New Delhi, July 18: If the open-air lectures made up her mind, Che Guevara's picture confirmed what Mayane Bueno already knew. JNU was the place to study.
"My Indian friends told me the university is closely linked to social movements," said the student from Brazil.
Bueno enrolled for a master's in sociology as Jawaharlal Nehru University today started admitting a fresh batch for the new academic year, under pouring rain.
Bueno's batch will be the first to join since the sedition controversy in February triggered a police crackdown and sent three students to jail over an event to commemorate executed Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru.
More than 2,100 seats are on offer at JNU's 10 schools and four independent academic centres. They include undergraduate and postgraduate courses in science and humanities, apart from MPhil and PhD programmes. Over the next month, the seats will be filled up based on entrance exams and interview results.
The varsity has received 76,091 applications, a marginal drop of 4.5 per cent from last year.
Bueno said she was drawn to JNU by the open-air lectures on nationalism and freedom by teachers who took part in the protests against the action on the students.
"I am a student of anthropology and I came to India on an internship in 2014 to learn about its people and how they think. I saw the lectures of sociology professor Vivek Kumar and many others on YouTube and I applied for an MA in sociology," she said.
Bueno had walked into an admission assistance kiosk of the CPIML-Liberation backed All India Students Association after seeing a picture of the Argentine revolutionary. "Che is our hero in South America," she said. "I don't really understand what happened in JNU, with students being arrested. But I believe in more power to people rather than the State."
Admissions this year have been centralised at the JNU's convention centre so that most of the formalities can be completed under one roof. Some student activists claimed this was a ploy by the authorities to deny them the opportunity of helping the new students and win their support. "There is no space to interact and help people," said Satarupa Chakraborty of the SFI, the CPM's student wing.
Leaders of smaller groups, like the Congress-backed NSUI, seemed pleased. "There's no undue advantage to the communists or the sanghis. We can interact with the students all year round," said Sunny Dhiman, media in charge of the NSUI's JNU unit.
JNU student union joint secretary Saurabh Sharma of the ABVP, the Sangh's student arm, said there were 5,500 hostel rooms but around 500 students wouldn't get rooms on the campus immediately. "We are here to help students who don't get rooms by putting them up in our rooms," Sharma said. There are around 8,000 students in JNU now.
Parents appeared pleased with whatever help student leaders gave them. "My daughter told me this is the best place to study Arabic," said Ajay Bansal from Faridabad whose daughter has enrolled for a five-year integrated BA-MA programme in Arabic. "I was nervous because of all that has happened... but the campus looks safe."
Alpana, who has an MTech from Birla Institute of Technology in Mesra, Jharkhand, is joining a PhD programme in the school of computer and systems sciences. "I am here to study, not do politics," she said.
But student activism appears to have changed at least one young mind. "I have never done any politics but I got interested in JNU after it was in the news," said a PhD student from Bihar.
