Showing posts with label JNU. Show all posts
Showing posts with label JNU. Show all posts
Wednesday, 13 April 2022
Wednesday, 29 December 2021
Wednesday, 15 September 2021
Monday, 13 September 2021
Saturday, 10 July 2021
Wednesday, 8 January 2020
Why I didn’t call myself a JNU-ite for 37 yrs. But now something has changed: Yogendra Yadav
Yogendra Yadav in The Print
For the first time, I felt like calling myself a JNU-ite.
It was around midnight Sunday. I was standing outside Jawaharlal Nehru University’s main gate. The masked goons had finished their job and had been honourably escorted out. The hecklers and bouncers, who were giving them cover through the evening, had also dispersed. Mission accomplished, street lights had been switched back on. Just when you would expect everyone to retreat into the safety of their homes and hostels, the JNU community marched in a peaceful procession. Teachers came out to stand with their students. They all shouted slogans and sang songs. They opened the university gate. And so, the JNU community reclaimed the space that was desecrated by goons a few hours ago.
I felt so proud. I felt I belonged here. Like never before.
Jhola-carrying, but not a JNU-ite
For a good 37 years, I have resisted calling myself a JNU-ite. Maybe it’s just my nature. I cannot stand clannishness of any kind – caste, community, club, school, village, nation, party, anything. Institutional snobbery by any name – Stephenian, Oxonian or JNUite – puts me off. Since I associated stereotypical JNUites with some of these traits, I kept away from all formal and informal gatherings of JNUites.
This reluctance was informed by some cultural unease as well. Coming from a small town, I could not relate to JNU’s dominant radical culture. It was too anglicised, too deracinated to appeal to my cultural sensibilities. Reading Raag Darbari and Phanishwarnath Renu was a way of getting back at English-spouting revolutionaries. Not smoking, not drinking, not even chai, was my private rebellion against the dominant ways of rebelling at JNU. I would drink a glass of milk and carry some home-made laddoos or gur to make my point.
My intellectual and ideological distance with JNU’s Left must have compounded it. In the early 1980s, the dominant version of Marxism taught at JNU was rather formulaic, mechanical and polemical. Exposure to sophisticated readings of Karl Marx and Marxism by some teachers there only accentuated my distance from the orthodox Left. Unlike many of my contemporaries, I couldn’t possibly romanticise the Soviet Union or applaud the practice of Indian Communists. The theory and practice of Naxalites, the much-reviled and little understood word these days, left me intellectually and morally cold. The Left academic establishment invited the anti-establishment streak inside me.
All this must have fed into my politics at that time. I joined the Samata Yuvjan Sabha in opposition to the dominant Communist student groups at the time – the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) and the All India Students Federation (AISF). It was at JNU that I was inspired by Sunil, a few years my senior, to take up politics. That is where I met Kishen Pattnayak, my political guru, Sachchidanand Sinha, an enduring intellectual influence. For me, JNU was not about discovering Marx or Lenin, but about reading deeper into Gandhi, Jayaprakash Narayan and Rammanohar Lohia.
Forgive me for this biographical interlude. But I hope now you understand why I flinched at being seen as a JNU-ite. I have kept a beard and often carried a jhola. But I do not see why that must make me a Marxist or support Communist parties or defend all public sector companies.
A detached observer
Over the years, as the Left declined in its academic power and its pockets of political dominance, my opposition to it also declined. Indeed, it would be silly to retain older battle-lines in this new political context of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s hegemony. In hindsight, I have come to see the most valuable contribution of the Left to India’s political life: notwithstanding its disdain for ‘bourgeois democracy’ and culture, the Left helped maintain the democratic character of our democracy, and pro-people orientation of our public culture.
Similarly, for all its faults, the Left-wing student politics of JNU has retained the virtue of connecting the Indian youth, many from privileged background, to the realities of the country they live in. JNU as an institution has provided a space for innumerable students from underprivileged background to build not just a successful career but also lead a meaningful life. No wonder this small institution has contributed disproportionately more leaders to India’s political life. You may not be a Marxist – and I have never been one – but you cannot deny the intellectual contribution of the Marxists to understanding our society. It is hard to imagine social science in India without dialogues within and with the Indian left.
I have also come to recognise how much I owe to the opportunity of studying at JNU with great teachers like Sudipta Kaviraj and Rajeev Bhargava, or listening to some of the leading minds of India in the famous late-night debates in the JNU campus or to the democratic space made available to critics like us by the dominant Left student politics. An opportunity to compare it with other institutions in the country and abroad has also made me appreciate what a national asset JNU is and continues to be. Over the years, JNU has changed too. The campus is more diverse in ideological orientation and political shades. Ideas, academics and political organisations other than the Left also flourish there. It is much less anglicised than before.
Although my assessment changed, I continued to be a detached observer. Not a JNU-ite.
A JNU-ite
The last four years have changed it all. Desperately in need of internal enemies, the Narendra Modi regime has zeroed in on JNU as its prime intellectual target. We have witnessed a multi-pronged attack by the state. When the regime realised that it lacked the intellectual resources to defeat the JNU in a debate, it resorted to defaming and demonising with the help of a pliant media. This was accompanied by a political onslaught on campus politics, followed by a bureaucratic onslaught. The current Vice-Chancellor, M. Jagadesh Kumar, was thrust upon the university to complete the demolition job, of changing the character of JNU forever. The gunda attack under police protection was the final act – the physical attack – in this long process of institutional destruction.
In the face of this relentless onslaught, JNU symbolises whatever this regime does not want or cannot handle. Now, JNU does not stand for any ideological orthodoxy, it stands as a symbol of democratic dissent. It is not Left vs Right anymore. It is simply right vs wrong now. JNU is being targeted because it thinks, because it asks inconvenient questions, because it refuses to become either a kindergarten or a coaching factory, because it dares to be political. This leaves any conscientious citizen with no dignified option but to stand up to this barbarity. If the Modi regime wishes to turn JNU into any other university, the only fitting response is for every university to become another JNU.
I stand as a proud JNUite. So must you, no matter if you didn’t study there.
For the first time, I felt like calling myself a JNU-ite.
It was around midnight Sunday. I was standing outside Jawaharlal Nehru University’s main gate. The masked goons had finished their job and had been honourably escorted out. The hecklers and bouncers, who were giving them cover through the evening, had also dispersed. Mission accomplished, street lights had been switched back on. Just when you would expect everyone to retreat into the safety of their homes and hostels, the JNU community marched in a peaceful procession. Teachers came out to stand with their students. They all shouted slogans and sang songs. They opened the university gate. And so, the JNU community reclaimed the space that was desecrated by goons a few hours ago.
I felt so proud. I felt I belonged here. Like never before.
