Bulldozing dissent

Joseph Heller’s novel Catch 22 talks about unsettling times, probably more unsettling than what we have in India today. One of the most remarkable descriptions in the novel is about the mental asylum, which was part of a large military facility. The inmates in the asylum had a real idea about their own situation. In a world where a fierce war was being waged and where young men were running mad, laying down lives and winning medals, the inmates in the loony bin had no doubt that their ward was the only sane place in the whole universe.

The Hindutva brigade in our country has been actively engaged in damaging the composite fabric of the country and selling its resources to wanton corporates. But like Heller’s loonies, they are in no doubt that they are the only patriots worth the name. How would it be otherwise? Dare ask such a thing and they will brandish before your nose a fistful of one way tickets to the God and Devil forsaken country called Pakistan!!

Earlier, they had reserved such generosity to a handful of eminent men like the Jnanapith laureate U R Ananthamurthy and a few Khans from the Bollywood. But now the honour has been extended to all faculty and students of JNU.  You need only approach anyone from Rajnath Sing to Kummanam Rajashekharan or even any third rate ABVP functionary and they will give you tickets to Pakistan. As a matter of fact, you need not even have a JNU identity card to win this mega bumper: you just need show some sympathy for those academics and students who were brutalized at the Patiala court, and be sure, flight tickets to Islamabad or Karachi will be delivered at your doorsteps.

If you believe in calling a ‘spade’ a ‘spade,’ you will have to admit what the JNU students did on the anniversary of Afzal Guru’s hanging was a bit unwise. They should have been more on their guard in the dangerous times we live. Of course a university is meant to be a place for free debate and dissemination of ideas. It was how the great visionary after whom the august institution is named had visualized it.

It is also true that global institutions like Yale, MIT and LSE, allow a great degree of freedom to their faculty and students; a freedom which includes the right to criticise their governments, constitutions, judges, armies and in the case of the US even to burn their national flag. In Yale, for example, you can hear professors coolly discoursing on the dubious nature of Elihu Yale’s trade in India (this was none but the guy who founded that absurdly prestigious college), and at MIT a no less figure than Noam Chomsky sparing no words in hell to denounce America’s racist past and neo-colonialist present. At LSE Paul Gilroy is at his very best when talking about the cruelties of British imperialism and the hollowness of hallowed concepts like nation-state. In a moment of rare poetic illumination, he goes on to say how ecstatic he becomes each time he sees someone shooting a ball past the English goalkeeper. Such comments don’t earn academics like him atavistic anti-nationalist labels nor land them in prison like the poor Pakistani boy Omer. As for Omer, he was an avid fan of our  Mahendra Dhoni and his in innocence  and admiration for his icon, happened to wave an Indian flag.  He was charged with sedition and taken to prison.

Jawahar Lal Nehru, himself a product of Cambridge University, had idealistic visions about a university. Like Shakespeare, he believed that academies should be the place where the true Promethean fire should burn. But we are no longer living in Nehru’s India.

In this country debating the merits of the death penalty given to Afzal Guru- which was questioned by many legal luminaries and which in the words of the Judiciary itself was something done to satisfy the conscience of the nation- is a crime. But understand, it is no crime here to build a temple for Godse or a statue in that Pune Brahmin’s honour. Nor is it a crime to suggest that Godse should have rather gone for Nehru’s scalp instead of Gandhi’s vegetable intestines. Small wonder then in calls for the wholesale dismantling of a prestigious University – which in the language of RSS mouthpiece Organizer has become a den of anti nationals-and if needed, its forcible transplantation to Pakistan. After all two of the greatest leaders of the Hindutva brigade, Mr. LK Advani and Jaswant Sing, are greater admirers of Jinnah than Nehru! So why not palm off an anti-deshi university to them? Who knows it won’t be a more prized gift to them than the solemnly packaged carton containing someone called Massood Azhar, delivered by hand by our erstwhile BJP Home Minister at Kandahar?    

In fact, the antiquated sedition laws in our country, a leftover from the colonial times, are proving to be handy weapons to browbeat political and ideological opponents into submission. Whether it be Hardik Patel or Kanhaiya Kumar the law has been used not to tackle treason but to muzzle political opposition and suppress counter narratives.

There have been un/well-founded reports that it was the ABVP cadre on the JNU campus who raised pro-Pakistani slogans to bring disrepute to the organizers of the programme. Pro-Hindutva activists have many a time in the past resorted to such nefarious tactics. Few would remember the case of Deshraj reported in December 2014.

Deshraj was an avid Hindutva activist from Muzaffarnagar. He took pains to slaughter a dog and then  a buffalo.   He dumped the dog’s carcass in a mosque in the locality and the buffalo’s inside a temple.  He wrote pro-IS slogans inside the temple: All these were well-calculated moves to incite communal tension. And none need teach the Hindutva Parivar that communal flare-ups do benefit them both electorally and economically. Deshraj was only being a tool in this wider conspiracy.

Lucky for the people of Muzaffarnagar, Deshraj was caught red-handed. However, his family backed by the local Parivar leaders were ready with convincing excuses: Deshraj, they averred, was under medication and suffering from mental disorders. Certainly mental ailment is an excuse that comes in handy for those belonging to the parivar brigade. JNU students certainly can claim no such privilege. They should better remind themselves of what Gabriel Garcia Marquez long ago said about Latin America: It is hazardous to be alive in South America, the master of magical realism had wisely observed. In India of our times, it is not only hazardous to be alive but even to be dead. Because even after death, they might accuse you of treason and sedition as it happened in the case of Ishrat Jahan and Rohit Vemula.    

(Umer O Thasneem teaches English at Calicut University. The views expressed here are personal. He may be contacted at uotasnm@yahoo.com)