations in these Universities and these attempts crop up every now and then. There have been the Technical Students’ Federation by students of Biju Pattanayak University of Technology and most recently, students of Siksha ‘o’ Anusandhan University tried to associate (with leaders of former movement against the Government’s declaration to withdraw deemed University status taking the lead) and had their elections. In the light of re-presentative democratic politics, these can be seen as being infiltrated by political parties and individual aspirations of leaders of the movements – something that the bourgeois Ideology has as its problematic; but to see through the prism of politics of class, these are spontaneous anti-capitalist outbursts of labour. These

“engender(s) splendid shoots of idealism, comradely solidarity and self-sacrifice but at the same time individual struggle for existence[…]and the corrupting influence of the bourgeois parties do not permit these splendid shoots to develop fully. For all that, in spite of his remaining philistinely egoistic, and without exceeding in ‘human’ worth the average representative of the bourgeois classes, the average worker knows from experience that his simplest and natural desires can be satisfied only on the ruins of the capitalist system. ”[1]

[1] Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, Aakar Books, 2005, New Delhi, Pp. 76.