Kanhaiya Kumar, March 16, 2016. Wikicommons\/ Hemanth5432. Some rights reserved.Since 2014, Indian universities have been
\nsubject to the authoritarian impulse of the state, with the right wing Bharatiya
\nJanata Party (BJP) government of Narendra Modi seeking to fundamentally
\ntransform the character of these universities, imposing unqualified
\nadministrators that are close to the party line, implicitly supporting
\nparty-affiliated student groups such as the ABVP, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) (translation: All
\nIndian Student Council) to silence alternative voices, and deploying both
\nviolence and disproportionate punishment to silence student protest against the
\nstate\u2019s authoritarian policies. <\/i><\/p>\n
The ABVP has been reconfigured to establish the
\nBJP agenda on university campuses, serving as both the mouthpiece of the BJP as
\nwell as an information source for surveilling over and controlling thought that
\nis seen as critical of the BJP agenda dedicated to Hinduizing India. Moreover,
\nthe ABVP has been at the vortex of cooking up trouble and inciting violence
\nacross campuses in India.<\/p>\n
These active measures of intervention into
\nhigher education taken by the Modi government have been orchestrated toward
\nachieving the broader agenda of cleansing the universities of critical voices,
\ninstead reconfiguring universities to serve the right wing agendas of further
\nprivatization and saffronization of education. The education agenda is being
\nreworked, and turned toward the teaching of Sanskrit, the discoveries of Vedic
\nscience, and the reformulation of teaching as practical skills-building.<\/p>\n
At the epicenter of the recent state-led majoritarian
\nattack on universities is the hallowed Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). <\/p>\n
On
\nFebruary 9, 2016, a small group of students at JNU had organized a poetry
\nreading session titled \u2018A Country without a Post Office\u2019 to interrogate the
\nunjudicial hanging of Mr. Afzal Guru, who was allegedly involved in the attacks
\non the Indian parliament in 2001. <\/p>\n
Based
\non accusations that anti-India slogans were chanted at the event, the President
\nof the JNU Student\u2019s Union, Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested and charged with
\nsedition for his alleged involvement in shouting anti-India slogans.
\nApparently, the Vice Chancellor of the University had given permission to the
\nDelhi Police to arrest the student and remove him from campus.<\/p>\n
The
\narrest was made primarily on the basis of a video broadcast by a TV channel
\nthat now stands challenged, with evidence suggesting that the video was doctored
\nup. TV channels such as Times Now, Zee News, and News X have played an
\ninstrumental role in fanning the flames of public outrage, recirculating grainy
\nvideos that are difficult to decipher on screen. The arrest of Kanhaiya
\nKumar, who was later released on bail, was followed by the arrest of JNU
\nstudents Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya. <\/p>\n
Even
\nafter the veracity of the videos had been questioned and subsequent
\ninvestigations have revealed that the videos were doctored, the media houses
\ndid not issue an apology or correct the misinformation, instead feeding the
\nmedia witch-hunt by stoking the charges of anti-nationalism.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
The
\nstudents had already been marked in media and public discourse, with a section
\nof the public issuing violent threats to the students. In spite of the dubious
\nnature of the evidence that was used to file the case initially, the charges of
\nsedition have not been dropped. Two of the students, Umar and Anirban, continue
\nto be in police custody although the emerging evidence not only questions the
\nveracity of the tapes but also suggests that the JNU row was a concerted effort
\nto discredit the university as a place of thought. For instance, later
\ninvestigations suggest that Shilpi Tiwari, former aide of the Union HRD
\nMinister Smriti Irani, played an instrumental role in planting and
\ncirculating the doctored videos. Similarly, the BJP spokesman Sambit Patra
\nplayed the doctored video(s) on network television.<\/p>\n
When Kanhaiya Kumar was presented at the Patiala Court in New Delhi, lawyers and
\nBJP supporters attacked the students and professors of JNU that had attended
\nthe event in solidarity with Mr. Kumar. They were chanting \u201cGlory to Mother
\nIndia,\u201d and \u201cTraitors leave India.\u201d Professors and students at universities
\nsuch as JNU have emerged as the targets of online-offline lynch mobs. The