Jhola-carrying, but not a JNU-ite
For a good 37 years, I have resisted calling myself a JNU-ite. Maybe it’s just my nature. I cannot stand clannishness of any kind – caste, community, club, school, village, nation, party, anything. Institutional snobbery by any name – Stephenian, Oxonian or JNUite – puts me off. Since I associated stereotypical JNUites with some of these traits, I kept away from all formal and informal gatherings of JNUites.
This reluctance was informed by some cultural unease as well. Coming from a small town, I could not relate to JNU’s dominant radical culture. It was too anglicised, too deracinated to appeal to my cultural sensibilities. Reading Raag Darbari and Phanishwarnath Renu was a way of getting back at English-spouting revolutionaries. Not smoking, not drinking, not even chai, was my private rebellion against the dominant ways of rebelling at JNU. I would drink a glass of milk and carry some home-made laddoos or gur to make my point.
My intellectual and ideological distance with JNU’s Left must have compounded it. In the early 1980s, the dominant version of Marxism taught at JNU was rather formulaic, mechanical and polemical. Exposure to sophisticated readings of Karl Marx and Marxism by some teachers there only accentuated my distance from the orthodox Left. Unlike many of my contemporaries, I couldn’t possibly romanticise the Soviet Union or applaud the practice of Indian Communists. The theory and practice of Naxalites, the much-reviled and little understood word these days, left me intellectually and morally cold. The Left academic establishment invited the anti-establishment streak inside me.
All this must have fed into my politics at that time. I joined the Samata Yuvjan Sabha in opposition to the dominant Communist student groups at the time – the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) and the All India Students Federation (AISF). It was at JNU that I was inspired by Sunil, a few years my senior, to take up politics. That is where I met Kishen Pattnayak, my political guru, Sachchidanand Sinha, an enduring intellectual influence. For me, JNU was not about discovering Marx or Lenin, but about reading deeper into Gandhi, Jayaprakash Narayan and Rammanohar Lohia.
Forgive me for this biographical interlude. But I hope now you understand why I flinched at being seen as a JNU-ite. I have kept a beard and often carried a jhola. But I do not see why that must make me a Marxist or support Communist parties or defend all public sector companies.
A detached observer
Over the years, as the Left declined in its academic power and its pockets of political dominance, my opposition to it also declined. Indeed, it would be silly to retain older battle-lines in this new political context of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s hegemony. In hindsight, I have come to see the most valuable contribution of the Left to India’s political life: notwithstanding its disdain for ‘bourgeois democracy’ and culture, the Left helped maintain the democratic character of our democracy, and pro-people orientation of our public culture.
Similarly, for all its faults, the Left-wing student politics of JNU has retained the virtue of connecting the Indian youth, many from privileged background, to the realities of the country they live in. JNU as an institution has provided a space for innumerable students from underprivileged background to build not just a successful career but also lead a meaningful life. No wonder this small institution has contributed disproportionately more leaders to India’s political life. You may not be a Marxist – and I have never been one – but you cannot deny the intellectual contribution of the Marxists to understanding our society. It is hard to imagine social science in India without dialogues within and with the Indian left.
I have also come to recognise how much I owe to the opportunity of studying at JNU with great teachers like Sudipta Kaviraj and Rajeev Bhargava, or listening to some of the leading minds of India in the famous late-night debates in the JNU campus or to the democratic space made available to critics like us by the dominant Left student politics. An opportunity to compare it with other institutions in the country and abroad has also made me appreciate what a national asset JNU is and continues to be. Over the years, JNU has changed too. The campus is more diverse in ideological orientation and political shades. Ideas, academics and political organisations other than the Left also flourish there. It is much less anglicised than before.
Although my assessment changed, I continued to be a detached observer. Not a JNU-ite.
A JNU-ite
The last four years have changed it all. Desperately in need of internal enemies, the Narendra Modi regime has zeroed in on JNU as its prime intellectual target. We have witnessed a multi-pronged attack by the state. When the regime realised that it lacked the intellectual resources to defeat the JNU in a debate, it resorted to defaming and demonising with the help of a pliant media. This was accompanied by a political onslaught on campus politics, followed by a bureaucratic onslaught. The current Vice-Chancellor, M. Jagadesh Kumar, was thrust upon the university to complete the demolition job, of changing the character of JNU forever. The gunda attack under police protection was the final act – the physical attack – in this long process of institutional destruction.
In the face of this relentless onslaught, JNU symbolises whatever this regime does not want or cannot handle. Now, JNU does not stand for any ideological orthodoxy, it stands as a symbol of democratic dissent. It is not Left vs Right anymore. It is simply right vs wrong now. JNU is being targeted because it thinks, because it asks inconvenient questions, because it refuses to become either a kindergarten or a coaching factory, because it dares to be political. This leaves any conscientious citizen with no dignified option but to stand up to this barbarity. If the Modi regime wishes to turn JNU into any other university, the only fitting response is for every university to become another JNU.
I stand as a proud JNUite. So must you, no matter if you didn’t study there.
Wednesday, 17 April 2019
Sunday, 21 February 2016
Jawaharlal Nehru University was never a bastion of open debate
Swapan Dasgupta in the Times of India
During the course of the acrimonious exchanges over a series of incidents that originated in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, some commentators alluded to a controversial motion —“This House would not in any circumstances fight for King and Country” — that was passed by the Oxford Union in 1933. The argument was that universities are natural centres of heretical and unconventional views and that the authorities should not overreact.
Whether or not the Union home ministry and Delhi Police were guilty of astonishing stupidity by charging an excitable student politician with sedition for hobnobbing and sharing a platform with separatists is an issue that will prompt different responses. In 1933, for example, Winston Churchill described the Oxford students who voted for the grandstanding motion as “abject, squalid, shameless and nauseating” — sentiments that many who don’t possess the same measure of erudition would echo in the case of the JNU radicals. Indeed, the reaction of British society to the Oxford poseurs was unwaveringly hostile and evidence of universities harbouring spoilt brats. Likewise, there is little doubt that had the provocative slogans championing the breakup of India been chanted in public — and not within the safe haven of the campus or, indeed, the Delhi Press Club — the street reaction would not have been couched in niceties.
Echoes of a similar town-gown divide appear to be quite evident in the furore over the sedition charges levelled against a student — not that this excuses the disgraceful behaviour of some lawyers in Delhi’s Patiala House court. But what has complicated the situation is that the political opponents of the Narendra Modi government ranging from the Congress to the Maoists have joined hands to scream fascism. The assault on the government has been complemented by the international rent-a-cause brigade that has become accustomed to circulating pious petitions on issues that range from who Indians should not vote for to the state of higher education in India.
Part of the problem stems from the caricatured views the Indian Right and Left-Liberals have of each other, a process the civil war of journalists has added to.
