Finding a Politics of Our Own: Why I Choose ASA Beyond Right and Left Campus Politics

I come from a Dalit community in a village in Kalyana Karnataka (formerly Hyderabad-Karnataka), a region that has historically been underdeveloped. For someone like me, joining a Central University was not merely an academic achievement. It meant breaking through economic and cultural barriers that had been there long before I was born. Entering such a place raises questions of survival. For students from groups that are not in the mainstream, getting in is only the first part of the fight. The harder part is surviving in a place where language, culture, social connections, and political ideas are shaped, often tacitly. A university may say it is democratic and forward-thinking, but it is not separate from society: caste, class, religion, gender and power do not disappear at the university gate; they come with us. The emergence of student politics in academic institutions makes these issues harder to ignore because it forces every group on campus to show, in action, what kind of university they want.

Pondicherry University (PU) has a long history of student politics. However, PU student politics rarely gets discussed at the national level the way JNU’s does, or HCUs, Delhi Universities, or TISSs do. The university has a mix of organizations. Left, Right, Congress-aligned, and independent. That you find elsewhere, but its politics work differently and from the outside the campus can seem almost apolitical. That impression is misleading.

PU was created by an Act of Parliament in 1985. Its student politics has not been the same all the time since then; the level of organized student politics has depended a lot on whether the university was holding council elections during a particular time. For roughly its first two decades, it stayed a quiet, low-profile institution, with no documented student politics to speak of. Under Vice-Chancellor J.A.K. Tareen (2007-2012), organised political activity was actively discouraged, and council elections were not held for extended periods, pushing whatever politics existed underground.

Elections became more frequent starting in the middle of the 2010s, and during this time the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA) became a strong presence on campus. This was also the time when the Students Federation of India (SFI), the student wing of the CPI(M), built a strong base at PU. This dominance was aided by the absence of AISA (CPI-ML’s student wing) and AISF (CPI’s student wing), which left SFI as the only major Left organisation on campus. SFI’s base has been reinforced by the large number of students from Kerala, where the CPI(M) has deep roots.

After the Students’ Council election of September 2019 in which an SFI-led alliance won 10 of the 11 council seats, the university did not hold another council election for five years. The COVID-19 pandemic and, in the view of many students, an administration disinclined to encourage organised student politics under a BJP-led central government, combined to keep elections suspended until December 2024. Pondicherry University is arguably now in a third phase of its student politics: one marked by the growing presence of ABVP, driven in part by an increase in students from northern India following the introduction of CUET, even as SFI continues to hold its ground.

In this scenario, it is hard for students from Dalit and Adivasi backgrounds to fit into these parties. They also face pressure to join one of the two dominant organisations, because their classmates and hostel-mates already belong to one or the other. Besides this, NSUI is another organisation some join because their family already has a Congress background, and others join because they see it as a path into electoral politics with the INC after they leave the university.

In my case, I joined PU already carrying a background in the Ambedkarite student movement from my previous university, GKVK, Bangalore, and having worked with the Dalit movement in Karnataka, so it was easy to find and join ASA and become an active member. However, during my initial days, SFI tried to recruit me; I resisted the pressure, rejected their majoritarian politics, and did not fall for the incentives they offered. But this is not the case for most first-generation students entering the university. These organisations often hijack them, turning them into foot soldiers by subjecting them to the same pressure. Dalit and Adivasi students are usually well aware of their ideological enemies, the RSS and ABVP, but in resisting them, they often end up falling into the trap of SFI instead, since it is the only major Left organisation standing in that space.

Research tracing the history of Ambedkarite student movements after independence across campuses shows that the same struggle happens in many universities. ASA started at Hyderabad Central University in the 1990s on a campus where the Left’s SFI already had power. One fact that researchers keep returning to is that Rohith Vemula moved from SFI to ASA before he died in 2016. Seen by many as evidence that the Left, even when it wins every election, still does not make caste the main focus of its politics. The sociologist Kristina Garalytė, who spent months studying Dalit student activism at JNU, Osmania, and the English and Foreign Languages University, found the same problem on every campus: Dalit students had to create their own space. Statues of Ambedkar and Phule, “beef festivals” at Osmania and Hyderabad. Because the Left and the main political groups around them simply did not make caste a serious topic. A recent study of Ambedkarite student movements since independence, conducted by the researcher Amit Kumar Saurabh, makes the same point across the country: Dalit student politics has had to struggle for space against a common belief on both sides. Nation first for the Right, class first for the Left.

