K A Shaji
The other day, when News9 invited me to its NewsHour discussion, I thought we would be talking about hi one of the many raging political controversies that are currently making Kerala’s political landscape unusually vibrant and turbulent.

Instead, I was asked to discuss the ABVP’s clean sweep at Government Sanskrit College, Tripunithura.

The result was being celebrated across the Sangh Parivar as though Kerala’s campuses had suddenly turned saffron.

I looked at it differently.

The ABVP won all 12 seats. But the election was uncontested. SFI and KSU did not field candidates for most of the seats. The college itself has a very small and declining student population.

So what exactly are we celebrating as a political earthquake?

For me, the real story begins where the election result ends.

Why did SFI and KSU have so few candidates?

I believe the answer has much more to do with the changing aspirations of Kerala’s students than with any sudden ideological conversion of an entire campus.

Kerala’s young people are becoming ruthlessly practical about education.

They want a degree that can take them to a job, a competitive examination, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi, Dubai, Europe, America or somewhere else in the world.

They are asking a brutally simple question:

What will this degree do for my life?

Sanskrit illustrates the problem perfectly.

I am not against Sanskrit. I strongly believe that Sanskrit’s enormous literary, philosophical and intellectual heritage must be preserved, researched, translated and taught.

But we also have to be honest.

Sanskrit has very limited direct employment opportunities in today’s economy. The same crisis is affecting several traditional language courses, sections of the humanities and even some conventional science and engineering programmes.

Students are voting with their admission forms.

And this is where the Tripunithura story becomes politically interesting.

An organisation like ABVP has an ideological and cultural motivation to enter a Sanskrit institution and build a presence there. Other organisations may simply find it increasingly difficult to mobilise students in a course that attracts fewer young people.

That does not automatically mean a saffron wave. It can also mean that one organisation is occupying a space others have stopped contesting.

There is a huge difference between the two.

I remembered EMS Namboodiripad during the discussion. He had questioned the need for a separate Sanskrit university, arguing that education must remain connected to the material realities and everyday struggles of ordinary people.

His position can certainly be debated.

But the question he raised has not disappeared.

How do we preserve an ancient intellectual tradition without turning it into an isolated academic island?

Kerala eventually established Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit. Ironically, the university itself has moved far beyond Sanskrit alone. It now encompasses humanities, social sciences, languages, philosophy, psychology, geography, music, theatre and several other disciplines.

That, to me, points towards the future.

I don’t want Sanskrit to disappear.

I don’t want Sanskrit to become the property of the Sangh Parivar either.

I want Sanskrit to belong to everyone.

Let us have strong Sanskrit departments and research centres. Let us teach it alongside linguistics, philosophy, archaeology, history, comparative literature, manuscript studies, translation, digital humanities and cultural studies.

Let Sanskrit engage with the modern world.

Let students study it because they want to understand one of India’s great intellectual traditions, not because a political organisation has turned it into a badge of cultural nationalism.

Because once a language becomes a political possession, something precious is lost.

Sanskrit is much bigger than Hindutva.

And India’s civilisational heritage is much bigger than any political organisation.

So yes, ABVP can celebrate Tripunithura.

They won.

But let’s not turn an uncontested victory in a small, declining Sanskrit college into evidence of the political transformation of Kerala’s campuses.

ABVP has won Tripunithura. It has not won Kerala.

The real story is elsewhere.

It is about a generation of Kerala students making hard choices in a brutal employment market.

It is about declining interest in courses that no longer promise a viable livelihood.

It is about student organisations losing their traditional constituencies.

And it is about an ideologically committed organisation recognising opportunities in spaces others have quietly abandoned.

That is the political story I see in Tripunithura.

And that story is far more complicated, and far more interesting, than simply declaring a saffron victory.

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