\nanti-national label has been drummed up to silence diverse voices across the
\ncountry. The Indian media have been stoking the flames of mass hysteria, further
\norchestrating witch hunts when others speak up on their behalf. More recently,
\nmedia houses such as Zee News have turned to attacking the noted JNU political
\nscholar Nivedita Menon and the well-known Urdu poet and scientist Gauhar Raza.<\/p>\n
Responding
\nto the JNU events, Home Minister Rajnath Singh warned, \u201cAnyone who raises
\nanti-India slogans or tries to put a question mark on the nation\u2019s unity and
\nintegrity will not be spared,\u201d while Education Minister Smriti Irani said: \u201cThe
\nnation can never tolerate any insult to mother India.\u201d The BJP-affiliated
\npolitician Subramanian Swamy demanded a temporary closure of the university and
\na complete cleansing of the university. Such announcements point towards a
\nconcerted effort to delegitimize the university and to undermine spaces of
\nthinking that interrogate the monolithic communal free market development
\nnarrative that the state seeks to pursue. But not only this. Interrogating the
\nrole of the armed forces special powers act in what are termed \u2018areas of
\ndisturbance\u2019 such as Kashmir and the Northeast, the rapes by the army in
\nKashmir and the Northeast, or the development model of India can be quickly
\nlabeled as anti-national.<\/p>\n
The
\nanti-national propaganda campaign has been strategically directed at portraying
\nstudents, professors, and their university as a threat to the nation, feeding
\ninto a national media and public frenzy to shut down debate, conversation, and
\ndifference. The most recent attack on JNU is part of an ongoing campaign
\nagainst universities, witnessed earlier in the Film and Television Institute of
\nIndia (FTII), Hyderabad Central University, and more recently, Allahabad
\nUniversity.<\/p>\n
The
\nlanguage of anti-nationalism has worked to put forth a monolithic vision of the
\nnation state, and simultaneously sought to erase diverse voices from the
\ndiscursive space. The JNU incident comes in the wake of the suicide of Rohith
\nVemula, a Dalit (meaning \u201coppressed\u201d in South Asia, a broad category comprising
\nthe scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other oppressed groups) student leader
\nat the University of Hyderabad, who committed suicide after having been
\nunjustly treated by a university administration held hostage to the BJP
\ngovernment at the Center. <\/p>\n
Rohith
\nwas a member of the Ambedkar Students Association, a dalit student group that
\ndrew attention to various forms of injustices in Indian society, and was protesting
\nthe hanging of Yakub Memon, a convict in the 1993 Bombay bombings. At the
\nevent, a confrontation had broken out with activists of the ABVP. Because of the
\nalleged intervention of the BJP leader from the region, Bandaru Dattatreya, and
\nthe pressure exerted by the BJP government, Rohith\u2019s fellowship was withdrawn
\nand he was expelled from the hostel, which ultimately led to his suicide.<\/p>\n
Over
\n10,000 students marched to the capital on February 24 to protest Rohith\u2019s
\ndeath. In their protest, the students draw attention to the disenfranchisements
\nof Dalits in a Brahminical education system and the attacks on Rohith that was
\nsystematically orchestrated by BJP-ABVP. The protest of the students is a
\nprotest against the chilling climate of control being exercised by BJP on
\nuniversity campuses throughout India.<\/p>\n
The
\nattack on Universities across India is reflective of a broader authoritarian
\nagenda directed at silencing difference and critical thought at sites of
\nlearning. Science and engineering curricula and research programs are being
\nredone with an agenda for promoting Vedic science. History is being re-narrated
\nto articulate a Hindu narrative of the nation state, devoid of evidence. <\/p>\n
The
\nattack of the Hindu right on universities such as JNU is an attack on the
\nfundamental idea of India as a democracy that thrives in its pluralism and
\ncelebrates a culture of argumentation, as Amartya Sen so poignantly depicts in
\nhis book \u201cThe Argumentative Indian.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Narendra Modi government\u2019s attack on Indian
\nuniversities is an attack on thought, an attack on critical engagement, and an
\nattack on learning as asking questions. Freedom of academic thought is under
\nthreat across India as the Indian state continues its attack on universities,
\nteachers, and students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1282\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}