In the normal course, universities should have been a forum for informed and intelligent conversations. Even if a dialogue didn’t narrow the political divide, it would have prevented demonology and the near-complete absence of social interaction and the ostracism of those who violate a consensus — Arnab Goswami is the most recent target.
To blame this ghettoisation on the Modi regime is being disingenuous. Contrary to recent mythology, JNU wasn’t ever the bastion of free, open and convivial debate. There was a pre-determined view of what was acceptable and what was beyond the pale. In political terms, openness meant a dialogue that involved all the 57 varieties of Marxism, Nehruvian and Lohiaite thought and, the new fangled ‘alternative’ currents emerging from Left orphanages. In recent years, and partly as a response to bleeding hearts in Western universities, even Islamism has been accommodated under the radical roof. What has been consistently shown the door are India’s indigenous conservative traditions and their contemporary expressions.
This exclusionary process was confirmed in a recent article upholding the ‘idea’ of JNU by an alumnus, Professor Peter DeSouza: “the liberal persuasion was not allowed the space it should have been given by the Stalinist Left. The political spectrum was wide but could have been wider. Analytical thinking was feeble and ideological camps gave protection to the less capable.” JNU reproduced itself ideologically over decades, a reason why its intellectual establishment initially thought there was nothing odd about students being associated with divisive slogans. The ‘sedition’ overkill provided an escape route from troubling questions centred on JNU’s relationship with nationhood.
The ideological bubble that sustained JNU was shaken by the post-2014 political change. The exclusion of its stalwarts from the new establishment has bred insecurity and added to its determination to paint the ‘outlanders’ as cretinous, semi-educated and aesthetically suspect. This phenomenon was also in evidence last week in the post-modernist ghettos of Jadavpur University.
The ‘sedition’ stir will pass but the partition pangs of Indian academia will have to be addressed. The question of whether India is merely a geographical mass or is also blessed with sacredness will be a basis of a wider polarization.
During the course of the acrimonious exchanges over a series of incidents that originated in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, some commentators alluded to a controversial motion —“This House would not in any circumstances fight for King and Country” — that was passed by the Oxford Union in 1933. The argument was that universities are natural centres of heretical and unconventional views and that the authorities should not overreact.
Whether or not the Union home ministry and Delhi Police were guilty of astonishing stupidity by charging an excitable student politician with sedition for hobnobbing and sharing a platform with separatists is an issue that will prompt different responses. In 1933, for example, Winston Churchill described the Oxford students who voted for the grandstanding motion as “abject, squalid, shameless and nauseating” — sentiments that many who don’t possess the same measure of erudition would echo in the case of the JNU radicals. Indeed, the reaction of British society to the Oxford poseurs was unwaveringly hostile and evidence of universities harbouring spoilt brats. Likewise, there is little doubt that had the provocative slogans championing the breakup of India been chanted in public — and not within the safe haven of the campus or, indeed, the Delhi Press Club — the street reaction would not have been couched in niceties.
Echoes of a similar town-gown divide appear to be quite evident in the furore over the sedition charges levelled against a student — not that this excuses the disgraceful behaviour of some lawyers in Delhi’s Patiala House court. But what has complicated the situation is that the political opponents of the Narendra Modi government ranging from the Congress to the Maoists have joined hands to scream fascism. The assault on the government has been complemented by the international rent-a-cause brigade that has become accustomed to circulating pious petitions on issues that range from who Indians should not vote for to the state of higher education in India.
Part of the problem stems from the caricatured views the Indian Right and Left-Liberals have of each other, a process the civil war of journalists has added to.
In the normal course, universities should have been a forum for informed and intelligent conversations. Even if a dialogue didn’t narrow the political divide, it would have prevented demonology and the near-complete absence of social interaction and the ostracism of those who violate a consensus — Arnab Goswami is the most recent target.
To blame this ghettoisation on the Modi regime is being disingenuous. Contrary to recent mythology, JNU wasn’t ever the bastion of free, open and convivial debate. There was a pre-determined view of what was acceptable and what was beyond the pale. In political terms, openness meant a dialogue that involved all the 57 varieties of Marxism, Nehruvian and Lohiaite thought and, the new fangled ‘alternative’ currents emerging from Left orphanages. In recent years, and partly as a response to bleeding hearts in Western universities, even Islamism has been accommodated under the radical roof. What has been consistently shown the door are India’s indigenous conservative traditions and their contemporary expressions.
This exclusionary process was confirmed in a recent article upholding the ‘idea’ of JNU by an alumnus, Professor Peter DeSouza: “the liberal persuasion was not allowed the space it should have been given by the Stalinist Left. The political spectrum was wide but could have been wider. Analytical thinking was feeble and ideological camps gave protection to the less capable.” JNU reproduced itself ideologically over decades, a reason why its intellectual establishment initially thought there was nothing odd about students being associated with divisive slogans. The ‘sedition’ overkill provided an escape route from troubling questions centred on JNU’s relationship with nationhood.
The ideological bubble that sustained JNU was shaken by the post-2014 political change. The exclusion of its stalwarts from the new establishment has bred insecurity and added to its determination to paint the ‘outlanders’ as cretinous, semi-educated and aesthetically suspect. This phenomenon was also in evidence last week in the post-modernist ghettos of Jadavpur University.
The ‘sedition’ stir will pass but the partition pangs of Indian academia will have to be addressed. The question of whether India is merely a geographical mass or is also blessed with sacredness will be a basis of a wider polarization.
Saturday, 20 February 2016
Be Warned, the Assault on JNU is Part of a Pattern
Romilla Thapar in Outlook India
There is by now little doubt that we are currently being governed by those that seem to have an anti-intellectual mind-set. This spells trouble for universities that are concerned with high standards of teaching and research.
JNU students and teachers protest the police action against JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar. Credit: Shome Basu
Recent events at JNU raise many questions pertinent to us as citizens of India. The questions have become imperative because it is apparent that many who govern us have little sensitivity to understanding the fundamental issues crucial to governance. For example, what are the necessary aspects of a democratic system, or how essential are equality and human rights as components of democracy to be taught and nurtured in educational institutions. Every articulation of thought and action is judged these days by its immediate political implications and seldom by the wider context of ethics, society and citizenship.
A recent example was the discussion on capital punishment where a handful of students had gathered on the JNU campus. Obviously the names of those recently given this punishment cropped up in the discussion, and very soon this became the dominant political aspect and the sole consideration, setting aside all other questions. Slogans took over in a confused fashion as happens in such situations and the serious issue of capital punishment was lost. Capital punishment is not just an issue of concern to nationalism alone. It involves aspects of ethics, morality, religion as well as the context of the punishment, and it is not in the least bit surprising that opinions differ on all these issues. The logical follow-up could have been a more extended discussion of the subject, from other perspectives, rather than the insistence by some of those present that this was an anti-national issue, and their then proceeding to have the government intervene and clamp down on it.
