Education during polarization: investigating the family experiences of students of NLM and MLN

In recent years, two central (federally funded) universities in India have consistently been in the limelight due to student-led activism on campus, garnering significant negative political and media attention. While one is left-leaning political affiliation, the other one takes the spotlight for being a minority institution. This chapter examines how, in the Indian subcontinent, an individual's choice of higher education and eventual career is primarily shaped by their family and, by extension, the family's political socialization. It uses 16 semi-structured interviews between students from both institutions to study their experiences at the epicenter of India's polarizing context. Through a qualitative thematic analysis of their responses, we study the tendency to sustain or appease one's family as a means of social acceptance and how it plays a significant role in ensuring kinship ties, where deviance is not merely frowned upon but also leads to severe consequences. By doing so, we aim to identify the family dynamics that arise from a student's educational choices as a member of an “otherized” institution. This will extend the scope of studying polarizing family dynamics in the South-Asian context.