Gangwars in campus: How it becomes the last blow to student freedom

Last Friday(13th Nov 2009), when i was chatting to a friend, incidentally he mentioned that college is suspended indefinitely. I was amazed to hear that since its long time my old college had any serious problem to shut themselves down. Before everyone was saying the smooth running of college is impaired by so called political(?) activities of student. Management brought a new principal to crunch the political activities and he was able to crush the activities to a large extend(mainly by helping only one gang). So, for last two years, gang wars of the scale mentioned here was absent in the college. Only small scale scratchings were there.

I simply asked him what happened. The reply was interesting. In a college, where authorities now claim that there are no political activities which impaired the academic and cultural activities, a new gang war happened. A new gang of students identifying themselves as “Amigoz” were beaten up by students of Mechanical Engineering dept.(interestingly, amigo is the spanish for Friend and friends was the name of the Mechanical sympathisers when i was in college). What happened is pretty simple, the so called “amigoz” decided to celebrate “amigo day” on 12th of November(technically “amigo day” or “Día del Amigo” or “friends day” is on July 20th). I don’t exactly know how. May be some cultural event or something like that and it seems Mechanical students tried to gate crash it. But it seems some local amigos(read friends) and police deflected them(as an effect the “all mighty” mechanicals lost their face :)). So the p***** of mechanicals decided to take revenge on the amigoz and did what any other 18 year old will usually do. They just walked into the ECE block and bashed up any “amigoz” or their amigos. There were many injuries and a proud mech. soldier(lowest rank in old NY gangs) was injured from a broken window and got admitted in hospital too. As usual police arrived after the show. Now comes the better part, the sympathisers of “amigoz” in the locality warned students and management promptly suspended the college activities.

Now, everyone might be thinking what is so big in this! Actually nothing, its the normal stuff happening in any college around Kerala, sometimes it comes with the label of a political clash and becomes 40pt headlines in newspapers. Otherwise it ends up like this. I can’t spot any difference between the clashes in Nov 2007 and this. But then it was a big reason for college to convince themselves and any authority that elections to the student bodies in college and the political(?) activity related to it was the root cause.Politics and student freedom were cursed and made look like the biggest daemon haunting the college.

There were no elections held to the student union and as an effect no cultural activities were planned or conducted for last two years(still management is collecting the 500 Rs. for the non existing union activity from every student!). That means, as an effect of some gang wars, which had no remote relation to any political activity, the only student body in college got extinct, saying this will end all the fights in the campus. Did anything happened to the gang wars, no. So, who are the ultimate losers, every student of the college!

This incident just shows that, banning of the political activity in college and taking strong measures against exercising any democratic freedom haven’t changed the situation even a little, so now i can’t understand why college authorities is not ready to go forward with elections to the student body. I think the answer is, its not fights they fear. Its that, students participating in democratic activities might realize that they have some basic rights and might stand for it. Authorities fear the days when a student decides to stand up for what is his.

P.S: If i haven’t got any facts right here, just let me know, i will try to fix it.
P.S1: everything i wrote here are my thoughts, feelings and observations everyone has a right to disagree with it.

Tags: campuspolitics, gang wars, student freedom