Sedition and secession
As has been said by almost everyone who has written on this event, the terms that the government uses in its charges against the JNU students are problematic and cannot be bandied about in a casual way. Charges of sedition, extremely serious as they are, nevertheless are slapped on anyone for virtually any critical opinion about the country. Even the dictionary meaning of sedition is enticement to violence and the overthrow of the state/government. As others have pointed out, there is a considerable difference between advocacy of violent methods and actual incitement to violence. But such distinctions seem to be beyond the comprehension of most politicians.
To maintain that a statement made about the possibility of a segment of the Indian nation breaking away is sedition, shows neither an understanding of the word nor knowledge of the historical occasions in the last half century when such statements were made with reference to other parts of India. This is not the first time that Kashmir has been mentioned as part of such a suggestion. There have been earlier threats of secession from other parts of the nation, such as Nagaland and Tamil Nadu, and the intention of establishing the Sikh state of Khalistan to mention just a few. Some others are not completely silent even in present times. Threats of secession are in part the way in which nationalisms play out in nations that extend over large territories and multiple cultures. It has to be understood as a process of change and debated rather than being silenced by calling it sedition.
The debate on sedition goes back to the early years of independence when the attempt to silence free speech was successfully resisted by the Supreme Court, (Brij Bhushan vs. State of Delhi and Romesh Thapar vs. Union of India). Nehru was in favour of expunging sedition as unconstitutional. Those were the days when democracy was valued and was nurtured. We should familiarise ourselves with the many occasions when sedition has been objected to and on valid grounds, and therefore consider its removal from the body of laws. Laws that can be easily misused should be reconsidered. Governance does imply taking an intelligent interest in the debates on the laws by which we are meant to be governed.
The first foray
Then there are those who, because they are critical of some aspects of the nation, are immediately condemned as anti-national. Taken literally this adjective would apply to a large number of Indians who are critical of various aspects of events in India. Governments turn by turn have described people as anti-national but the frequency of this accusation has increased in the last couple of years. It has been applied so often by the BJP that the word has become virtually meaningless, but not harmless, because it can be used to politically persecute a person. The ancestor to the BJP – the Jan Sangh party, when it was part of the government of Morarji Desai, subsequent to the Emergency – criticized the history textbooks written by some of us and published by the NCERT. We were accused of being anti-Indian and anti-national for the views we held on ancient Indian history. The government demanded that our books be proscribed. But in the election that followed the government fell, so the books survived.
Almost 25 years later, in the first NDA government the matter was taken up again. The then education minister, Murli Manohar Joshi and his BJP cohorts referred to the authors of the textbooks – and I was included in this – as not only anti-Hindu but also anti-national, anti-Indian, and academic terrorists of the worst kind. Enthusiastic politicians demanded that we should be arrested and punished for writing these books. Fortunately, the first NDA government did not take itself too seriously and did not go around arresting many teachers and students for being anti-national, largely because their definition of what was anti-national became a matter for ridicule. Anti-national for them was in effect a limited term, namely anti-Hindu.
Pathetic attempt
In the latest move of the BJP-RSS government pertaining to universities, the student union president who was arrested at JNU has been accused of being anti-national and indulging in sedition. He has been accused of raising slogans on independence for Kashmir and praise of Pakistan. The irony is that the student union president who was doing just the opposite of what would be regarded as anti-national and seditious and was trying to close the discussion, was the one who was arrested.
It is now being held, very much as an after thought, that the group that held the meeting were instigated by the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. This is at best a rather pathetic attempt to institute a charge of terrorism with no other evidence but a dubious tweet. Does government evidence rely on tweets? And are dubious tweets enough to accuse a person of sedition ? This is not just a case of the government and the police being adamant, but it appears to be a well-planned strategy to destabilise JNU. There was just too much unusual alacrity in the way events moved. One can’t help but feel that somewhere along the line, the present government has lost its initial confidence in itself and is now resorting to unpleasant tactics. An example of this was the way in which JNU faculty and students and some media people were beaten up at the Patiala House Courtby a bunch of lawyers, said to be of the BJP, when there was to be a hearing of the case against the student union president. Are the courts of law now going to have to resort to fisticuffs?
Education as catechism
The ideology central to the BJP-RSS has no space or use for liberal thought. Education for such organisations means only what can be called a kind of catechism. This is a memorisation of a narrow set of questions rooted in faith and belief and an equally narrow set of answers that prohibit any doubt or deviation. The same technique applies to all subjects. Therefore educational centres that allow questioning and discussion are anathema and have to be dismantled.
Since what is referred to as Hinduism does not confine itself to a single sacred book, nor is there exclusive worship of a single monotheistic God, the notion of blasphemy so crucial to the Christian and Islamic religions has little application to the Hindu religion. However, in the Hindutva version of Hinduism, aimed at establishing a Hindu Rashtra – a state where Hindus are the primary citizens and the purpose of governance is to uphold Hindu principles – the notion of a kind of blasphemy is applied to those that are critical of Hindutva that is equated with the Hindu Rashtra. This is then equated with the nation. Criticism of it is described as anti-nationalism so such criticism can be silenced. To call criticism as “hurt sentiment” is now much too mild. It has to be treated as blasphemy/anti-nationalism, and treated as a serious crime. This helps to convert a secular state into a religious state, which ultimately is the aim of the RSS.
The BJP-RSS government currently in power is unable to have a dialogue with an institution such as the JNU and other similar universities such as the Hyderabad Central University. The emphasis from the start in such universities has been on questioning existing knowledge, exploring new knowledge and relating knowledge to the existing reality. This is the very opposite of merely handing down selected information without questioning it. This is a problem that the BJP-RSS government has to face with a number of pace-setting prestigious centres of learning that do not substitute catechism for learning, and instead demand the right to debate a subject that may be thought to be blasphemous to the nation as defined by Hindutva. So the alternative is to try and dismantle such centres of learning by creating disturbances. This will eventually prevent them from functioning as they are intended to do.
Method in the madness
There seems to be something of a pattern in the organisation of such disturbances, since there is a repetition of the same procedure in each case. The similarities are curious. The first step is to ensure that the person appointed in a position of authority in the institution is relatively unknown, as have been many of the directors, chairmen, and vice-chancellors appointed in the last 18 months in various institutions. They are relied upon to follow the orders of the government. The next step is to locate a group preferably debating contemporary issues, and instruct the local AVBP cadres to create a confrontation with such a group in the course of the meeting, and the confrontation could even result in some violence. This allows the ABVP to claim that they were attacked first and for a complaint to be made to the local BJP politician, readily to hand, who then takes it up with the minister, and who then orders the authority concerned to rusticate the students, to bring the police into the premises and arrest the non-AVBP students, irrespective of whether or not they were involved in the confrontation.
