_“If they put us in chains, we will raise voice more, because democracy has to be practised every day. If they beat us down, misbehave with us, we will only entrench our position.” (Sung by Silvi, a German student in JNU)_
The incidents that happened recently at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi and the reactions to them raise plenty of thoughts. I first thought they could happen only in the land of the absurd. Anyway, what happened should not have happened in a modern democratic country.
Rabindranath Tagore had said in a thesis (1917) on Indian nationalism that “my countrymen will gain their India only when they fight the education which teaches that a country is greater than the ideals of humanity”.
Jawaharlal Nehru had said that a university must stand for high ideals such as tolerance, reason, humanism, adventure of ideas and the search for truth. The university that bore his name had realised that dream to a great extent, where many ideas clashed freely, conservative concepts about caste, gender and class were questioned regularly, people learned to handle differences through debates and differentiate protest from hatred.
Irrespective of the party, its students, and many times teachers too, have questioned injustice and suppression. They have reacted to many incidents involving many parties, such as the emergency, the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, the eviction by the communist government in Nandigram and the pogrom in Gujarat.
The latest protest involving Kanhaiya Kumar is part of that series. The way Afzal Guru was hanged has been severely criticised not only by individuals like Shashi Tharoor, Arundhati Roy, justice Markandeya Katju and Delhi high court chief justice A.P. Shah, but also by the PDP, which is now in alliance with the BJP in Jammu and Kashmir, which had said that it was “a travesty of justice”.
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Then shouldn’t they too be anti-nationals? JNU students raised this issue as part of their campaign against capital punishment, which is now a subject of national debate.
Those who see Kashmiri students speaking in JNU campus as a crime might be considering that Kashmir is not a part of India. Self-determination is a right that we promised when Kashmir was added to India. It so happened that Nehru did not implement it. Is even talking about that promise sedition? Now some people in the BJP say Kanhaiya Kumar is guilty while others say he is not.
Hence, they have identified another student, Umar Khalid. Umar is not a jihadi, but a socialist. But some people who believe that all those with Muslim names are terrorists, did not waste even a moment to link him to terrorist organisations such as Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba.
One allegation against him is that he had gone to Pakistan. Later it was proved that he did not even have a passport. How does visiting Pakistan become a crime? Ved Pratap Vaidik, an RSS sympathiser, has not only gone to Pakistan but also met Hafiz Saeed. Then isn’t he a terrorist? Umar is someone who resigned from the DSU pointing out their attitude against women.
A spineless vice-chancellor, policemen who are always adept at turning anyone into a Maoist or terrorist, thugs, including O.P. Sharma, a BJP MLA, who dared to thrash people whom they call anti-nationals — including bearded bystanders wearing kurta — even in the Patiala House court; who gave them permission to decide who is a nationalist and who is anti-national? How do organisations that distributed sweets on the day the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, was killed by Godse and observe the day Godse was hanged as the day of sacrifice become nationalists?
Who gave the right to a group of uncouth people to wield the sedition law of the British against all those who they do not like as they wish, ban dalit organisations, evict adivasis, frame laws that hurt workers, water down environment laws and, forget Indians, represent even Hindus? They have forgotten that the people of India have elected them not for these things. The same people are now giving a fitting reply to them.
(The writer is a well-known poet and a former secretary of the Sahitya Akademi)