Rationalists are growing rational - and through thick woods one finds a stream astray, So secret that the very sky seems small , I think I will not hang myself today -G. K. Chesterton

We are entering the silly season. February is an irrational month. Butterflies go blind, mistaking human fingers for flower stems. Birds go bonkers, waking you up at dawn from the leafless tree outside the window. Clouds play hide and seek-the days swing wildly from clear morning skies to overcast afternoons. It is the season of anticipation of spring, and the longing is so intense that it melts away the frustrations of squalid reality all around. And next week, college campuses all over the country go to the polls. Students will be electing their leaders for the next two years. This is more important than Friday's Education Day. After all, it has always been the student community that has spearheaded democracy movements and reforms in this country since the seventies.

The right to form free students' unions was won after a fierce struggle. During the students' agitation of 1969, police baton charged students in my village. In police custody, young students wet their polyester half-pants out of fear, and the officers would taunt: "Goats don't deserve democracy." Looking back, the fear of beating was more scary than the actual beating itself. When the cane starts falling on your back, the body automatically anaesthetises itself and goes numb after the first few lashes. It stings, later it hurts, then it starts hardening your resolve. It was this resolve that forced the king to call for a referendum ten years later. Underground political parties had proxies in the student unions even then. When the parties could function more openly, the student bodies became overt extensions of political parties. Campus politics lost some of its idealistic fervor when getting into the students' union emerged as a career option for the suitably inclined.

Instead of being the agents of subversion they were originally meant to be, student protests became a recruiting ground for absorption into the system. Students were at the vanguard of the People's Movement of 1990. But when it succeeded, 'intellectuals' who had bravely worn black-bands of protest got away with a disproportionate share of the credit, and the spoils of victory went completely to the political parties.

All through the nineties, students remained confused. They were being asked to forsake politics by the very same leaders who had urged them to march on the barricades a few years earlier. There was Kishunji of all people urging students to eschew politics. After all, as a maverick democracy fighter he was the main inspiration behind the formation of Nepal Students Union in the late sixties. It appeared as if the Nepali Congress leadership took on the Francis Fukuyama doctrine: the new mantra was the market and it needed consumers, not protesters.

In retrospect, it appears kind of natural that some idealistic youth strayed into the path of violence. When legitimate avenues of protests are monopolised by the agents of status quo, seekers of change take short-cuts. The insidious power of the market is more maddening, a weak and ineffective government more oppressive, and an intolerant intellectual climate more frustrating than even the tyrannies of an autocratic regime. However, resorting to violence to resist such an amalgam of forces in the manner of the Maoists is a fatal exercise in futility.

The energy needed to sustain the struggle for change is lost in the mindless violence of armed insurgencies. On the other hand, students' wings parroting the party line ties down the movement for change. The assertion of the New Left that university education in a bourgeois society is the preparation of a privileged minority for a return to the ruling class is not without some merit. It is campus politics that frees students from this trap.

Unlike the Naxalite-inspired Jhapali communists of the seventies who urged students to boycott bourgeois education, BP Koirala used to point out that learning brought us to the frontlines of the battle for the establishment of true social democracy. What he often left unsaid was that universities were conveyor belts mass-producing conformists-nothing worthwhile is ever taught in classrooms. Students have to do their learning all by themselves, and struggle for the change they desire. Campus politics can provide such an opportunity of learning only when it can be freed from the stifling control of political parties.

The urge to break free from the party yoke is being heard on across campuses these days. Nearly everywhere, there are the 'official' candidates and the 'free' ones. Having been in the thick of it once upon a time, I know that students always choose the most deserving. It's only because of outside interference that the choice gets distorted. When that starts happening too often, as it does on university campuses in India, students politics too gets criminalised. Our mainstream political parties are morally bankrupt and do not seem to have a cause left to fight for anymore. The mess in the ruling party is revolting enough, but just look at the way opposition parties are openly salivating for power. Maybe it is from here, on college campuses festooned with banners and slogans, that the real impetus for change and reform will come. Can we dare to hope that it will be students who will teach teachers? That the future will show the past which way to go?

The melancholy of February will soon blow away, and take the haze of doubt with it. Leafless trees aren't lifeless, they will soon turn green.