The normal university reaction in the past has been not to allow police on the campus or to make arrests. The exception was during the Emergency. Generally, a committee of enquiry is appointed by the university. It is treated as an internal matter of the institution. Police action can only be permitted if there is a serious breach of law. A group of students shouting slogans is not a serious breach of law. What was done in the JNU reminds me of the saying “to bring a sledge-hammer to crack an egg.” The intention was obviously not just to crack the egg but to smash it completely. But it looks as if the egg is now on the face of the government.
One might well ask why the BJP-RSS is so bent on dismantling institutions of learning and converting them into teaching shops. Is it the premium on conformity and out-of-date knowledge that the BJP-RSS would like to define as education? Is it the kind of education that is given in the shishu–mandirs and madrassas that is seen as ideal in form? Interestingly the institutions that come under attack are those that are associated with freedom of thought, the asking of questions, the advancing of knowledge. Those that conform to education as learning by rote and providing supervised answers are not interfered with all that much, since this pattern of learning fits into a catechism style.
There is by now little doubt that we are currently being governed by those that seem to have an anti-intellectual mind-set. This spells trouble for universities that are concerned with high standards of teaching and research, and it would seem beyond the comprehension of those governing. One can only ask why the government is so apprehensive of intellectuals? Is the government being ham-handed with universities because from the minister down they fear the potential power of those universities that encourage their students to think independently? Or is this a deliberate way of creating a general ambience of fear in the institutions? The existence of such a fear would make it easier to impose syllabi, courses and methods of teaching emanating from the think tanks of the RSS. Not to mention that it makes those employed in universities more pliant.
A culture worth fighting for
For those of us who were among the founding members of JNU, the events of the last few days at the university is a moment of a far bigger intellectual and emotional crisis than has ever happened before in its history. JNU was founded on the principles of democratic functioning, both administratively and in the content of the education it imparted. It meant a generally positive relationship between teacher and student, and a frequency of free discussion both on matters academic and on the world we live in. It meant more rigorous training in the subjects taught and this experience improved the work both of teachers and students, and all of which was underlined by an insistence on critical enquiry. We were conscious of stretching our minds to beyond what was readily known and in encouraging students to look beyond the obvious. It was these factors that made it into a prestigious university, a trend-setter in many subjects that were taught in other Indian universities. It was again these factors that gave it international recognition, on par in many subjects with the best universities outside India.
This of course is the opposite of the rather pathetic BJP-RSS version of what is meant by education at any level, judging by the views of the HRD ministry. To see the BJP-RSS government trying to annul what we have achieved in JNU and reduce the university to a pedestrian teaching shop, is like having to see the work on one’s lifetime being systematically destroyed. Many of us chose to work in JNU rather than take up lucrative positions in universities abroad, because we had a vision that we could make it among the best academic centres located in India. And that excellence it has experienced. As one academic who lived a substantial part of my life working in the JNU, and contributing to this vision, the hostility of the current government to the JNU leaves me with a sense of despair and sadness for the future of universities in India. However, I must add that experiencing the protest of the JNU community against the attack that has been mounted on it, does make me feel that perhaps the values that we had tried to inculcate in its early years have taken root. When JNU recovers from the trauma of this attack it is likely to be even more committed to the values for which it was created – excellence not only in intellectual enterprise but also in endorsing a humane and open society upholding the rights of every Indian citizen.
A recent example was the discussion on capital punishment where a handful of students had gathered on the JNU campus. Obviously the names of those recently given this punishment cropped up in the discussion, and very soon this became the dominant political aspect and the sole consideration, setting aside all other questions. Slogans took over in a confused fashion as happens in such situations and the serious issue of capital punishment was lost. Capital punishment is not just an issue of concern to nationalism alone. It involves aspects of ethics, morality, religion as well as the context of the punishment, and it is not in the least bit surprising that opinions differ on all these issues. The logical follow-up could have been a more extended discussion of the subject, from other perspectives, rather than the insistence by some of those present that this was an anti-national issue, and their then proceeding to have the government intervene and clamp down on it.
Sedition and secession
As has been said by almost everyone who has written on this event, the terms that the government uses in its charges against the JNU students are problematic and cannot be bandied about in a casual way. Charges of sedition, extremely serious as they are, nevertheless are slapped on anyone for virtually any critical opinion about the country. Even the dictionary meaning of sedition is enticement to violence and the overthrow of the state/government. As others have pointed out, there is a considerable difference between advocacy of violent methods and actual incitement to violence. But such distinctions seem to be beyond the comprehension of most politicians.
To maintain that a statement made about the possibility of a segment of the Indian nation breaking away is sedition, shows neither an understanding of the word nor knowledge of the historical occasions in the last half century when such statements were made with reference to other parts of India. This is not the first time that Kashmir has been mentioned as part of such a suggestion. There have been earlier threats of secession from other parts of the nation, such as Nagaland and Tamil Nadu, and the intention of establishing the Sikh state of Khalistan to mention just a few. Some others are not completely silent even in present times. Threats of secession are in part the way in which nationalisms play out in nations that extend over large territories and multiple cultures. It has to be understood as a process of change and debated rather than being silenced by calling it sedition.
The debate on sedition goes back to the early years of independence when the attempt to silence free speech was successfully resisted by the Supreme Court, (Brij Bhushan vs. State of Delhi and Romesh Thapar vs. Union of India). Nehru was in favour of expunging sedition as unconstitutional. Those were the days when democracy was valued and was nurtured. We should familiarise ourselves with the many occasions when sedition has been objected to and on valid grounds, and therefore consider its removal from the body of laws. Laws that can be easily misused should be reconsidered. Governance does imply taking an intelligent interest in the debates on the laws by which we are meant to be governed.
The first foray
Then there are those who, because they are critical of some aspects of the nation, are immediately condemned as anti-national. Taken literally this adjective would apply to a large number of Indians who are critical of various aspects of events in India. Governments turn by turn have described people as anti-national but the frequency of this accusation has increased in the last couple of years. It has been applied so often by the BJP that the word has become virtually meaningless, but not harmless, because it can be used to politically persecute a person. The ancestor to the BJP – the Jan Sangh party, when it was part of the government of Morarji Desai, subsequent to the Emergency – criticized the history textbooks written by some of us and published by the NCERT. We were accused of being anti-Indian and anti-national for the views we held on ancient Indian history. The government demanded that our books be proscribed. But in the election that followed the government fell, so the books survived.
