by AJOY ASHIRWAD MAHAPRASHASTA & DIVYA TRIVEDI
A protest demanding the release of Kanhaiya Kumar, the JNUSU president, in New Delhi on February 18 PHOTO/Anindito Mukherjee/Reuters
Again I’ve returned to this country
where a minaret has been entombed.
Someone soaks the wicks of clay lamps
in mustard oil, each night climbs its steps
to read messages scratched on planets.
His fingerprints cancel bank stamps,
in that archive for letters with doomed
addresses, each house buried or empty.
Empty? Because so many fled, ran away,
and became refugees there, in the plains,
where they must now will a final dewfall
to turn the mountains to glass. They’ll see
us through them—see us frantically bury
houses to save them from fire that, like a wall
caves in.
…
“We’re inside the fire, looking for the dark,”
one card lying on the street says, “I want
to be he who pours blood. To soak your hands.
Or I’ll leave mine in the cold till the rain
is ink, and my fingers, at the edge of pain,
are seals all night to cancel the stamps.”
The mad guide! The lost speak like this. They haunt
a country when it is ash. Phantom heart,
pray he’s alive. I have returned in rain
to find him, to learn why he never wrote.
—Agha Shahid Ali, 1997.
These memorable lines about the pathetic situation in Jammu and Kashmir, a State torn apart by decades of conflict, evoke the feelings of separation, lost love, homelessness, and lost addresses. The helplessness of a postman in Kashmir in trying to deliver a postcard to an address that is buried in debris or a home that is abandoned mirrors the lost connection between the state and its people. Almost two decades after the poem appeared, a cultural event, incidentally named “The country without a post office”, held on February 9 in one of India’s finest universities, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), reinforced this lost connection. A group of students organised the cultural evening to voice the concerns of the Kashmiri people and commemorate Afzal Guru, who was hanged to death in 2013 in the Parliament building attack case. The students sought to highlight the stories of the Kashmiri people, living constantly under military vigilance, through plays and songs. The event was critical of the state’s “high-handedness”, which is a common feature of similar events organised in the Left-dominated campus. The organisers felt the hanging of Afzal Guru was based on fabricated evidence and questioned the judiciary’s decision; in fact, many prominent lawyers, politicians, writers and scholars have done so before. The students raised slogans demanding freedom—freedom from patriarchy, hunger, casteism, feudalism, and state repression. Again, such slogans are raised whenever there is an atrocity against the marginalised. But what was acceptable in the normal course went against the students: the Central government branded them as “anti-nationals” and the Delhi Police slapped sedition charges on six JNU students.
Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, along with JNU Students Union (JNUSU) president Kanhaiya Kumar, have been arrested for raising “anti-national” slogans. Three other students, Ashutosh Kumar, Anant Prakash Narayan, and JNUSU general secretary Rama Naga, facing similar charges, are living under constant threat of public lynching despite the fact they have promised to cooperate with the police investigation. The students and JNU, which has also been branded as anti-national, have received unprecedented support from the academic community, writers, artists, and people from all walks of life from all over the world. The general opinion is that the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has misused its powers to victimise young, inquiring minds on a university campus.
Scholars have viewed the crackdown on JNU as part of a series of recent attacks on universities. In the past few months, the Centre has intervened directly in the internal matters of public universities, undermining their autonomy to a great extent. Most of these interventions have been prompted by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), which is affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), the ideological progenitor of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). For instance, on the ABVP’s request, Union Minister of Labour and Employment Bandaru Dattatreya wrote to the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) to act against students who, according to him, indulged in “anti-national” activities at the University of Hyderabad, also called Hyderabad Central University (HCU). This letter prompted at least four high-level bureaucrats of the MHRD to pursue a minor scuffle between students on the HCU campus. This resulted in a series of punitive actions against some students and eventually led to the suicide of a Dalit research scholar, Rohith Vemula, in HCU in January (Frontline, February 19).
In the case of JNU, too, the first information report (FIR) on the alleged anti-national activities was filed by the BJP Member of Parliament from East Delhi, Mahesh Giri. Several universities, including Allahabad University and Gauhati University, have reported cases of punitive action by the administration ever since the NDA came to power in May 2014. All such attacks on a section of the student community have a pattern in which a BJP leader would prompt the HRD Minister to take action. In most of these cases, the Ministry was misinformed by the ABVP, which incidentally fights for the same political space as other dissenting groups on campuses. In all such attacks, the dissenting groups were targeted for being “anti-national”.
The MHRD’s actions have been interpreted as sectarian, pandering to the Hindutva voices on campuses. Academics feel that the crackdown on universities amounts to hounding all dissenting voices, especially communists, Ambedkarites and other liberals, who have been critical of the government’s policies.
Abha Dev Habib, a faculty member at Miranda House Women’s College, Delhi University, and a member of the Delhi Teachers’ Front, said: “That such attacks are mounted in the name of nationalism and patriotism is equally worrisome. Attack on all democratic spaces and criminalising dissent is a way to set aside the government’s failures to improve the standards for education. The government has been slashing funds in education. We have been critical of the government’s intentions to privatise and saffronise education. We have spoken against hundreds of problematic appointments in university administration. As a result, from the Film and Television Institute of India [FTII] to JNU, the academic community has been raising its voice against the government.” The economist Prabhat Patnaik said: “We must understand that the government’s attack on free speech and dissent is the beginning of an insurrection against the Indian Constitution.” Academics believe that the attacks on university spaces and campus politics are the direct result of the Sangh Parivar’s ideas of education. It conceptualises universities and schools as pliant spaces to take forward the ideology of Hindu nationalism. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindutva associates have many a time stated that students are meant to study peacefully and remain within the confines of their classrooms.
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