This is not a personal problem with the Left; it is a position that Ambedkar laid out in precise detail nearly ninety years before SFI ever set foot on PU campus. In Annihilation of Caste (1936), he criticized the socialists of his time, arguing that they assumed property was the source of power in India as it was in Europe at the time but that this was a mistake. Caste, he said, was a system of power in itself, one that shaped work, respect and relationships long before capitalism existed. A politics that treats caste as part of class, to be dealt with after economic issues are solved, repeats the mistake.

At PU, that error is not theoretical. SFI has led the students’ council for most of the years PU has run elections, yet that leadership has rarely translated into real representation for Dalit and Adivasi students: Departments still can’t fill their SC/ST seats, partly because the reservation rule itself works against them: an SC seat only kicks in at the fourth admission, an ST seat at the eighth. The tuition fee used to be the first wall, PU collecting the full amount on the spot, UGC rules about waiting for scholarships ignored. That wall came down only because ASA fought for and won a three-month relaxation, not because SFI’s council ever raised it. The hostel hasn’t come down the same way; advance mess and hostel charges still come in before the scholarship does; none of these has ever been SFI’s central demand, even in the years it held the numbers to make them so.

On ideological questions, SFI has been no more consistent. It organises religious and Brahminical festivals on campus under the label of "cultural" or "regional" programming, and it has never systematically opposed the RSS, ABVP, or ABRSM activity that runs through the campus temple year-round: Ram Navami, Ganesh Chaturthi, Holi, and the rest come and go largely unchallenged. What opposition SFI does offer tends to surface around election season, as visible but short-lived protests pitched at the general student body, rather than as a sustained position held between elections. AISA and AISF, which might have offered a different kind of Left politics, have no real presence at PU at all, which leaves SFI as the only Left option on campus, and leaves Dalit and Adivasi students choosing, in effect, between SFI and ABVP, with no Left alternative that puts caste at the centre.

For us, caste is not something we learn about in a class. It is part of our lives in our villages, families, schools, jobs, and social interactions. It decides who is respected, who is left out, whose work is valued and whose voice is doubted.

The name Rohith Vemula always comes up when we talk about students from backgrounds outside the mainstream of higher education. His death made many of us face the truth of being excluded by institutions. Rohith came into a university of dreams and his own thoughts, but his experience showed how an institution can make a student feel like they don’t belong. For many of us, he was not a name on a protest sign; his story felt very close, and it changed how we saw Ambedkarite student groups across the country.

This is where the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA) became important to me. (I joined ASA in 2024, soon after arriving at Pondicherry University, already carrying an Ambedkarite political formation from Karnataka. Within months I was elected General Secretary, and in the 2024-25 council election I won the seat from the School of Life Sciences under the ASA banner.)

ASA was not another student group fighting for power. It gave us a way to think about politics through Ambedkar, Phule, Kanshi Ram, and the wider anti-caste movement, which helped us understand the university from the point of view of those who are left out. This aligns with how such groups have worked in universities: as places where students who have been left out can see themselves as political beings, not just as people getting something from an institution that was not built for them.

Under a government led by the BJP, the influence of the Sangh Parivar has become increasingly visible in institutions and schools, and Pondicherry University is no exception. The ABVP, an organization linked to the RSS, has been active on campus.

Recently, the presence of the Akhil Bharatiya Rashtriya Shaikshik Mahasangh (ABRSM) among university teachers and its work with the university have also become part of the campus scene, with the university holding events with ABRSM and ABRSM-PU having its own leaders.

The worry is not one organization or one idea. It is when political influence starts to work through levels at once: student groups, teacher networks, university events, administrative rules and policies all supporting each other.

