Does universality of contradictions - enunciated by Mao Zedong in On Contradiction - hold good in student politics in India today, given that a high-voltage saffron ideology is fast occupying the space among students and the youth? If the answer is in the affirmative, why isn't there a retaliation? Forget about an equal and opposite response from the Left. What about democratic and secular counter-expression?

I have in mind the huge procession with the slogan, 'Hok Kolorob', in September 2014 beginning from Jadavpur University, when over one hundred thousand students came out, defying torrential rain, to protest against a brutal police assault on peaceful protesters. Many parents joined the march. Some of these veterans were deeply involved in the Naxalite movement in the early 1970s. When they were in their youth, their parents couldn't think of sympathizing with their children. On the contrary, they left no stone unturned to discourage their sons (daughters too, albeit fewer in number) from heeding Charu Mazumdar's call to 'turn the 70s into a decade of revolution'.

Sadly enough, not even one per cent of the 'Hok Kolorob' masses showed the courage to return to the streets to protest against the alleged conspiracy of the sangh parivar that had emboldened the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad to intimidate minorities and secular democrats. About the Left, the less said the better. Small groups of intellectuals, most of them past their youth, were the only exception.

But why are the 'Hok Kolorob' indoors? Sociologists need to think and enlighten us on this matter. This evasiveness is a consequence of blatant careerism encouraged by the academia and university management. Remember Jean Genet's famous speech at a gathering in Yale University on May Day in 1970. "I will not forget the Universities. The Universities. They teach you a false culture in which the only recognised values are quantitative. The University is not content to turn you into a digit within a large number - for example when they train five thousand engineers - it cultivates in you the need for security, for tranquility and quite naturally it educates you to serve your bosses, and beyond them politicians although you are well aware of their intellectual mediocrity."

The speech by the French literary giant was translated by the then firebrand communist leader and women's liberation crusader, Angela Davis. Jean Paul Sartre wrote a classic biography - Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr - a narrative of the creative intellectual who was once a thief and a convict and, later, a semi-legendary figure whose influence has grown stronger with time.

The indictment of the regressive role of academia grows abroad from within. Think of the Canadian academic, Jordan Bernt Peterson, a clinical psychologist and tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, who admitted candidly - "We're teaching university students lies, and pandering to them, and I see that as counterproductive." He thinks that "huge swathes of the university are irrevocably corrupted: sociology, gone; anthropology, gone; history, big chunks of it are gone, the classics, literature, social work, political science in many places, and that doesn't cover women's studies, ethnic studies."

We need another Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to give a call to students - education can wait but the imperative for barricading the saffron-tinged neo-fascism cannot. It's time for libertarians among the young to emulate the Republicans of Spain of the 1930s. No pasaran.