JNU student movement challenges Modi’s Hindutva mission

The history of student movements and people involved in student movement being branded anti-national is not recent, but the extent to which Prime Minister Narendra Modi‘s regime has now furthered this technique of vilification and branded an entire university like the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and those who sympathise with the left-wing student movement as anti-national has reached epic proportions.

The Modi regime is completely out of sorts with its narrow and communal definition of nationalism, which brought the doctoral student Rohith Vemula to his demise.

Vemula’s tragic death is not just a suicide of an individual student but an institutional murder of a Dalit student who had to turn to radical politics to preserve his identity in these dark times of rising saffron emergency.

It is to this respect that even Vemula was branded as an “anti-national”, not because he was organising a public meeting on the hanging of Yakub Memon, but because he was a poor Dalit student who dared to study in a Central university, availing subsidised education and was successful in getting into doctoral studies.

His suspension, by the vice-chancellor of the University of Hyderabad (UoH) under the aegis of a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP and Union minister, was an act of Dalit exploitation propagated by the state. He had every right to be called an “anti-national”, but we have to understand that it is not he himself but the state that made him out to be anti-national.

To understand why Vemula was so driven against the authorities, one has to take into account the unreasonable scrapping away of the non-NET fellowship, which was the only source of livelihood for many students like him.

The government, losing all its regard for the research community, took this draconian measure and was met with massive public dissent in the form of the “Occupy UGC” movement. This created the necessary radical force in the student community to break out and challenge not just the university authorities but the state authority itself, and the students were right in doing so.

Students of higher educational institutions were already sceptical about the Modi regime, and they had been opposing the various social policies introduced by this government that catered to the BJP’s Hindutva ideology, the most significant among them being the beef ban.

The row then began in universities across India, like the UoH, Osmania University, TISS Mumbai, JNU, etc.

Hindutva’s version of nationalism

The Hindutva ideology that the government has been trying to propagate led to incidents like Trilokpuri, Dadri and Malda, and led to the deaths of many individuals, such as MM Kalburgi and Mohammad Akhlaq, to name a few.

Every conscious being knew that the Modi regime was gradually, or not so gradually, modulating the discourse of nationalism along a Hindutva line.

Nationalism now meant living under the hegemony of Brahminical ideas fused with Hindutva fundamentalism.

Secularism and freedom of expression have been attacked by both state-sponsored violence as well as mob violence. In the guise of religion, the BJP regime has been able to mobilise an entire militant army in India in the form of outfits such as Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, etc.

Then, the Modi regime started the victimisation of others, firstly the Muslims by vilifying Pakistan in its entirety, with the Shiv Sena (acting as the SS in Bombay) and banning Pakistani authors and artists from visiting and performing. Then it turned its attention to the fringe elements, who were incidentally Muslims and brought the entire weight of the law upon them.

Consider the case of Memon. He had willingly surrendered, willingly shared intelligence with the Indian security agencies, who were quite clueless about the main perpetrators and the details of the Mumbai bomb blasts until Memon was able to shed light on the case.

He had surrendered to the police and was sure of life imprisonment, which is a harsh punishment itself, but the state, frustrated with incomplete success and fuelled with fascist chauvinism, had to take some action.

The Modi regime saw the hanging of Yakub Memon as a deterrent to anti-national activities when, in actuality, it compromised the integrity of the judicial system and increased the paranoia of the minorities, both Muslims as well as Dalits.

The economic benefits of the Modi regime have not trickled down to the average taxpayer and have been used up by the upper class and upper caste Hindus that the dominant state ideology caters to.

As a result, there was growing discontent with the Modi regime, which manifested itself in the Delhi elections as well as the Bihar elections with the BJP’s iconic defeat.

At the same time, a measure such as the installation of Gajendra Chauhan, a flag bearer of the RSS, as the head of FTII, was another nail in the coffin of the Modi regime.

It united the students under one banner to fight against the saffronisation of educational institutions, which had already been the case with Delhi University. The FTII strike had started before the “Occupy UGC” movement and provided the latter with a necessary fulcrum for an intensified struggle on all fronts.

The support of the people was slowly shifting towards the students, and the “Occupy UGC” movement turned out not just to be a student protest but a civil protest in its magnitude.

Vemula was one such student who was active in the dynamics of the student movement, and like any conscious political thinker, he precluded the fact that if the government is to be fully exposed, issues like that of the fringe elements, such as Memon, should be used to begin a criticism of the existing structure that creates hegemony more intensely and pragmatically.

The Modi regime, on the other hand, sticks to its narrow definition of nationalism, and it is this idea of nationalism upheld by the prime minister and his sycophants that has been allegedly the reason behind Vemula‘s murder.

Just as Memon was a victim of jingoism, so were Vemula and people like Akhlaaq. These incidents are indeed a sad commentary upon India as a nation, and this kind of witch-hunting that the Indian state has reduced itself to will breed more anti-national forces rather than curbing them.

Students rise for justice

With the death of Vemula, the student communities across India have been stigmatised because it was a clear case of caste discrimination in a higher educational institution. Intelligentsia, all the way from public polemicists to renowned journalists, have been up in arms about the case, and the death of this extraordinarily bright Dalit student has become the rallying symbol for students studying in premier institutions across India.

With the slogan for “Justice for Rohith Vemula”, the students demand a campus that is free of discrimination, a space that promotes plurality, celebrates equality, and engages in intellectual debates that can lead to a progressive systemic change.

