The JNU
Marches on
Ish
Mishra
By continuously being in the news in
media and social media for around four months now since the organization of the
cultural program, The City Without Post Office on the anniversary of
Afzal Guru’s hanging in the case of parliament attack in 2001, viewed by many
as a judicial murder and thereafter, JNU has not only metaphorically but in
reality also have transcended from a common noun, institution, to an abstract noun, idea, that
has been fast spreading in the campuses of higher education slowly but
steadily. The NDA government under Narendra Modi, immediately after taking the
charge, began to plan to suppress the dissenting voices in the campuses and to
paint them with saffron; to reduce the to the centers of manufacturing sense of
devotion and faith from the centers of critical thinking and scientific
temperament. The RSS fronts know well that to maintain hegemony over a people,
control over institutional knowledge is necessary, as Brahmanism could maintain
its hegemony over the vast population of the society by monopoly over
definition and impartment of knowledge. JNU being the hub of protests against
injustices and oppression, it thought if it could crush the hub, the rest would
be easily tamed to conformity. But they were wrong, JNU Marches on. Two of the
hunger strikers on 8th day in BHU, have been admitted to hospital.
They are agitating for 24 hour library facility. There could be 24 hour
channels spreading superstitions and prejudices and rumors, but not 24 hour
library that may help students imbibing the habit of critical thinking and
innovation, antithetical to those who locate all the great “greatness” in some
“golden” past. In order to scare the students the administration, as is its
usual tactic suspended few agitating students who do not seem to be cowed down.
The attack
was premeditated and planning had begun over a year ago. The names of the
students recommended for various penalties, including out-of-bound for five
years, by the “High Level Enquiry Committee” headed by the prominent leader of
anti-reservation group, Youth for Equality, had long been decided before the
premeditated attack on JNU in the dawn of 11th February 2016. The court has stayed
the implementation of the recommendations. All these same names are there in
the dossier prepared by 11 “nationalist” (read pro-RSS) teachers of JNU a year
ago that describes JNU as a hub of organized sex racket and the
anti-national activities. Similar views were published in RSS mouthpieces –
Organizer and Pamchjanya in 2015. Was this group of “nationalist” teachers
assigned the job by the university administration or any government agency or
they took the tedious job preparing a 200 page dossier after me5ticulous
research over the number of bottles and buts of the cigarette consumed
and condoms used by JNU students? In the first decade of JNU the right wing
extremists, the self-claimed moral cops slandered JNU as a place, where wine
and “women were free”. Confronted by the journalists on crack down over1983
agitation in defense of the admission policy, the then VC had also repeated the
same slander. Many lumpens believing the rumor would come to the campus in
search of “free woman” and would go back with couple of good lessons. Why
slander campaign against JNU and the students? Punishment to selected students
is always meant to silence the dissent. But as JNU students, teachers and the
alumni made it clear by marching in a very large
number defying the fascist order, the dissent of JNU cannot be silenced by
terror tactic. The new protagonists of this “ideological battle” have vowed to
make it a national movement by joining hands with workers’ and transform it into
a movement for defending democracy. It is going to be a long drawn battle
between the coercive repression and protracted ideological resistance.
Brahmanism,
disguising as “nationalism”, expressing via
various RSS organs, is desperate to restore its ideological hegemony. It knows
that it could maintain its hegemony by defining and monopolizing knowledge
through monopolistic education for thousands of years. Universal,
constitutional accessibility to education and its democratization through
social justice legislations has challenged their monopoly over knowledge. It is
trying to meet the challenge by subverting the education.
The attack on the students by the state and the right wing extremism,
represented by RSS that took off with Mr. Modi’s ascendance to power in the
center, has intensified in the last one year. The ruling classes, in order to
divert the popular attention from the major contradictions and to blunt their
edge, overplay some minor, mostly artificial contradictions with sentimental
appeals and divert the creative discourse of dissent into reacting to their
agenda. Nationalism is very sensitive issue as no one would like to be termed
as anti-national. Fascists are intolerant to differing opinions more so in the campuses with left and Ambedkarite student activism. As has been widely known
by now, the invasion of JNU with declarations of its being hub of
anti-nationalism by government and RSS ideologues on the basis of the stage
managed allegedly anti-national sloganeering, was premeditated. Why the vicious
attack and slander campaign against the students of HCU and JNU, as has been
rightly said by Kanchan Ilaiah, the campuses with a difference (Indian
Express, 6 April 2016)? The RSS knows that the Brahmanical values and
the hierarchal sense of devotion that forms its ideological bases, cannot
flourish without saffronization of the higher education. The campuses like JNU
and HCU that encourage and nurture a culture of debate and discourse, a culture
of questioning and dissent are unfertile for saffron growth. The presence of
ideologically Left and Ambdedkarite students is the biggest hurdle. To break
this hurdle the government began to appoint RSS loyalists with redoubtable
academic credentials, mostly upper caste, at the helm of academic and research
institutions, as the first step to crush this culture.
