SHUBHDA CHAUDHARY
NEW DELHI: In a major blow to the Right to Freedom of Speech
and Expression, JNU Students’ Union President Kanhaiya Kumar along with other
students has been arrested on grounds of sedition and criminal conspiracy. This
was a repercussion of holding an exhibition on Feb 9, which marked the
execution of Afzal Guru titled “The country without a post office.” Vice-Chancellor
Jagdeesh Kumar has called it an act of indiscipline.
Rhyme and reason. Crime and treason. Or in common parlance,
asking for it. In a free nation, you can demand freedom from that nation and
that, however unpatriotic, will fall within the freedom of speech framework.
JNU had always been recognized for its democratic space and left politics.
Arresting innocent students on criminal custody just because they were shouting
‘anti-national’ protests exposes the levels to which our current government has
stooped down to. A fair question: what would have those students achieved
anyway with such protests, which in local JNU parlance, is an everyday affair?
But instead, they were targeted, as if; the government was waiting for an act
of this intensity to happen, so that its occurrence could be highly escalated
to preserve the right-wing rhetoric of the country. The current government is
systematically targeting the educational institutions, be it the Rohith
Vemula’s case or #ShutDownJNU slogan, creating a left ‘other’ that needs to be
loathed, unheard and unseen, forcibly made invisible from the contours of
political dialectics.
But within this entire hullabaloo, it must be noted that the
President in JNU doesn’t run the show. S/he is not the high command, nor a
general commanding the army. No one calls the shots in that university.
Students can think for themselves and are responsible for their own acts, not
the President. And this person is elected through an actual and clean
democratic process. So, welcome to a thing called ‘democracy’!
JNUSU Vice President said, “They want to witch-hunt and
target us, like they targeted Rohith Vemula. They want us to hang ourselves
like Rohith did”. “Police are doing rounds of the campus and mindlessly
witch-hunting activists. RSS is running campaigns to shut down JNU,” he added.
Shut Down JNU. This was the war cry on Wednesday as the
Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad launched a protest, fuelling a fire that
spread to Twitter, the bipartisan battlefield of partisan polemic. It sounded
as spurious as the regular right-wing “anti-national” whine.
ABVP said ‘JNU is anti-national’. But JNU doesn’t need to
shut down over some seditious sloganeering, but it should give the
administration, both on and outside the campus, some serious heebie-jeebies.
Because it goes beyond petty politics.
The idea of the government is to let JNU stay as an island
of dissent, consistently portrayed as anti-national, to justify thousands of
cases of suppression of dissent by the state nationwide. It is indeed the
‘othering’ of liberalism as unpatriotic. The current administration has made no
secret of the fact that in its eyes, social conservatives are ideal and
obedient replacements for real social scientists. Rewriting history is a top
priority for them, as they envision an altogether different national project
than the one that had been put in place in 1947. The Indian state has killed
more Indian citizens than foreign troops, since independence. The case was the
same during British rule. So as Saib Bilawal guesses rightly “anti-nationals”
must be “purged” every now and then, for the good of the nation? Only the
masters have changed.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh warned of “stringent action”
against the organisers of the protest. “Anyone who raises anti-India slogans or
tries to put a question mark on nation’s unity and integrity will not be
spared,” he said. Education Minister Smriti Irani said: “The nation can never
tolerate any insult to mother India.”
After Kanhaiya’s arrest, teachers and students protested
outside the Vice Chancellor’s office, demanding to know why students were being
treated like “terrorists” and picked up from campus by plainclothesmen. A rival
group of students belonging to the ABVP protested near the India Gate in the
heart of Delhi.
“JNU has always been a university where there has been a
vibrant culture. Excessive police action is uncalled for and has worsened the
situation,” Professors said in a statement.
Left parliamentarian Sitaram Yechury commented in a tweet:
“What is happening in JNU? Police on campus, arrests and picking up students
from hostels. This had last happened during Emergency.”
The same Afzal Guru event happened a year before. No one
said anything. Now, because the main critiques of the Modi regime are coming
out from JNU, the state wants to discredit JNU.
The police
didn’t hesitate before lathicharging our fellow students whenever they
protested against anything — at UGC, Jantar Mantar, or for that matter,
anywhere. They even attacked journalists and broke cameras. When the event
happened this time, the police just stood there vacantly for over two hours,
and let the cameras soak in the crowds and slogans. Clearly the state is up to
only ‘good governance’ and ‘development’, here.
This was a
trap for the students. They followed the bait and the government and media
pounced, clearly.
D.P. Tripathi (Ex. President JNUSU arrested during the
emergency) in a press release stated ‘We condemn in the strongest possible
words the high-handed police action in JNU. This is reminiscent of the dark
days of the emergency when the state had swooped down on the campus and had
arrested many on false and trumped up charges. While we hold no brief for those
who raised objectionable slogans, the arrested students have been charged with
anti-national activities, precisely the charges on which we were also arrested
during the draconian emergency.’
It’s quite unfortunate that the same arrest took place when
Editor’s Guild organized the annual lecture, inviting Nobel Laureate Amartya
Sen to speak on ‘The Right to Dissent’. Sen quoted that we should be ‘committed
to remove the unfreedom heaped upon us by our rulers.’ He stated that ‘we have
to work hard to protect our tolerance and plurality as well as dialogic
democracy.’
So, is India truly turning into a fascist nation? If all
those who disagree with RSS-ABVP, do not stand together in solidarity now as
after Rohith Vemula’s killing, will they be picked up one by one and
suppressed? Solidarity does not imply a common manifesto - it implies
recognition of common concern for humanity and progressive ideas and
recognition of fascism as a common enemy.
(The writer is a doctoral student at JNU, New Delhi).
source: thecitizen.in
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