The question of justice is also linked to the context of Dalit exploitation in India, and thus it has been furthered into a question of social significance. It is important to note that both these movements, “Occupy UGC” and well as “Justice for Rohith Vemula”, have been spearheaded by the JNU Students’ Union(JNUSU) in particular and the JNU community in general.

JNU saga

The Joint Action Committee for Social Justice has grown out of the politically conscious circles of JNU and has been an assembly of all the national Left student forces, such as the All India Students’ Association, Students’ Federation of India, All India Students’ Federation, Democratic Students’ Union and Democratic Students’ Federation, to name a few. It is needless to say that both the RSS and its militant student affiliate group, Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), see JNU as a hub of solidarity, freedom of expression and dissent.

The commemoration of Afzal Guru, the alleged shouting of pro-Pakistan slogans, and the subsequent arrest of JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar on charges of sedition have sparked a row.

The event on the death anniversary of Guru was organised to question the verdict of the Supreme Court on his hanging. The verdict of the Supreme Court clearly states that there is a lack of evidence which would prove that Guru was directly involved with the Parliament attack case, but considering the ‘collective conscience of the nation’, the court gave him a guilty verdict and sentenced him to death.

Students allege this is a case of victimisation of the Muslim community by the Indian state under the guise of chauvinism and thus hollowing the integrity of the judicial system. This kind of move inevitably makes people lose their faith in the justice system, and creates an idea that the justice system can mete out justice only to a select few, for example, the super-rich Salman Khan or the Ambani brothers.

Consider the organisation of the Guru event in comparison with the Memon event organised by Vemula’s association. In both cases, nowhere is the nation a target of destruction, and the main motive is the opening up of dialogues to strengthen the idea of democracy and plurality.

Also, consider the conditions in which the slogans were raised.

Through the video, which has gone viral, it is evident that the ABVP is the one shouting pro-Pakistan slogans to instigate anti-nationalist sentiments in some individuals who may have indeed given in and redoubled those slogans. Though it was also found that Zee News and News X doctored the tapes to fan xenophobia across the nation.

This type of politics is prevalent in a part of Indian Kashmir where the government has allegedly given leeway to the defence personnel to violate human rights without any further inquiry under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.

Guru was a product of such politics, and the people who may have supported those slogans have a similar politics that surrounds them in their domicile. It is obvious that no student comes to JNU as a docile body, but comes with a certain social consciousness, and the space of JNU allows, as all universities should, to vent their political thoughts and indulge in proper dialectics to come to a synthesis of ideas.

Kanhaiya Kumar and sedition law

Almost all modern democracies in the world have done away with laws of sedition. Sedition in the Indian context has been one of the many laws that have existed since the colonial British regime.

It should be noted that the United Kingdom, which introduced this law in India and other colonies, has recently scrapped it from its law book in 2010.

Now, the Modi regime has drawn a line between sedition and anti-nationalism. The Modi regime believes that any sort of activity, talk or even ideology that propagates plurality and celebrates the multi-nationality of the Indian Union is anti-national.

It is evident from this that the state under Modi strictly adheres to a policy of totalitarianism, and he has proved this by sending police force to quell an activity, which was not at all contested by any student group and was celebrated rather peacefully.

The arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar and the further violence in the court during his bail hearing only goes to show how this fascism is similar to the German National Socialist or Nazi model, where the average Caucasian White German man was mobilised by the Nazi ideology of Aryan racial supremacy to attack any person who did not subscribe to their ideology in totality.

The false fascist consciousness that has been propagated in the name of Hindutva is the root of all causes. It has created a camp of nationalism, and whoever differs from that canon goes automatically to the anti-national camp.

In JNU, when the number of protesters reached a whopping three to four thousand, there were only 20 people from ABVP showing black flags.

Inside the campus, they are a minority, but the recent attack on the JNU website by hackers and the violence that erupted twice in front of the Patiala House court clearly show that the terrorists of RSS are ready to draw first blood in the name of pseudo-nationalism.

JNU shall prevail

JNU, as well as rational people all across India, respect the diversity of India and believe it to be a country of rich ethnic diversity.

The prime minister, as well as those who believe in the narrow-minded vision of nationalism, should be made aware of the fact that the Indian state does not exist per se, but as a coming together of different states.

In that sense, India is a republic and a Union as well. Obviously, the BJP government is already aware of the fact and tries to hide them from the common people because it has vested interests in the destruction of JNU, the first being that since JNU students have always been championing the cause of people, from social justice to fighting for the marginalised.

Modi regime sees it as a hindrance to total control of the power of the Indian state over the campuses, so that they may be turned into corporate slave producing machines of the ruling classes.

The second reason is that since Modi wants to boost the corporate sector and bring in private players, there is an inherent need to devalue the current educational institutions, which run on subsidies, especially a university such as JNU which is world-renowned, so world renowned that Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia and Yale among many others have shown their solidarity with JNU.

The fact of the matter is that JNU will not and cannot be shut down.

Since the assaults on society reflected themselves in the struggles of JNU, whether it be the beef festival or the celebration of the death anniversary of Guru, similarly the assault on JNU will also as a consequence reflect upon society creating a social movement so massive, it will restructure the entire social situation and that is exactly what is needed in these times of crises where saffron emergency is on the rise.

If a protracted and intensified struggle is continued, we will not just see new discourses emerging, but the people of India will be the ones who will forge it.