From JNU to Congress, Kanhaiya shrugs off contradictions: ‘Will be proven right 50 years later’

Charged with sedition in February 2016, Kanhaiya Kumar spent nearly three weeks in prison and was even attacked by a mob. But this did not stop the president of the students’ union at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University from delivering a blistering indictment of Prime Minister Narendra Modi once he was out on bail.

From the steps of the university’s administrative block, rechristened Freedom Square by protesting students, the young communist outlined his political vision in a speech that went viral.

“I don’t have faith in destiny, but something good is about to happen,” he said at the time. “If we can unite the Ambedkarite movement and the left movement in this country, we will form a government that guarantees justice to all.”

Today, Kumar is with the Congress party, which has made him a senior observer for the upcoming Assembly elections in Kerala. Far from uniting leftists and Ambedkarites, the assignment entails locking horns with the state’s ruling left coalition, of which his old organisation, the Communist Party of India, is a crucial constituent.

The Kerala gig represents just the latest in a series of contradictions that have loomed over Kumar’s political journey in the last decade. But Kumar insists that his beliefs are still the same and claims to have more clarity now than ever before.

“I feel no urgent pressure to prove that I am right,” he told Scroll. “I will be proven right 50 years later.”

A national storm erupted in February 2016 when the Modi government ordered a police crackdown against students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University for slogans raised at a campus event. Three students were arrested on charges of sedition, sparking a debate on nationalism and democratic freedoms.

Ten years later, we revisit the legacy of that moment by tracing the trajectories of four student-activists – the choices they made, the outcomes that followed, and what that reveals about political life in India.

Kumar had to overcome a major disadvantage to become president of the JNU students’ union in 2015 – the student outfit that he belonged to, the CPI-affiliated All India Students’ Federation, was a marginal player on campus, dwarfed by dominant left groups.

But his earthy oratory and rootedness won him followers. Anshul Trivedi, a JNU contemporary who voted for Kumar, recalled that he talked of students’ scholarships and the bed bugs in their hostel rooms instead of waxing eloquent about global conflicts.

Four years later, keen to capitalise on Kumar’s newfound fame, the CPI fielded him from Bihar’s Begusarai in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Kumar filled the rally grounds every time he spoke, but finished a distant second behind the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate.

The CPI, though, promptly gave him a place in the party’s top decision-making body – only to see him jump ship and join the Congress in 2021.

“We gave everything, still we lost him,” lamented Ram Naresh Pandey, CPI’s Bihar secretary. “Was this what he was aspiring to do? Fight the Left to weaken it and suppress its voice? I wish him all the best for that in Kerala.”

Kumar countered this by saying he was opposed to the policies of the Pinarayi Vijayan-led government, not its ideology. “It is a government led by a left party, yet it is working against left principles,” he alleged. “So I will speak against it.”

Those not connected to CPI are more understanding of Kumar’s choice, given that the party is a spent force in the Hindi belt. Rohit Azad, an economics professor at JNU who has known him since 2016, does not believe he compromised his ideology unlike, say, Shehla Rashid.

“I would have been happier if he had stayed with the Left, but the way he speaks, the issues he raises and his politics on the whole has not changed,” Azad said. “Yes, he is an ambitious man, as all politicians should be. If you are not driven by ambition, how will you act?”

Some, in fact, argue that Congress is an obvious home for Kumar. It is, after all, trying to bring left and Ambedkarite forces together under one roof, just as he had envisioned in 2016.

“Any left-minded person in today’s India should accord primacy to the battle in defence of the Constitution,” said Kolkata-based economist Prasenjit Bose, who was once a prominent member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and recently joined the Congress in an event attended by Kumar.

Bose and other leftists from JNU who are now in the Congress party, position themselves in the long line of socialists that the grand old party has historically kept in its fold.

“From the time of Nehru and Bose, the Left and the Right within the Congress have been clashing,” explained Trivedi, Kumar’s friend from JNU who became a Congress member alongside him in 2021. “We are doing left-of-centre politics in this mainstream space. We are saying the same things that we said when we were with the Left.”

Struggle and resilience

Kumar did not set out to become a politician. Born in 1987 in a rural pocket of Begusarai, among the last remaining communist bastions in central Bihar, he had tried his hand at a range of professions even before he came to Delhi and got admission in JNU.

In his book From Bihar to Tihar, Kumar recounts that when he was 15, he almost took up a job at a bookstore in Begusarai to support his poor family. For some time, he even distributed polio vaccines to earn a daily wage.

However, his father took note of his good academic performance and let him go to Patna, the state capital, to finish school and obtain a college education. There, he learned how to repair electronic appliances and taught tuitions to make ends meet while preparing to become an engineer.