Almost 25 years later, in the first NDA government the matter was taken up again. The then education minister, Murli Manohar Joshi and his BJP cohorts referred to the authors of the textbooks – and I was included in this – as not only anti-Hindu but also anti-national, anti-Indian, and academic terrorists of the worst kind. Enthusiastic politicians demanded that we should be arrested and punished for writing these books. Fortunately, the first NDA government did not take itself too seriously and did not go around arresting many teachers and students for being anti-national, largely because their definition of what was anti-national became a matter for ridicule. Anti-national for them was in effect a limited term, namely anti-Hindu.
Pathetic attempt
In the latest move of the BJP-RSS government pertaining to universities, the student union president who was arrested at JNU has been accused of being anti-national and indulging in sedition. He has been accused of raising slogans on independence for Kashmir and praise of Pakistan. The irony is that the student union president who was doing just the opposite of what would be regarded as anti-national and seditious and was trying to close the discussion, was the one who was arrested.
It is now being held, very much as an after thought, that the group that held the meeting were instigated by the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. This is at best a rather pathetic attempt to institute a charge of terrorism with no other evidence but a dubious tweet. Does government evidence rely on tweets? And are dubious tweets enough to accuse a person of sedition ? This is not just a case of the government and the police being adamant, but it appears to be a well-planned strategy to destabilise JNU. There was just too much unusual alacrity in the way events moved. One can’t help but feel that somewhere along the line, the present government has lost its initial confidence in itself and is now resorting to unpleasant tactics. An example of this was the way in which JNU faculty and students and some media people were beaten up at the Patiala House Courtby a bunch of lawyers, said to be of the BJP, when there was to be a hearing of the case against the student union president. Are the courts of law now going to have to resort to fisticuffs?
Education as catechism
The ideology central to the BJP-RSS has no space or use for liberal thought. Education for such organisations means only what can be called a kind of catechism. This is a memorisation of a narrow set of questions rooted in faith and belief and an equally narrow set of answers that prohibit any doubt or deviation. The same technique applies to all subjects. Therefore educational centres that allow questioning and discussion are anathema and have to be dismantled.
Since what is referred to as Hinduism does not confine itself to a single sacred book, nor is there exclusive worship of a single monotheistic God, the notion of blasphemy so crucial to the Christian and Islamic religions has little application to the Hindu religion. However, in the Hindutva version of Hinduism, aimed at establishing a Hindu Rashtra – a state where Hindus are the primary citizens and the purpose of governance is to uphold Hindu principles – the notion of a kind of blasphemy is applied to those that are critical of Hindutva that is equated with the Hindu Rashtra. This is then equated with the nation. Criticism of it is described as anti-nationalism so such criticism can be silenced. To call criticism as “hurt sentiment” is now much too mild. It has to be treated as blasphemy/anti-nationalism, and treated as a serious crime. This helps to convert a secular state into a religious state, which ultimately is the aim of the RSS.
The BJP-RSS government currently in power is unable to have a dialogue with an institution such as the JNU and other similar universities such as the Hyderabad Central University. The emphasis from the start in such universities has been on questioning existing knowledge, exploring new knowledge and relating knowledge to the existing reality. This is the very opposite of merely handing down selected information without questioning it. This is a problem that the BJP-RSS government has to face with a number of pace-setting prestigious centres of learning that do not substitute catechism for learning, and instead demand the right to debate a subject that may be thought to be blasphemous to the nation as defined by Hindutva. So the alternative is to try and dismantle such centres of learning by creating disturbances. This will eventually prevent them from functioning as they are intended to do.
Method in the madness
There seems to be something of a pattern in the organisation of such disturbances, since there is a repetition of the same procedure in each case. The similarities are curious. The first step is to ensure that the person appointed in a position of authority in the institution is relatively unknown, as have been many of the directors, chairmen, and vice-chancellors appointed in the last 18 months in various institutions. They are relied upon to follow the orders of the government. The next step is to locate a group preferably debating contemporary issues, and instruct the local AVBP cadres to create a confrontation with such a group in the course of the meeting, and the confrontation could even result in some violence. This allows the ABVP to claim that they were attacked first and for a complaint to be made to the local BJP politician, readily to hand, who then takes it up with the minister, and who then orders the authority concerned to rusticate the students, to bring the police into the premises and arrest the non-AVBP students, irrespective of whether or not they were involved in the confrontation.
The normal university reaction in the past has been not to allow police on the campus or to make arrests. The exception was during the Emergency. Generally, a committee of enquiry is appointed by the university. It is treated as an internal matter of the institution. Police action can only be permitted if there is a serious breach of law. A group of students shouting slogans is not a serious breach of law. What was done in the JNU reminds me of the saying “to bring a sledge-hammer to crack an egg.” The intention was obviously not just to crack the egg but to smash it completely. But it looks as if the egg is now on the face of the government.
One might well ask why the BJP-RSS is so bent on dismantling institutions of learning and converting them into teaching shops. Is it the premium on conformity and out-of-date knowledge that the BJP-RSS would like to define as education? Is it the kind of education that is given in the shishu–mandirs and madrassas that is seen as ideal in form? Interestingly the institutions that come under attack are those that are associated with freedom of thought, the asking of questions, the advancing of knowledge. Those that conform to education as learning by rote and providing supervised answers are not interfered with all that much, since this pattern of learning fits into a catechism style.
There is by now little doubt that we are currently being governed by those that seem to have an anti-intellectual mind-set. This spells trouble for universities that are concerned with high standards of teaching and research, and it would seem beyond the comprehension of those governing. One can only ask why the government is so apprehensive of intellectuals? Is the government being ham-handed with universities because from the minister down they fear the potential power of those universities that encourage their students to think independently? Or is this a deliberate way of creating a general ambience of fear in the institutions? The existence of such a fear would make it easier to impose syllabi, courses and methods of teaching emanating from the think tanks of the RSS. Not to mention that it makes those employed in universities more pliant.
A culture worth fighting for
For those of us who were among the founding members of JNU, the events of the last few days at the university is a moment of a far bigger intellectual and emotional crisis than has ever happened before in its history. JNU was founded on the principles of democratic functioning, both administratively and in the content of the education it imparted. It meant a generally positive relationship between teacher and student, and a frequency of free discussion both on matters academic and on the world we live in. It meant more rigorous training in the subjects taught and this experience improved the work both of teachers and students, and all of which was underlined by an insistence on critical enquiry. We were conscious of stretching our minds to beyond what was readily known and in encouraging students to look beyond the obvious. It was these factors that made it into a prestigious university, a trend-setter in many subjects that were taught in other Indian universities. It was again these factors that gave it international recognition, on par in many subjects with the best universities outside India.
