Growing intolerance

Authorities must allow individuals the freedom of choice

Last week, India played Pakistan in the Asia Cup in Bangladesh. It was a tremendously exciting match; Pakistan needed 12 runs off the last four balls to win, and Shahid Afridi delivered two huge sixes to win the match, in his inimitable style with two balls to spare. Passions ran high. They ran especially high, apparently, in Swami Vivekanand Subharti University, a private institution in Meerut in Uttar Pradesh. There, a group of Kashmiri students cheered for Pakistan, not for India. Their fellow-students objected vociferously; apparently, some damage to property took place although it is still not established for certain who was responsible.
 

This disagreement should have been seen as minor, and any clashes as a discipline problem to be resolved by the university administration the way any such quarrels are. Instead, the university authorities took the draconian decision to suspend all the Kashmiri students - over 60 of them. None of the rest was disciplined. And the Uttar Pradesh police compounded the error by charging the students with sedition under a colonial-era law that is still scandalously on the books. That charge has now been withdrawn, reportedly after Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah spoke to his counterpart in UP, but the damage remains substantial.

It is important to note that the students did what they were entitled to do as Indian citizens: cheer for, or against, the sports team of their choice. Neither the law nor anyone else should conclude that it is something they should be punished for. Nor could charges of sedition be justifiably levelled against them. Sedition can only be against a government and a cricket team, even when it may be representing a country, can hardly be the government against whom sedition can take place. Withdrawing the sedition charges against these students should not be enough. Indeed, as has been suggested by legal luminaries, action should be contemplated against those who in the first place considered it necessary to level such serious charges against students for making public their preference for a certain team.

That these students belonged to Kashmir made the situation a little more complicated. But if some people from Kashmir are seen as not sympathising with the Indian cricket team, they cannot be browbeaten into making personal choices that the rest of India would be more comfortable with. Yet that is precisely what seems to have been the argument behind the actions of the University authorities. In any case, this was a cricket match between two countries and supporting either of the team should not be confused with their national loyalties.

The nature of the action the University in Meerut initiated against the Kashmiri students smacked of intolerance and insecurity. Unfortunately, that is increasingly becoming the nature of Indian nationalism - which belittles all Indians. All forms of "insult" are considered worthy of action nowadays. After one recent book on the Hindus by American scholar Wendy Doniger was withdrawn by her publisher, Penguin, the group that had pushed for it went after another; and this week came news that some shops in Bangalore had begun withdrawing that book from their stores. The book's publisher, Rupa, has denied having issued any orders to withdraw the book, but such instances seem to suggest that the forces of a more militant and religion-inflected nationalism are on the march. India's claim to liberalism in its polity is one of the few things that it has got right in its 67 years of independence. That claim will not easily survive such incidents. If simple expressions of individual choice are no longer to be tolerated, then much that has been valuable about India will be lost.