Next step of RSS design of saffronization of campuses is the
generation of ideological following among the students. That is not possible in
the campuses “with a difference”, with democratic academic culture conducive to
the creation and recreation of rationality, reason and rebellion, but unfertile
to the growth of the sense of devotion and Brahmanical obscurantism. Its
student brigade, ABVP cannot have hold in campuses, where the students derive
their inspiration from Bhim Rao Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh. Therefore it decided
to invade the campuses and discredit the radical student activists, the budding
intellectuals as anti-national. By doing so, it imposed a cultural war on
students. The students have taken up the challenge. The campuses all over the
country have risen in revolt. It is a war between constitutional nationalism
and jingoistic national chauvinism as propagated by various RSS fronts. The
fascist attack on HCU and JNU brought together various left students groups’
and the followers of Ambedkar on the same platform. Rohith Vemula’s martyrdom
proved to be the turning point. JNU students were, at the time, engaged in the
protracted Occupy UGC agitation against government policy and
planning under JNUSU leadership. Rohith’s martyrdom brought about the much
awaited unity of the Jay Bhim and Lal Salam slogans
and JNU became the hub of agitation. This made the right wing extremism
desperate that invaded JNU for its “anti-nationalism”.
The difference between modern fascism and the premodern princely
despotism is that the former has solid ideological following with a sense of
unconditional devotion, armed with Goebbelsian machinery of misinformation and
rumor that goes down to common people, who are not willing to reason, as
reality. It does not appeal to the popular reason but to
the popular emotions with its own constructs of nationalism and
antinationalism; patriotism and sedition. As we know from the historical
experiences, the fascists are most scared of the ideas that question and expose
their designs. Therefore their paramilitary brigades disrupt the opponents’
programs and discourses with the war cries of nationalism. Mussolini’s Black Shirts and
Hitler’s Storm Troopers (SA) are the glaring historical
examples. ABVP, the student wing of the RSS, is doing exactly the same. Instead
of organizing its own programs on nationalism, it has been indulging into
disrupting others’ programs, be it on nationalism, Ambedkar or Bhagat Singh,
with war cries of Bharat Mata Ki Jay. The slogan that once
symbolized and evoked a sense of belonging to a historical unity of a place and
people evolved through the anti-colonial struggles has become disruptionist
ploy in the hands ABVP to scare the opponents. Unable to counter the ideas by
ideas, its leaders, it seems, have decided upon single point program of violent
disruption of others’ right of freedom to ideas, in the name of patriotism or
nationalism.
What is Nationalism? Why are the students of the institutions of
higher education in general, and IIT Madras, Hyderabad Central University and
JNU being persecuted and branded as anti-national? It is to be noted the
aforesaid institutions are ranked in the top five in the country by the
Ministry of Human Resource Development. Is the nationalism, as the
mythological claim of the right wing extremism, a legacy of some antiquity?
Nationalism is not the legacy of any real or mythical past but a historically
evolved modern ideology of the modern nation state that rose in Europe on the
ruins of a regressive feudalism. As Benedict Anderson has rightly pointed out
in The Imagined Communalities, the concept of nationalism as a new
identity criterion and as a hegemonic ideology “was born in an age when
Enlightenment and revolutions were destroying the legitimacy of divinely
ordained hierarchical dynastic realm”. In pre modern days, there was no
nationalism but loyalty to the “divinely ordained” and the divinity of the
ruler’s authority was testified by the religion as its ideology. From the
beginning of the premeditated attack on JNU with aggressive slanderous
campaigns, of RSS think tank is pooling its all the intellectual resources to
link the death of a soldier on the border with JNU’s “anti-nationalism”. In pre-modern
days, the soldier of the king’s army was not moved by any patriotic sense but
as a mercenary warrior with allegiance of loyalty to his employer, the king or
the feudal lord in the same way as Indian soldier of British Indian army owed
allegiance to the colonial rulers. People do not join army for patriotism but
for a secure job.
In Europe, nationalism emerged as an ideology of the modern nation
state to validate the authority of the national government. The God, as source
of the validity of authority was replaced by an abstract idea of “people” and
religion was replaced by an undefined notion of “nationalism” as the validating
ideology. Historically sedition and anti-nationalism have been used to silence
the political dissent. As is well known that the Sedition Law, under which the
JNU students are charged, was enacted by the colonial rulers to crush the
national movement. Nazi mayhem, persecution of political dissent under
McCarthyism in 1950s in the USA and authoritarianism of emergency days in India
are just the few glaring examples of oppression in the name of nationalism and
perceived national security.
In India, nationalism emerged as an anti-colonial ideology.
