 "JNU teachers & students form a human chain inside the campus in protest against arrest of JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar, in New Delhi. Photo: PTI")
“I decline to be utterly impartial as between the fire brigade and fire," said Winston Churchill once. The government of India has now decreed that some students in JNU are the fire while the government itself is the fire brigade. It has now set out to extinguish this fire with all its might.
The Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi has become the centre of hot political actions these days with the government of the Republic of India locked in a battle with students who have apparently shouted slogans against India.
In its 67th year of the Republic, some of us have not yet understood that a Republic does not get threatened by a few students shouting slogans against it and in favour of Afzal Guru. The nearly seven decades of being a Constitutional Republic have not assured us about the durability of our nation. Like a petulant teenager, our government has thrown a fit.
Kanhaiya Kumar, the students' union leader from JNU, was arrested as some anti-India slogans were reportedly shouted by some students at a gathering organised by him on the university campus. The Home Minister of India has announced that the gathering even had the support of Pakistani terrorist mastermind, Hafiz Saeed. Delhi Police and the HM based their assertion on a tweet by a parody Hafiz Saeed account. The HRD minister, Smriti Irani, had earlier announced with great fervour that the country could not tolerate any insult to Bharat Mata. The government of the republic of India has charged Kanhaiya with sedition.
People sympathetic to a particular kind of politics sent me WhatsApp messages, wanting to know whether I approved of the slogan shouting. No, I replied. I did not ask them whether they felt the Indian Republic would disintegrate by a few slogans being shouted by some young men and women on a university campus.
“Why are so many in the BJP auditioning for the role of Kansa” in their attempt to suppress the arrested JNU students union leader Kanhaiya Kumar, wrote Mukul Kesavan in The Telegraph today.
Today, BJP president Amit Shah has come out with a statement condemning Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi for supporting students’ right to dissent. Shah recalled the dark days of Emergency when all dissent was suppressed by a police state. Apparently, it is not Emergency enough to see students being charged with sedition for having shouted slogans. Mukul Kesavan rightly asks, “Have we all gone mad?”.
In Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru writes:
“Sometimes as I reached a gathering, a great roar of welcome would greet me: Bharat Mata ki Jai — ‘Victory to Mother India.’ I would ask them (the crowds)... what they meant by that cry, who was this Bharat Mata, Mother India, whose victory they wanted? My question would amuse and surprise them.
Bharat Mata, Mother India, was essentially these millions of people, and victory to her meant victory to these people. You are parts of this Bharat Mata, I told them, you are in a manner yourselves Bharat Mata, and … their eyes would light up as if they had made a great discovery.”
This idea of what a nation means is perhaps beyond the members of the Modi government. The nation is made by its citizens, not a portrait of a lady holding the tricolour.
The home minister and all the other ministers in the government are not custodians of Bharat Mata. They are the custodians of the Constitutional Republic of India. The Republic guarantees rights to all Indian citizens; even to those deemed anti-national by a group of bullies, and the constitution does not mandate surgical removal of the right to disagree either.
From telling people what not to eat, to telling women what to wear, to criminalising homosexuality, to telling youth to celebrate Matru-Pitru Diwas instead of Valentine’s Day on February 14, to now finally outlawing thought by charging dissent with sedition, the wider Sangh brotherhood is not trying to suffocate democracy. It is instead trying to redefine it as per a conservative worldview. Anything outside this worldview is dangerous and hence anti-national.
The government of India, formed by a party elected with the biggest mandate in 30 years, felt threatened by slogans shouted by students. This slogan-shouting has happened for years in various parts of the country. The Republic has sustained. It has shaken off the challenge it faced in Kashmir and effected multiple peaceful transitions of governments in the state; the latest when BJP and PDP came together to form the government in J&K. The reports of disaffection in Kashmir due to misgovernance by BJP-PDP combine are more disconcerting than slogan shouting at JNU.
We have seen similar acts being performed by various institutions in the country. We saw it at IIT-Madras, at FTII-Pune and at University of Hyderabad where Rohith Vemula escaped the persecution at the hands of a malign government, by committing suicide.
As I type this, TV reports are coming in from Patiala House Courts where BJP supporting lawyers have beaten up JNU students, faculty and media inside the court and charged them with anti-national behaviour. The police watched from the sidelines. One of the warriors beating people up in full view of TV cameras was BJP MLA OP Sharma.
Great nations are not threatened by contrarian viewpoints. They are threatened by Lilliputian leadership with its pettiness. They are threatened by group-think. They are threatened by exclusivity. They are threatened by majoritarianism.
Very soon, we may not even need the drama of charging people with sedition. They could be charged with such a crime and hanged by this mob at India Gate to loud cheers about Bharat Mata. The HRD and the home ministers can watch from a distance, satisfied that an affront to the Bharat Mata was punished swiftly. That way, even the Delhi police chief can devote more time to tweeting.
How does it matter that we could not do anything about what actual terrorists did to us at Pathankot airbase, as long as some students with a different point of view can be beaten up and locked away for life on charges of sedition?
Long live the republic of farce! Yes, we have all gone mad in India.
Twitter: @bhayankur
