Kanhaiya Kumar, March 16, 2016. Wikicommons/ Hemanth5432. Some rights reserved.Since 2014, Indian universities have been
subject to the authoritarian impulse of the state, with the right wing Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) government of Narendra Modi seeking to fundamentally
transform the character of these universities, imposing unqualified
administrators that are close to the party line, implicitly supporting
party-affiliated student groups such as the ABVP, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) (translation: All
Indian Student Council) to silence alternative voices, and deploying both
violence and disproportionate punishment to silence student protest against the
state’s authoritarian policies.
The ABVP has been reconfigured to establish the
BJP agenda on university campuses, serving as both the mouthpiece of the BJP as
well as an information source for surveilling over and controlling thought that
is seen as critical of the BJP agenda dedicated to Hinduizing India. Moreover,
the ABVP has been at the vortex of cooking up trouble and inciting violence
across campuses in India.
These active measures of intervention into
higher education taken by the Modi government have been orchestrated toward
achieving the broader agenda of cleansing the universities of critical voices,
instead reconfiguring universities to serve the right wing agendas of further
privatization and saffronization of education. The education agenda is being
reworked, and turned toward the teaching of Sanskrit, the discoveries of Vedic
science, and the reformulation of teaching as practical skills-building.
At the epicenter of the recent state-led majoritarian
attack on universities is the hallowed Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).
On
February 9, 2016, a small group of students at JNU had organized a poetry
reading session titled ‘A Country without a Post Office’ to interrogate the
unjudicial hanging of Mr. Afzal Guru, who was allegedly involved in the attacks
on the Indian parliament in 2001.
Based
on accusations that anti-India slogans were chanted at the event, the President
of the JNU Student’s Union, Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested and charged with
sedition for his alleged involvement in shouting anti-India slogans.
Apparently, the Vice Chancellor of the University had given permission to the
Delhi Police to arrest the student and remove him from campus.
The
arrest was made primarily on the basis of a video broadcast by a TV channel
that now stands challenged, with evidence suggesting that the video was doctored
up. TV channels such as Times Now, Zee News, and News X have played an
instrumental role in fanning the flames of public outrage, recirculating grainy
videos that are difficult to decipher on screen. The arrest of Kanhaiya
Kumar, who was later released on bail, was followed by the arrest of JNU
students Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya.
Even
after the veracity of the videos had been questioned and subsequent
investigations have revealed that the videos were doctored, the media houses
did not issue an apology or correct the misinformation, instead feeding the
media witch-hunt by stoking the charges of anti-nationalism.
The
students had already been marked in media and public discourse, with a section
of the public issuing violent threats to the students. In spite of the dubious
nature of the evidence that was used to file the case initially, the charges of
sedition have not been dropped. Two of the students, Umar and Anirban, continue
to be in police custody although the emerging evidence not only questions the
veracity of the tapes but also suggests that the JNU row was a concerted effort
to discredit the university as a place of thought. For instance, later
investigations suggest that Shilpi Tiwari, former aide of the Union HRD
Minister Smriti Irani, played an instrumental role in planting and
circulating the doctored videos. Similarly, the BJP spokesman Sambit Patra
played the doctored video(s) on network television.
When Kanhaiya Kumar was presented at the Patiala Court in New Delhi, lawyers and
BJP supporters attacked the students and professors of JNU that had attended
the event in solidarity with Mr. Kumar. They were chanting “Glory to Mother
India,” and “Traitors leave India.” Professors and students at universities
such as JNU have emerged as the targets of online-offline lynch mobs. The
anti-national label has been drummed up to silence diverse voices across the
country. The Indian media have been stoking the flames of mass hysteria, further
orchestrating witch hunts when others speak up on their behalf. More recently,
media houses such as Zee News have turned to attacking the noted JNU political
scholar Nivedita Menon and the well-known Urdu poet and scientist Gauhar Raza.
Responding
to the JNU events, Home Minister Rajnath Singh warned, “Anyone who raises
anti-India slogans or tries to put a question mark on the nation’s unity and
integrity will not be spared,” while Education Minister Smriti Irani said: “The
nation can never tolerate any insult to mother India.” The BJP-affiliated
politician Subramanian Swamy demanded a temporary closure of the university and
a complete cleansing of the university. Such announcements point towards a
concerted effort to delegitimize the university and to undermine spaces of
thinking that interrogate the monolithic communal free market development
narrative that the state seeks to pursue. But not only this. Interrogating the
role of the armed forces special powers act in what are termed ‘areas of
disturbance’ such as Kashmir and the Northeast, the rapes by the army in
Kashmir and the Northeast, or the development model of India can be quickly
labeled as anti-national.
The
anti-national propaganda campaign has been strategically directed at portraying
students, professors, and their university as a threat to the nation, feeding
into a national media and public frenzy to shut down debate, conversation, and
difference. The most recent attack on JNU is part of an ongoing campaign
against universities, witnessed earlier in the Film and Television Institute of
India (FTII), Hyderabad Central University, and more recently, Allahabad
University.
The case of Rohith
Vemula
The
language of anti-nationalism has worked to put forth a monolithic vision of the
nation state, and simultaneously sought to erase diverse voices from the
discursive space. The JNU incident comes in the wake of the suicide of Rohith
Vemula, a Dalit (meaning “oppressed” in South Asia, a broad category comprising
the scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other oppressed groups) student leader
at the University of Hyderabad, who committed suicide after having been
unjustly treated by a university administration held hostage to the BJP
government at the Center.
Rohith
was a member of the Ambedkar Students Association, a dalit student group that
drew attention to various forms of injustices in Indian society, and was protesting
the hanging of Yakub Memon, a convict in the 1993 Bombay bombings. At the
event, a confrontation had broken out with activists of the ABVP. Because of the
alleged intervention of the BJP leader from the region, Bandaru Dattatreya, and
the pressure exerted by the BJP government, Rohith’s fellowship was withdrawn
and he was expelled from the hostel, which ultimately led to his suicide.
Over
10,000 students marched to the capital on February 24 to protest Rohith’s
death. In their protest, the students draw attention to the disenfranchisements
of Dalits in a Brahminical education system and the attacks on Rohith that was
systematically orchestrated by BJP-ABVP. The protest of the students is a
protest against the chilling climate of control being exercised by BJP on
university campuses throughout India.
The
attack on Universities across India is reflective of a broader authoritarian
agenda directed at silencing difference and critical thought at sites of
learning. Science and engineering curricula and research programs are being
redone with an agenda for promoting Vedic science. History is being re-narrated
to articulate a Hindu narrative of the nation state, devoid of evidence.
The
attack of the Hindu right on universities such as JNU is an attack on the
fundamental idea of India as a democracy that thrives in its pluralism and
celebrates a culture of argumentation, as Amartya Sen so poignantly depicts in
his book “The Argumentative Indian.”
The Narendra Modi government’s attack on Indian
universities is an attack on thought, an attack on critical engagement, and an
attack on learning as asking questions. Freedom of academic thought is under
threat across India as the Indian state continues its attack on universities,
teachers, and students.