Nation and its students: Reflections on educational activism from a public university in Delhi, India

Abstract

This article examines contemporary facets of student mobilization that unfolded with the introduction of the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 (CAA). Taking cues from a premier public university in India, the article explores how CAA-driven activism enabled the political socialization of students, and how such a process was entangled with their identities and ideologies. It provides an ethnographic description of student mobilizations for and against the amended citizenship laws to show that (1) the space of the university has witnessed a steady resurgence insofar as the questions of nationalism and nation-building are concerned, (2) higher education in India is at a paradoxical crossroads, and is traversing through rapid neoliberalisation and burgeoning religious nationalism, and (3) ‘competing nationalisms’ between student organizations are on display, where each group believes that their idea of the nation is more suitable than another. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual armory, the article’s contribution lies in arguing that campus activism leads to the formation of dispositions that enable and assist in the production of political capital among student activists. It concludes that the university then serves as a platform and creates further pathways for accumulating such capital.