From Bihar to Tihar
Kanhaiya Kumar
Juggernaut
253 pages; Rs 250
It seems such a long time ago that Kanhaiya Kumar, the former president of JNU Students’ Union, dominated daily news. But, in fact, in the first half of the year, especially in February and March, the young firebrand student leader was India’s chief villain or emerging hope, depending on whether or not you believed the Narendra Modi-led Union government’s police action against him. He was tried for nothing less than sedition and for a few months his popularity rivalled that of Mr Modi’s. Today, as the whole country tries to squeeze out that next tranche of Rs 2,000 from their bank accounts, Mr Kumar’s views have taken a back seat. Nevertheless, he has over 50,000 followers on Twitter and is used to going around the country speaking on issues of national relevance.
The point is, Mr Kumar is seen as one of the most vocal critics of Mr Modi’s style of governance and is likely to come back into headlines the next time we see some news of trouble in Indian universities since he represents the face of student unrest and the larger fight about the freedom of expression especially within universities, which, as Sunil Khilnani so well articulated, “have to be sanctuaries, the republic of ideas. They have to be places where you can think the unthinkable, where you can say the unsayable.”
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This book, a memoir, then is Mr Kumar’s effort to explain his side of the story. Mr Kumar has made no bones about the fact that the media, especially some of TV news channels, were guilty of bias while covering the events in JNU in February leading to his arrest and subsequent incarceration in one of India’s iconic jails, Tihar. To be fair to him, he had a point. More than one news anchor sought to reprimand him and his fellow students for what they perceived to be “anti-national” activities instead of presenting the facts before the public.
But this memoir is not just Mr Kumar’s way of clarifying on what had happened. It is also his way of reaching out to those who would care to read and understand why he is so openly suspicious of the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party government, its ideological parent — the RSS, and its affiliated organisations such as the ABVP. And that is why he tells the readers, in very simple language, about his childhood, his parents and their political affiliations and the experiences that shaped his worldview.
The book shows how Mr Kumar was stridently against injustice since childhood in Bihar. He was always very conscious of economic and social inequality and the dominant always took advantage of the weak. At one level, it is understandable that his childhood — he was born in 1987 — primed him for demanding more state action. At another level, it is ironic. Another person could have quoted the same events to suggest the belief that the state or the government is no good at alleviating such problems and that markets might provide a better solution.
To be sure, Mr Kumar is very suspicious about the way markets function and appears to see them as instruments in the hands of the rich to crush the poor and the socially backward. As such, everything seems to be a stratagem against the poor. For instance, when he was fleeced by some tout in New Delhi’s railway station, it reaffirmed his deep suspicion that “vested interests and businesses forged a nexus to keep prices up” and hurt customers. Of course, none of his experiences are incorrect but instead of understanding how markets have been undermined, he is prone to look towards the government for solutions.
And that is why the book leaves you wondering at several levels. One, in February, Mr Kumar was berated for being a free-rider. A lot of people questioned his freedom to voice his views given the fact that his education in JNU was subsidised by the tax-payer. It is another matter that Mr Kumar had a lucid and cogent rebuttal to such misplaced charges yet, as the book reveals, bulk of his education was a product of private enterprise — funded by the hard work and generosity of his mother and other well-wishers. The public funding bit came in much later.
Secondly, and this is most interesting, reading the book one feels as if he is not very different from his arch rival, in a manner of speaking, Mr Modi — at least in the role he envisages the government must play in our daily life. As days have gone by, Mr Modi has all but forgotten his promise of “minimum government” and has shown himself to be more statist than any government since liberalisation. Oddly enough, Mr Modi seems to have the same belief that Mr Kumar might want in a politician: To directly address poverty. The Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojna 2016 that comes into effect as we speak essentially does attempt to do what Mr Kumar might presumably want — take from the corrupt rich and give directly to the poor.
So it is not economics that separates him from his political opponents, but his preference for free speech.