The Indian Freedom Struggle generated many ideologies. Some sought to unite
Indians as a nation of a composite culture across the regional, social and
religious diversities. Some that sought to perpetuate such diversities and
divisions to derail the nationalist march. The colonial rulers with the
memories of the popular unity of 1857’s “India’s War of Independence”, still
fresh in the mind, adopted the policy of divide& rule and
began to utilize all the possible social cleavage for the purpose. It is to be
noted that but for the treacherous colonial loyalty of India’s princely states,
like Shindhia’s of Gwalior 1857 could have proved to be the end of colonial
rule and plunder. As Gyanendra Pandey ha well documented in his book Construction
of Communalism in the Colonial North India, communalism has been a
deliberate colonial construct. The reactionary sections of Indian society,
knowingly, unknowingly became colonial tool against the anti-colonial,
inclusive nationalism by propounding ahistorical theories of religion based
nationalism – the Hindu and the Muslim nationalism. This, as is history now,
gave rise to two-nation theory leading to the cruel partition of the country,
the wounds of which continue to bleed in the form of Kashmir issue.
Thus like nationalism, communalism too is modern ideology born out
of the womb of colonial capitalism on the foundations of supposed religious
exclusionism, communal diffidence and hatred. The communal ideologies, promoted
by imperialist forces emerged in opposition to secular, inclusive and composite
nationalism being shaped by the various streams of anti-colonial struggles.
Hindu and Islamic communalisms in India, represented by Hindu Mahasabha and RSS
and Muslim league and Jamat-e-Islami respectedly, are not ideological cousins
but twins, which not only complement each other but also reinforce each other
as both exhorted their followers not to waste energy in fighting the British
rule but preserve it for fighting each other that they did when the end of
colonial rule became imminent. Golwalkar is categorical in condemning both the
streams of freedom struggle – the Gandhian and the revolutionary represented by
Bhagat Singh and his Comrades -- as born out of the darkness of ignorance,
while RSS aims to take the country at some undefined glory. A comparative study
of communal ideologies is beyond the scope of this article; they hold not only
similar but congruent views on most of the substantial socio-economic and
political issues. On the basis of its role in the freedom struggle, Congress
assumed the power after the partitioned independence under the leadership of
Nehru. The constitution drafted by Baba Saheb BR Ambedkar envisions a
democratic, secular India committed to social and economic justices to Indian
masses. The concept of Hindu or Muslim nationalism is violation of the spirit
of the constitution embodied in the preamble. According to the noted historian,
Eric Hobsbawm, nationalism is allegiance to the constitution. Branding the
radical young scholars of JNU and HCU as anti-national and their arrest for
using their constitutional rights of freedom to thought and expression is a
contempt to the constitution and hence anti-national. Claims of being a Hindu
nationalist are violation of the preamble of the constitution and hence an
anti-national act. The paradox is that anti-nationals are issuing certificates
of nationalism.
The Brahmanical, fascist onslaught on the campuses of the higher
education beginning with the ban on Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle(APSC) on
the charge of “spreading hatred” against the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and
the Hindus, does not seem to stop so does the students’ radical resistance to
it. The repression by state’s coercive machinery is added and abetted by ABVP
and other RSS fronts. Like the Nazi Storm troopers in Germany in 1933 have
taken upon themselves to violently disrupt the opponents’ programs with Police
as mute spectators. The physical coercion, including the tortures and abuses to
Hyderabad Central University (HCU) teachers and students by the Police, is
consistently accompanied by the aggressive hate campaign of sedition against
them. The Prime Minister of India, Mr. Narendra Modi called upon the BJP
workers in its national executive meeting to make the nationalism as
the main plank of political mobilization. Before that BJP President, Amit Shah
had exhorted the workers of the party and other RSS auxiliaries to focus on
JNU. Just before that, the Finance Minister of the country had told a gathering
of BJP’s youth wing, BJYM that the ABVP has won the “ideological battle in
JNU”. Subsequently, he elaborated his point by telling the PTI that their view
has been accepted by the majority, probably through some astrological
referendum. All three of them, in a clichéd pattern continue to repeat the
Goebbelsian lie about controversial slogans despite the proven fact that the
videos with Bharat Ki Barbadi (destruction of India) slogans attributed to JNU
student leaders, telecasted by the “nationalist” channels were doctored.
Mr. Jaitley is right in terming the ongoing tussle between,
metaphorically speaking, JNU and jingoism, as an ideological
battle. But his proclamation of victory is too hasty and doubtable as the
battle is on, only the future will tell the result. This might prove the first
battle of the seemingly long drawn ideological/intellectual civil war between
the ideologies of constitutional nationalism, as proclaimed by the students and
communal jingoism, propagated by RSS; between the forces of progress relying on
reason and historical observation and the forces of corporate-Brahmanism
relying on irrational belief and Goebbelsian propaganda.
Ish Mishra
Associate Professor
Dept. of Political Science
Hindu College
University of Delhi
Delhi 110007
Ph. 9811146846
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