Why the events at JNU embody the battle for India's soul

St Stephen’s College in Delhi once had a history teacher who, in his idiomatic style, would say this to students taking his course on Modern India for the first time: “1857 was a turning point in the history of India, but India refused to turn.”

Given the events of the week gone by – full of fury, fervour and fisticuffs over the student unrest in Jawaharlal Nehru University – future chroniclers will not make the same accusation as the history teacher at St Stephen’s College.

February increasingly seems like a pivotal period, a turning point for India. And yes, India is stirring. In the week gone past, we can glimpse the India of tomorrow – it is a vision that is simultaneously depressing and elevating.

Ground realities

We fear a day might come when a hydra-headed political formation, aka the Sangh Parivar, or its mutant, will define how we live, what we eat, and our beliefs. We grimly contemplate a future where non-violent protests could be deemed anti-national, and state power deployed to crush dissent. We could soon have vigilante groups demanding obedience and obeisance under the deft supervision of police officers.

But we can also glimpse other, more encouraging possibilities. Insistence on shrinking ideas could lead to their expansion, as is evident in the passionate debate to define concepts such as nation, loyalty, patriotism and anti-nationalism.

We have been awakened to the impermanence of our certainties – for instance, our right to free speech. We might learn to guard it zealously. Then again, our faith in the importance of debates and discussions could be renewed. We could become increasingly intolerant of those who mistake violence for an argument, as do some lawyers in Delhi.

More than anything else, attempts to silence people could move them to speak cantankerously, to stop fearing the display of state power and orchestrated mob fury. The conflict between the state and the people could teach them – particularly the young – defiance and rebellion. People could mock the state in response to its flaunting of power.

This was indeed the theme of the protests at Jadavpur University, where students took out a rally in support of incarcerated JNU student leader Kanhaiya Kumar. There were students who shouted, “Afzal bole azadi, Geelani bole azadi”; “Jab Kashmir ne maangi azadi, Manipur bhi boli azaadi.”

It is hard to tell what meaning the word “azadi” implied to the students, whether they were supporting the independence of a territorial entity or freedom from police repression - of which both Kashmir and Manipur have been undeniable victims. But one thing seems clear – the state’s attempt to tailor political and social behaviour will provoke opposition to being straitjacketed. This is the very essence of being human.

Ideological imprint

As India lurches towards a turning point and mulls the direction it should take, it is ostensibly a puzzle why our future should have become a pressing question this past week. This is because the student protest at JNU and the the state’s response to it embody the struggle to claim India’s soul.

This struggle broadly has two forces arrayed against each other. On one side are the votaries of Hindutva, who believe that India is Hindu, but that its Hindu-ness has been submerged under constructs imported from the West. From this ideology flows its politics, which aims at making the Hindu-ness of India’s soul shine with the sheen of ancient glory.

But this goal cannot be realised, Hindutva subliminally claims, unless the Hindu adherents of Western ideologies are marginalised, or better still, reformed, either through ideological indoctrination or under duress. What it is to be Hindu, as also Indian, has different meanings and interpretations, but Hindutva strives to obliterate these nuanced differences to establish the primacy of its own worldview.

This was why Gandhi was assassinated. Not only was it impossible for the votaries of Hindutva to match his popularity, but he was also an antithesis to them. It was difficult for them to succeed in maligning or discrediting him because he was a devout Hindu (not that they didn’t try their hand at it).

Reinforcing fears

The strategies of Hindutva forces or the Sangh Parivar have been intermittently glimpsed since May 2014, when it won a mandate which freed it from the restraining influence of its political allies. Over the last year and a half or so, we have seen the bruising political programmes of love jihad, ghar wapsi, anti-cow slaughter, pulping of books, and hounding of writers and students holding contrarian views. Violence, or the threat of it, underlay these projects.

For instance, the Dadri incident involving the lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq on the suspicion of consuming and stocking beef agitated the nation. As did the tragic suicide of the Hyderabad Central University student Rohith Vemula, triggered by his questioning of the narrative on 1993 serial blasts convict Yakub Memon and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad challenging him aggressively.

We might then wonder what is so special about this week of unrest at JNU, or why India should have reached a turning point. It is because, first and foremost, the Sangh Parivar sympathisers have explicitly justified the use of violence to win debates over contentious political issues. Not only has the state benignly winked at such aggressors, it has resorted to disproportionate force to suppress ideas contrary to those nursed by the current managers of its apparatuses. This clearly marks the breaking down of consensus over how we conduct our politics.

The JNU crisis is also alarming because it has reinforced the fears that the Sangh Parivar not only considers Muslims and Christians as their unforgiveable foes, but also all those Hindus who differ from it, either ideologically or in having lifestyles not to the liking of the organisation headquartered in Nagpur. What shade of liberalism or leftism you prescribe no longer matters, nor the fact that you could even be politically apathetic. You could be the target in case you oppose Hindutva for whatever reason, even when you may be a religious Hindu.

Sangh Parivar agenda

Further, the tumult at JNU testifies to the Sangh’s hunger for conflict and instability, its resolve to win the tomorrow for Hindutva. Considering the blowback on Dadri and the retreat it had to beat at Hyderabad Central University following the suicide of Rohith Vemula, nobody could have thought the Sangh would have been in a tearing hurry to stoke fires at yet another campus. It implies more such contestation of ideas in the future, accompanied with, yes, violence.

There has been a flurry of analyses attempting to explain why the Sangh and the central government decided to turn the incident of alleged shouting of slogans at JNU in support of Afzal Guru into a full-blown crisis.

It has been said the Sangh wanted to overcome the setback it suffered on account of the suicide of Rohith Vemula, more so in the eyes of Dalits. That it wants to tar the Left as anti-national and dampen its chances in the upcoming Assembly elections in West Bengal and Kerala. That the RSS wants to polarise Uttar Pradesh over the issue of which parties are desh bhakts and which are not, and consequently emerge as the sole repository of nationalism.

Most analyses assume that the Sangh’s strategy, as is true of all political formations, is solely guided by electoral calculations. But this is precisely where the Sangh differs from others. It undoubtedly values political power, but its acquisition is aimed at changing the popular discourse in the country and ensuring its worldview becomes India’s as well.

From this perspective, the Sangh has succeeded to an extent. From championing the rights of the poor, or finding solutions to agrarian distress, or debating the inimical impact of neo-liberal economic policies, our framework of debate has changed considerably since its ascension to power. We have been reduced to engaging with subjects such as whether or not conversion to another religion is legitimate, whether it is justified to re-convert Muslims and Christians, how consuming of beef hurts religious sentiments, and now, what is the meaning of anti-national and what makes you one.

This is perhaps why there has been such a robust counter to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s discourse, another reason why this past week seems to have become a turning point. Perhaps never before have we had so many argue politically incendiary terms such as sedition, anti-national, patriotism, nation, state, et al.

It is the apprehension of the Sangh dominating the discourse that seems to have led JNU teachers to organise lectures every evening on nationalism. It isn’t surprising to discover the first of these lectures promptly found its way to social media. Indeed, this week tells us that we, as a democracy, are fighting the demons of adolescence on our way to attain maturity, that we have perhaps reached a critical point in the battle to claim India’s soul.

(Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist in Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, has as its backdrop the demolition of the Babri Masjid. It is available in bookstores.)