November 07, 2026

RSS Enters The Hitherto Out Of Bounds, Left Bastion Of Jadavpur University

By Linus Garg
First publised on 2026-05-13 15:16:52

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For decades, the sprawling 60-acre campus of Jadavpur University in south Kolkata was effectively terra incognita for the RSS. Its walls were covered in red graffiti, its corridors echoed with Marxist sloganeering, and its student politics were dominated by outfits that treated the Sangh Parivar as the ideological enemy. That a shakha of the RSS should now be held on its football ground, openly, with drills and Bauddhik sessions beginning at 6.30 in the morning, is not merely a campus event. It is a political earthquake whose tremors will be felt across West Bengal for years.

Members of the RSS-backed West Bengal University Karmachari Parishad held drills and other shakha activities at the football ground of Jadavpur University, signalling the saffron camp's growing footprint in an institution long seen as a Left bastion. The Parishad's secretary, Palash Maji, wasted no time in making the ideological intent explicit: the campus, he declared, would be "re-nationalised" and "freed from Maoist influence." This was followed by a rally by pro-RSS employees, during which participants carrying saffron flags marched from the Arts-Science intersection to Aurobindo Bhavan, raising slogans. Meanwhile, the Akhil Bharatiya Rashtriya Shikshak Mahasangh (ABRSM), an RSS-affiliated teachers' body, met Vice-Chancellor Chiranjib Bhattacharjee seeking recognition and demanding stricter discipline on the campus. And in a gesture heavy with symbolism, a photo of BJP ideologue Syama Prasad Mookerjee was placed on the walls of the university vice-chancellor's room, a portrait that had conspicuously been absent before.

None of this happened in a vacuum.

The shakha on the JU campus is the direct cultural consequence of the BJP's sweeping victory in the 2026 West Bengal assembly elections. BJP candidate Sarbari Mukherjee won the Jadavpur assembly constituency in south Kolkata by 25,773 votes, defeating incumbent TMC MLA Debabrata Majumdar, securing 1,01,283 votes against Majumdar's 75,510. The constituency that houses the university itself has gone saffron. In the broader picture, Suvendu Adhikari defeated Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in her home turf of Bhabanipur as the BJP secured a majority in the state. The political soil that had kept the RSS out of this campus has now fundamentally shifted.

To understand why the Jadavpur moment matters, one must understand what the university has represented in Bengal's imagination. Ranked among India's top universities, ninth among universities and first among state public universities as per the 2025 NIRF rankings, JU has been, for the Left, not merely an educational institution but a citadel of ideological reproduction. Generations of Marxist intellectuals, activists, and cadres were shaped here. The campus's walls, its student union politics, and its faculty culture were all intertwined with a worldview that regarded Hindu nationalist politics as inherently regressive and dangerous. The RSS, in this scheme, was not merely a rival political organisation. It was an ontological threat to the campus's self-image.

This is precisely why the shakha carries such outsized symbolic weight. It declares, with physical visibility, that the RSS is no longer content to remain at the gates. The saffron march from the Arts-Science intersection to Aurobindo Bhavan was not just a show of strength. It was a deliberate act of territorial reclamation. The demand to remove "objectionable" graffiti and the announcement of daily shakhas with physical training and ideological sessions together amount to a comprehensive counter-programme against the Left's decades-long cultural dominance.

Those on the Left and in the liberal intelligentsia will warn, with some justification, that the politicisation of university spaces by any ideological camp is corrosive to academic freedom. They are right to be vigilant. Universities derive their value from the free contest of ideas, not from the imposition of any single ideological frame, saffron or red. The history of Left-dominated campuses in West Bengal is not without its own dark chapters of intimidation, coercion, and the suppression of dissenting voices. If the new dispensation replicates that model under a different flag, it will have learned nothing from what it has displaced.

But the larger truth that this moment illuminates is one of democratic legitimacy and organic political change. The RSS shakha did not arrive through administrative fiat or illegal occupation. It arrived because the political and electoral ground beneath JU has shifted dramatically. The people of Jadavpur constituency, including, one presumes, many connected to the university itself, voted for change. Electoral democracy, when it functions, eventually reshapes institutional culture. What the Left built over decades through political dominance, it cannot expect to preserve forever once that dominance is broken at the ballot box.

The question now is what the BJP and the RSS choose to do with this opening. The temptation to use administrative leverage to drive ideological consolidation will be immense. It must be resisted. The proper response to decades of Left cultural hegemony is not to install a mirror-image saffron hegemony. It is to open the campus to genuine plurality, to allow the full spectrum of political and intellectual opinion to breathe freely, and to let JU's formidable academic reputation be strengthened, not weaponised.

For now, though, the football ground in Jadavpur has made history. The shakha has been held. The Bengal map is being redrawn, not just in Nabanna and Writers' Building, but in the minds and spaces that shape what Bengal thinks of itself.