This of course is the opposite of the rather pathetic BJP-RSS version of what is meant by education at any level, judging by the views of the HRD ministry. To see the BJP-RSS government trying to annul what we have achieved in JNU and reduce the university to a pedestrian teaching shop, is like having to see the work on one’s lifetime being systematically destroyed. Many of us chose to work in JNU rather than take up lucrative positions in universities abroad, because we had a vision that we could make it among the best academic centres located in India. And that excellence it has experienced. As one academic who lived a substantial part of my life working in the JNU, and contributing to this vision, the hostility of the current government to the JNU leaves me with a sense of despair and sadness for the future of universities in India. However, I must add that experiencing the protest of the JNU community against the attack that has been mounted on it, does make me feel that perhaps the values that we had tried to inculcate in its early years have taken root. When JNU recovers from the trauma of this attack it is likely to be even more committed to the values for which it was created – excellence not only in intellectual enterprise but also in endorsing a humane and open society upholding the rights of every Indian citizen.
'Anti National' according to Arnab
Dilip Bobb in Outlook India
The TV channel Times Now is attracting quite a few eyeballs and raising an equal number of eyebrows over its coverage of the row over nationalism. More precisely, the role of its anchor, Arnab Goswami. To figure out what's going on, here's a behind the scenes look at what happens in the studio.
Arnab: Hey you! You anti-national, what are you doing walking onto my set before me and carrying a flag. Is that a Pakistani flag? How dare you? You should be flogged in a public place...
Flag Carrier: Sorry Sir, I'm just the set assistant. I was told you might need the Indian flag to wrap around yourself on tonight's show on patriotism. I'll take it back...
Arnab: How dare you! I may need to raise it along with the decibel level and TRPs even though I can do enough flag-waving without a flag. Who is that other fellow carrying a placard? He must be an anti-national from JNU. How dare he? He should be hung, drawn and quartered...
Flag Carrier: He's the other set assistant. The placard is a screen to conceal the flames that lick the screen when you are on. The producer felt it might look like the Make in India event where the fire had reached the stage where people were still performing.
Arnab: I light the fire. I do the performing. I don't need any artificial aids. No one leaves here without being singed. No one leaves here without saying what the nation wants to know. Why do you think it is called the hot seat?
Flag Carrier: Yes sir, I mean no sir, I mean I'm just the assistant.
Arnab: That's the problem with this country. No one wants to take responsibility, no one wants to accept blame, no one wants to reveal their real position. In my book, that is ant-national activity. Can you deny you are anti-national?
Assistant: (muted)
Arnab: I have shut you off; I will now allow you to speak…Voices such as yours should not be heard. …What is that sound in my ear? Oh, it's the producer, but Mr Producer, how do you know he's just an assistant? These anti-nationals have mastered the art of disguise. See how many anti-nationals are showing up in my studio disguised as professors and academics…What's that? I invited them? Well, then, their credentials should be checked at the gate, their ID cards, their bank accounts, sources of foreign money , etc.
Producer: Arnab, It's me, the show is not going to start for another two hours. Plus, we invite guests, we send cars to pick them up, we pay them for their appearances, how can we check their ID's? It's not been done in news television before.
Arnab: News television has not seen an Arnab before either, Mr Producer Sir, this is the most watched channel, the most admired channel, the most preferred channel...
Producer: Arnab, I am the one who Okays the ads for Times Now. I know what it says but let's not get carried away...
Arnab: What about when they were carrying away poor Hanumanthapa's body in Siachen. I was the one who reminded everyone that a soldier had died and we were hosting anti-nationals on our soil, and in our studios. Did you see the spike in tweets about the show?
Producer: They were not necessarily in our favour. I think that the Siachen issue is buried now. We have had our own reporters attacked by lawyers in the courts.
Arnab: How dare they? Who are these anti-nationals who have the guts to beat up our reporters? I shall expose them, the nation wants to know, who are they?
Producer: They are the same ones we have been calling patriots and nationalists. They were singing Vande Matram on your show.
Arnab: How dare they? Don't they know who they are taking on? We are the voice of the people. Bring them on to the show and I will teach them a lesson in patriotism.
Producer: I tried but they have switched off their mobiles.
Arnab: How dare they? Don't they know how to communicate? How can they remain in silent mode when the nation wants to know, is waiting to know. Tell them anyone who does not appear on Times Now is anti-national. In fact, anyone who does not watch Times Now is anti-national. Now, let's get on with tonight's show.
Tuesday, 16 February 2016
JNU, BJP and Jeremiah Wright’s prayer book
Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn
EASTER is as good a time as any to recall Rev Jeremiah Wright’s admonition of the American political class. The noxious attack on Delhi’s premier Jawaharlal Nehru University by Delhi Police and their Hindutva cheerleaders is another fine reason to remember the pastor who baptised President Obama’s children but remains in bad odour with the right-wing political class in his country.
In a powerful sermon, he illustrates how to criticise your country and not be lynched or jailed. His slamming of America is not rooted in hatred of his country but in his love for its people as he loved people everywhere. Pastor Wright, like other ordinary people, does not have a nationalist bone.
War, he told a congregation not too long ago, does not make for peace. “Fighting for peace is like raping for virginity…When your wife or your children have been crushed by the enemy, when your mother or your father have been mowed down by the military, peace is not on your mind. Payback is the only game in town.” Are Jeremiah Wright’s words subversive for our region?
“Occupying somebody else’s country doesn’t make for peace. Killing those that fought to protect their own homes does not make for peace … We confuse government and God…We believe God sanctioned the rape and robbery of an entire continent. And [they want] us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no. Not ‘God Bless America’; God Damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people!” It’s a long speech.
Many Americans strongly disagreed with Jeremiah Wright. President Obama distanced himself from his sermons in an election year. But no statute or law book was thrown at him, nor was he harassed or threatened with lynching as happens in India these days. The object lesson here is that America can be accused of a million wrongs, but it remains a confident democracy that allows for dissent at home, though not be always abroad.
The Wright example is relevant for India as last week’s assault on JNU came from an insecure state that is not confident enough to take sharp criticism. The assault, ostensibly invited by some Wright-like words, triggered a heavy bout of nationalist fervour. Sadly, every party, from the left to the right, was pleading to be counted as nationalist as if that would save anyone from the state’s insidious rightist trap.
Nationalism, which Wright shunned, has traditionally been a sly, opportunistic, street-smart, malleable idea, which doesn’t do any good to any society coming under its sway. But it has always been useful for the national elites more or less everywhere, since decades. Ziaul Haq claimed to be a nationalist, so did his quarry, Z.A. Bhutto. Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif, ditto. Mujib and Ziaur Rehman likewise. Hitler rode to power on nationalism, and with him his trusted aide Ernst Rohm. However, when Rohm, the head of the dreaded Nazi SA, posited that socialism in National Socialism was as important as nationalism, Hitler got him shot.
