I met a young woman in the metro. She was reading a report of Kanhaiya Kumar’s speech. I asked her what she thought of it. “It blew me away,” she said. “How can the police come on the campus and arrest him for sedition for criticising the government? But we do it all the time. Does that make me seditious? But I love my country.”
Unusually articulate for one so young, she said the speech “made the hairs on my arm stand and my eyes prickle”.
Everyone is talking about the speech. It is being discussed in buses, around ice-cream carts, among security guards, autorickshaw drivers. Kumar was respectful of authority and age yet sarcastic. He touched a chord in every Indian who has ever had any dealings with the state because the Indian state is oppressive and yet liberal. It can lie to you but also be searingly honest. Kumar’s speech told us it can also deliver justice. The speech was simple, unpretentious and it told a story.
The speech was discussed inside JNU because it highlighted “azaadi’’, something that JNU has always stood for. For JNU, azaadi represents liberalism and democracy. This is probably why Anand Kumar of Swarajya, Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury of the CPI-M and Kamal Mitra Chenoy, first of the CPI and now of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), were all from JNU. So is Prafulla Ketkar, now editor of Organiser, the magazine that challenged the emergency and elected to be published with censored portions blacked out, rather than cease publication. Only JNU could have produced so many diverse opinions.
I was associated with JNU although I never studied there. Here’s what, ever generous, it taught me:
· Listening: to sounds – of the wind when it used to blow in June when the temperature would touch 50. Anyone who has been there knows the vast parched Aravali hills over which the campus sprawls. It was either insanely hot or bitterly cold. You waited for the sound of the bus (612/615) to arrive in New Campus. It came when it wanted to come. The bus would take you to the world that was not JNU. Sounds and words would sometimes come together. JNU taught me about Costa Gavras, Simon & Garfunkel , Leonard Cohen, Kumar Gandharva, Vishnu Sahasranamam, the abhang of Tukaram, the songs of Purandaradasa and haveli sangeet. Gaman was a film in the genre of Garm Hawa that recorded the pain of migrants. “Aaja Saanvariya Tohe Garva Laga Loon” by Hiradevi Mishra is unforgettable. I saw Gaman in JNU. Life was not about music and film. It was also about listening to and internalizing opinion. On the campus you heard it all. The Marxists called the Trotskyites left adventurists, the Trotskyites called the Marxists revisionist, the Free Thinkers called the Marxists fascist, the Socialists called the Marxists collaborators (especially around the time the Mitrokhin papers came out). To make sense of the discourse, you had to understand the code. And then there was the question of the debate on nationalities, identities and individual freedoms.
· Reading: So if you didn’t want to be completely out of it – although that was also an option – you needed to read and understand the context. Wang Ming, Russian-speaking Chinese Leninist who met with a sticky end because he advocated an antifascist united front became the most discussed rival of Mao Tse Tung. Was he a good guy or a bad guy? If you were in JNU, you needed to have an opinion on this. You also needed to know what Erich Fromm, rd laing, Marcuse, the eurocommunists, and the new left were saying. What did the rise of NTR REALLY mean? Was Sati the right of a woman to give up her life and were such traditions to be respected because they represented a strand of India… these were the debates you could hear on bus stands, in the book shop, at Gyarasi Lal’s vegetable shop (the only shop on campus at that time so you had no option but to buy overpriced vegetables and tell him what you thought of him… we were so rude to him and he just laughed it all off)
· Thinking: But ultimately you had to decide for yourself. Were you going to let Sikh families in Munirka, hounded in 1984 by marauding mobs, take refuge on the campus (in the homes of teachers and hostels)? Or were you going to stay aloof, because it wasn’t your problem and anyway, you didn’t believe in entering an argument that was between the state and religion. Wasn’t it incumbent upon you to unionise domestic labour, even if it was eating you out of home and hearth? When progressive friends called a cab because they were too drunk to take the bus and then refused to pay for the distance between the cab stand and the campus, what was your stand? In all things, you needed to take a stand. It was all a little wearying after a time. But you were always thinking.
· Believing: Arun Shourie recently said: ‘never trust governments’. JNU taught you that as well.
· Thanking: Ultimately, it is just a pile of brick and stone. But every clod of earth, every bougainvillea bush, every long and winding road has a story to tell. JNU is wonderful because it gives you everything, asking nothing in return.