Eventually, he discovered his penchant for debating and gravitated towards the humanities, opting for a bachelor’s degree in geography. In 2009, he moved to Delhi to prepare for the civil services exam. When this, too, did not work out, Kumar turned to JNU two years later, hoping to become an academic.

He writes in the book that he felt drawn to the “big-big” political posters on the walls from the day he first set foot in the campus. It did not take long for him to start contesting students’ union elections and, ultimately, run for the post of president.

As part of his 2015 campaign, Kumar railed against the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the dominant left parties in one breath, deftly weaving campus concerns with national and international ones. It was this speech that swung the polls in his favour, according to his contemporaries in university politics.

That was not the first time that he made his mark as an orator, though. Back in 2012, the young scholar had impressed attendees at an exchange event in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir.

On that occasion, Kumar had countered a proponent of Kashmiri independence, or azaadi, by underlining the primacy of bread-and-butter issues, according to three others present there.

Even when the sedition row erupted in February 2016, Kumar and the students’ union put out a statement criticising the allegedly secessionist slogans that were raised in JNU. Still, he was arrested three days after the controversy broke out.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one of the organisers of the gathering where the contentious slogans were raised told Scroll that Kumar shielded them from arrest.

“Just leave. I’ll manage the rest,” Kumar told them a night before he was himself arrested. Such leadership “required a different kind of grit”, this person added.

JNU professor Meenakshi Sundriyal recalled Kumar’s sense of indignation after he came out of jail about three weeks later. “The resilience really showed in his eyes,” she recollected. “He was like, ‘What the heck? How can you do this to me?’ That sort of a feeling.”

Measured words

During his 20-day incarceration, Kumar planned “every line” of the speech he delivered upon his release, said a person who helped Kumar at the time and did not wish to be identified.

But his words soon began to fall short. Samim Asgor Ali, a scholar-photographer who captured many of Kumar’s speeches on camera and catapulted him to fame, grumbled about how much the activist began to “measure” his words over time.

“Once he became popular, he began to worry about losing his Hindu supporters,” Ali said. “He used to come for Muslim protests, but he would avoid speaking wholeheartedly.”

Kumar denied this, and expressed solidarity with Muslims who, in his view, were being “demonised” by the ruling regime. But he also contended that the politics of hatred was part of a “design”.

“The whole country burns in the fire of hatred while forests are cut down, mines are looted, ports and airports are sold off, farmer suicides increase,” he elaborated. “All these questions disappear. To take attention away from them, hatred is necessary.”

Another subject that Kumar has been accused of skirting is the arrest and prolonged incarceration of his fellow JNU alumnus Umar Khalid in the 2020 Delhi riots case.

Soon after Khalid was arrested, Kumar, still with the Communist Party of India then, agreed to attend a press conference in Delhi to condemn the police action. However, he failed to show up.

“We put his name on the poster only because he had confirmed that he would join,” remembered Banojyotsna Lahiri, Umar Khalid’s partner. “We have never called him for any programme after that.”

Kumar put this down to party protocol – after he discovered D Raja, the general secretary of CPI, was attending the press meet, he felt his presence was not needed.

He scoffed at the allegation that he had, in any manner, let down Khalid. “I will consider this important if Umar comes out of prison and says that I betrayed him,” he bluntly stated.

“My friendship with Umar was forged in struggles even though we always differed ideologically,” he continued. “Whenever he comes out of prison, we will work against the BJP together.”

An uncertain future

As he inches towards completing five years with the Congress, Kumar, now 39, is still to find his footing. In 2024, he fought and lost yet another Lok Sabha poll – this time, from North East Delhi.

A Congress politician representing its social justice plank argued, “A lot of politicians can speak well, but you need followers to succeed in politics.” Kumar needs to “develop a political constituency”, he said. “Just going to TV studios will not help. People must believe that he is fighting for them.”

If Kumar’s upper-caste identity is coming in the way in the backward-caste dominated polity of Bihar, Praveen Chakravarty, chairman of the All India Professionals’ Congress, suggested that he model himself into a Delhi leader. “Whether we like it or not, politics is about geography,” he said. “He needs to pick his territory.”

For now, the party has put him in charge of its students’ wing, the National Students’ Union of India. Kumar said he was “trying to promote those from activist backgrounds and induct new ideas in the NSUI”.

But others believe his talents are getting wasted in this role.

“He was the performer,” said Ayesha Kidwai, a JNU professor who helped him and other student-activists with their lawsuits after 2016. “But now he has willingly embraced a position in which he does not speak.”

For his part, Kumar did not dismiss this criticism – he said he had heard similar things from others in his close circle. But he added that since 2019, he had deliberately chosen to speak less, especially on social media, and do more work among people on the ground.

“I am not a cartoonist, a blogger, a YouTuber or someone who makes reels,” he reasoned. “I am primarily a political worker. My work is organising people.”