Nehru was instinctively an internationalist, but opposition pressure turned him into a nationalist albeit grudgingly, with soft hands. Then Narendra Modi arrived and declared the first prime minister as the harbinger of the nation’s dark ages. By implication, Nehru was India’s essential foe. Modi struck up a conversation with Bangladesh while assiduously hiding away the role of Indira Gandhi in its creation. Gandhi had shored up the idea of Bangladesh to claim her own nationalist baton. Modi has striven to steal her thunder but may not succeed.
His stated objective in this endeavour is, therefore, to finish off the Congress, to weed out from the roots India’s original beacon of nationhood, and, not unknowingly, supplant it with the nationalist fervour of Hindutva’s lynch mobs.
To this end Modi took into confidence the audiences in Beijing about the plot. Indians, he told the world through them, without naming names, were living a life of inferiority complex under decades of Nehru-Gandhi rule. With his advent they had got back their spine.
That spine was in evidence last week in JNU, India’s premier institution of high academic interface with the world. Calls for shooting JNU’s leftist students could be an example of the reinforced spine. Shut down the university counselled another Hindutva acolyte. The agenda to dismantle the “hub of leftism”, of course, precedes by decades last week’s meeting of some as yet unidentified students to commemorate an executed Kashmiri militant.
The Afzal Guru meeting became a ruse for a terrifying police invasion of the campus. The student leader picked up for grilling is a Marxist and it is not his politics to slam the Indian state as Rev Wright would. That may not help though. The Hindu right is hunting for communists, not Kashmiri separatists who the army takes care of.
Therefore, perhaps the most tragedy-prone nationalists anywhere today are India’s communists, not the least because they were never cut out for the job. Their creed up until early 1990s was internationalism. Then they seemed to have run out of foreign partners.
Of the internecine communist battles the world over, two or three mannerisms are staple: brotherly greetings, marginalisation of former comrades and debunking of each other. Their task was to dismantle an unequal world, but Indian communists turned the challenge into a game of blind man’s bluff. Having ground down each other more viciously than they ever did their class adversaries they have unwittingly exposed themselves to the state’s vicious moves against them, as sitting ducks. What happened in JNU had much to do with that.
Jeremiah Wright’s sermon could yet guide the comrades to their old self-assured internationalism, and wean them away from an ill-fitting nationalist makeover. Happy Easter, comrades.
EASTER is as good a time as any to recall Rev Jeremiah Wright’s admonition of the American political class. The noxious attack on Delhi’s premier Jawaharlal Nehru University by Delhi Police and their Hindutva cheerleaders is another fine reason to remember the pastor who baptised President Obama’s children but remains in bad odour with the right-wing political class in his country.
In a powerful sermon, he illustrates how to criticise your country and not be lynched or jailed. His slamming of America is not rooted in hatred of his country but in his love for its people as he loved people everywhere. Pastor Wright, like other ordinary people, does not have a nationalist bone.
War, he told a congregation not too long ago, does not make for peace. “Fighting for peace is like raping for virginity…When your wife or your children have been crushed by the enemy, when your mother or your father have been mowed down by the military, peace is not on your mind. Payback is the only game in town.” Are Jeremiah Wright’s words subversive for our region?
“Occupying somebody else’s country doesn’t make for peace. Killing those that fought to protect their own homes does not make for peace … We confuse government and God…We believe God sanctioned the rape and robbery of an entire continent. And [they want] us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no. Not ‘God Bless America’; God Damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people!” It’s a long speech.
Many Americans strongly disagreed with Jeremiah Wright. President Obama distanced himself from his sermons in an election year. But no statute or law book was thrown at him, nor was he harassed or threatened with lynching as happens in India these days. The object lesson here is that America can be accused of a million wrongs, but it remains a confident democracy that allows for dissent at home, though not be always abroad.
The Wright example is relevant for India as last week’s assault on JNU came from an insecure state that is not confident enough to take sharp criticism. The assault, ostensibly invited by some Wright-like words, triggered a heavy bout of nationalist fervour. Sadly, every party, from the left to the right, was pleading to be counted as nationalist as if that would save anyone from the state’s insidious rightist trap.
Nationalism, which Wright shunned, has traditionally been a sly, opportunistic, street-smart, malleable idea, which doesn’t do any good to any society coming under its sway. But it has always been useful for the national elites more or less everywhere, since decades. Ziaul Haq claimed to be a nationalist, so did his quarry, Z.A. Bhutto. Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif, ditto. Mujib and Ziaur Rehman likewise. Hitler rode to power on nationalism, and with him his trusted aide Ernst Rohm. However, when Rohm, the head of the dreaded Nazi SA, posited that socialism in National Socialism was as important as nationalism, Hitler got him shot.
Nehru was instinctively an internationalist, but opposition pressure turned him into a nationalist albeit grudgingly, with soft hands. Then Narendra Modi arrived and declared the first prime minister as the harbinger of the nation’s dark ages. By implication, Nehru was India’s essential foe. Modi struck up a conversation with Bangladesh while assiduously hiding away the role of Indira Gandhi in its creation. Gandhi had shored up the idea of Bangladesh to claim her own nationalist baton. Modi has striven to steal her thunder but may not succeed.
His stated objective in this endeavour is, therefore, to finish off the Congress, to weed out from the roots India’s original beacon of nationhood, and, not unknowingly, supplant it with the nationalist fervour of Hindutva’s lynch mobs.
To this end Modi took into confidence the audiences in Beijing about the plot. Indians, he told the world through them, without naming names, were living a life of inferiority complex under decades of Nehru-Gandhi rule. With his advent they had got back their spine.
That spine was in evidence last week in JNU, India’s premier institution of high academic interface with the world. Calls for shooting JNU’s leftist students could be an example of the reinforced spine. Shut down the university counselled another Hindutva acolyte. The agenda to dismantle the “hub of leftism”, of course, precedes by decades last week’s meeting of some as yet unidentified students to commemorate an executed Kashmiri militant.
The Afzal Guru meeting became a ruse for a terrifying police invasion of the campus. The student leader picked up for grilling is a Marxist and it is not his politics to slam the Indian state as Rev Wright would. That may not help though. The Hindu right is hunting for communists, not Kashmiri separatists who the army takes care of.
Therefore, perhaps the most tragedy-prone nationalists anywhere today are India’s communists, not the least because they were never cut out for the job. Their creed up until early 1990s was internationalism. Then they seemed to have run out of foreign partners.
Of the internecine communist battles the world over, two or three mannerisms are staple: brotherly greetings, marginalisation of former comrades and debunking of each other. Their task was to dismantle an unequal world, but Indian communists turned the challenge into a game of blind man’s bluff. Having ground down each other more viciously than they ever did their class adversaries they have unwittingly exposed themselves to the state’s vicious moves against them, as sitting ducks. What happened in JNU had much to do with that.
Jeremiah Wright’s sermon could yet guide the comrades to their old self-assured internationalism, and wean them away from an ill-fitting nationalist makeover. Happy Easter, comrades.
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