Pondicherry University has already had times that show how easily student freedom can be lost. In 2019, students protested after the Vice-Chancellor was seen with ABVP members wearing “Modi Again” shirts at a campus event featuring a speaker from a group linked to the RSS, and ASA was among the groups that spoke out. In 2024, a student play titled Somayanam, performed at a departmental event, faced protests by the ABVP and a police case against the students for allegedly hurting religious feelings. The university launched an investigation, and the head of the department stepped down. The university has also put in place rules for asking permission before meetings and protests, and a 2025 code of conduct was criticized for parts that could punish protests and allow checking students’ social media. More recently, on September 25, 2026, ASA at Pondicherry University organised a screening of the documentary Prisoner No. 626710 is Present, about Umar Khalid, with the university authorities’ permission. ABVP opposed the screening. ABVP members physically attacked and threatened ASA members at the event. NSUI, SFI, and msf joined ASA in solidarity during the clash.

These are not just problems for one university. For academic freedom across the country. The 2025 update of the V-Dem Institute’s Academic Freedom Index ranked India 156th out of 179 countries, marking one of the largest declines in the index over the last decade.⁶ The index looks at the freedom to conduct research and teach, exchange ideas, and for universities to keep campuses free and to express culture and ideas. These are not just ideas for students; they determine whether a student can question those in charge, whether a teacher can teach without pressure, whether a university can work on its own, and whether speaking out is seen as part of learning rather than a problem to be punished.

Academic freedom cannot be discussed without considering power. The right to speak is not the same for all people. A student who comes from a group that has social advantages usually has family, money and support from organizations when they face pressure because of their ideas. For a student who is Dalit, Adivasi, or Bahujan and has made it into a Central University after many years of exclusion from school, the school can be one of the few places where they find confidence in their social and intellectual abilities. When that place becomes unfriendly to opinions, the effect is more than just the loss of an activity. It becomes a question of whether the student feels they fit into the school at all.

This is why I do not see the role of ASA as being about politics in the university elections. Its existence also helped protect a space for political ideas. On a campus increasingly shaped by battles, top-down control, and limits on what people can say, ASA gave students who are not in the majority a place to say that we are not just taking advantage of the university. We are also people with the right to question it.

The history of student politics at Pondicherry University shows that people can stand together. When something threatens all students, different groups set their differences aside and act together. This happens through Joint Action Committees, or JACs. JAC is simple. It’s not a merger of organisations, and it doesn’t erase their differences. It’s a temporary alliance, built around one specific demand. Different student groups campaign together through protests, petitions, and pressure on the administration until that one issue is resolved. Once it is, each group goes back to functioning on its own.

During my time in 2025. Pondicherry University issued a new proctorial notification, a rule that gave the administration much broader authority to discipline students. Student groups across the board saw it as anti-constitutional, anti-democratic, and anti-student, because it threatened the basic right to organise and dissent on campus. Five organisations, ASA, the Fraternity Movement, msf, AISF, and NSUI, came together and formed a JAC against it. SFI, which was leading the students’ council at the time, was invited to join more than once. It refused every time. That is something that ASA taught me directly. We can stand together in resistance without all of us being the same

When you come from a Dalit or Adivasi community, you go to the university carrying more than a degree or a list of your work. You carry your language, your food, your jokes, your music, your memories, your culture and the way you see life. In an unfamiliar place, you look for people who understand your jokes without you having to explain them. You look for people who know why a certain food tastes like home. You look for people who speak your language without making you feel bad. You look for people who understand your feelings and the things from your childhood that shaped you. You look for people with whom you do not have to explain who you are or why you are the way you’re.

ASA became a place like that for me. It was not a political place but also a social and emotional one. There I could just be myself. There were meetings and protests, but also friendship, laughter, sharing food, arguments, songs and long talks. This part of student politics is often forgotten. People do not join movements only because they read theory. Sometimes they join because they feel lonely, because they are angry, because they are looking for people who understand them or because they want to fight something that hurt them. Sometimes, for a time, they find a group where they do not have to explain who they are or why they are the way they are. That was one of the important things I found at ASA.

My time at ASA taught me that just being seen is not enough. We need the power to make decisions. We need the freedom to organize, to disagree, to work together without giving up our independence and to talk about caste even when it makes other groups uncomfortable. We also need the courage to say no when schools start valuing following rules over thinking for ourselves.

Looking back, ASA was not a part of my time at university. It was where I learned that politics is not always about winning. Sometimes it is about not disappearing. It is about keeping a voice alive when everything around you says to stay quiet. It is about building a group when the school makes you feel alone. It is about remembering Babasaheb not through his pictures and statues but through his belief in dignity, equality, liberty and brotherhood. Maybe that is what my time at ASA finally taught me.