61.Short Essay and Article on : Students and Politics

Students and Politics

A student is a person, maybe a child or an adult, who pursues studies in an institution or otherwise. Generally, he has to appear in one or the other examination, but that may not always be the case.

The main point is that a student’s primary aim is and should be the pursuit of studies. If that is admitted, then it means as a corollary, that any other aim of the student, even the pursuit of a hobby or participation in sports, must be considered secondary to the pursuit of studies.

As stated above, when even the pursuit of a hobby or participation in sports is for a student a secondary activity, politics can certainly not be regarded as an important activity for a student.

There is a common saying that politics is a dirty game. It is generally believed that the game of politics is mostly pursued by people with crooked minds.

This is as it may, we cannot ignore the fact that at least before Independence politics in India was pursued by persons with highly enlightened minds such as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Lala Lajpat Rai, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Maulana Azad, Sardar Patel, Dr Rajendra Prasad, Sarojini Naidu, etc. While talking of politics as a profession in western countries, Jawaharlal says at one place that there only people with the most brilliant and enlightened minds follow this profession.

In India, the general impression of politicians is that they are crooked people and they want to grind their own axe by hook or by crook.

It is not surprising that these crooked politicians should target the innocent gullible students in schools and colleges to further their own selfish motives. The students are immature. ‘They do not know the pros and cons of politics which is a highly crooked, complex game and is full of booby-traps.

It is generally seen that the students who get trapped in the meshes of politics during their student life, often fail in life and repent bitterly for this horrendous mistake. It is a different matter that during the Independence movement, the students had to assert themselves effectively along with great political personages in the interest of the country.

In the modern age and specifically in the present scenario, it will be the best thing for students to say goodbye to politics, at least until they have grown up adults.