Kanhaiya has got bail but the state has more to gain from keeping his two classmates behind bars

Once the Indian state fails to scare away protestors, it resorts to Plan B. It takes to stonewalling its opponents through protracted court battles or negotiations. The state aims to completely wear down the protestors.

It is during this period that the state hopes to drive a wedge among protestors, craft a narrative portraying them as villains, and claim its course of action is morally right. This last ground is then invoked to claim victory.

This is precisely what Finance Minister Arun Jaitley tried to do in his speech at the national convention of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha – the BJP’s youth wing – in Vrindavan on the weekend. “I consider this our victory because a person [Jawaharlal Nehru University student leader Kanhaiya Kumar] who was jailed for chanting slogans of dividing India, after being released has to say, ‘Jai Hind’ and waves the Tricolour during his speech,” the Bharatiya Janata Party politician said. “This is ideological victory for us.”

Jaitley’s remark should help provide perspective for viewing the decision of Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union to continue their fight for the release of Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, two of their classmates who remain behind bars. They have to be the JNUSU’s top priority in the charter of demands they issued on Tuesday.

Political orphans

This is because Bhattacharya and Khalid do not belong to the student wing of mainstream political parties, whether the Communist Party of India or the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) or the Congress. They are what you can call political orphans.

Theoretically, they do not have the protection of Left national leaders – as, say, JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar has – and who together still command enough heft to insulate a person belonging to their formation from the blowback of the Modi government. They can organise expert and expensive legal help and nationwide publicity.

Bhattacharya and Khalid do not have such comfort. Their fate is crucially linked to the support they receive from JNU students and teachers, as also to their ability to ensure they remain lodged in collective memory.

From the time Khalid and Bhattacharya surrendered to Delhi Police on February 24, they have been gradually relegated from the front page to the inside pages to being banished from the newspapers altogether. This is partly because of the release of Kumar and his rousing speech a little while later, leaving both detractors and supporters spellbound.

But there is also an aspect of our public life that cannot be denied – the longer the government prolongs the crisis at JNU, the greater the chances of the public forgetting Bhattacharya and Khalid altogether. JNU has to discover creative ways of inserting them permanently in the popular memory.

It is feared the state will target them not only because they are political orphans, but also because Khalid is the scapegoat the Sangh Parivar desperately needs to push its Hindutva agenda. This doesn’t have much to do with his politics as much with his religious identity.

Khalid is Muslim, regardless of his avowal of being an atheist. His father, Syed Qasim Rasool Ilyas, was a member of the Students Islamic Movement of India 16 years before the government banned it. Khalid was among the 10 organisers who reportedly hosted the February 9 event about Kashmir on campus at which slogans calling for India to be broken into fragments were said to have been chanted.

None of the videos has shown him mouthing the divisive slogans. Three of these videos were found to have been doctored. It is now commonly accepted that the contentious slogans were shouted by a few whose faces were covered – and who are said to have been outsiders. No attempt has been made to identify them, perhaps deliberately.

The game plan

But this is precisely where the state’s classic strategy will come into play. Khalid and Bhattacharya will sooner than later apply for bail, and the prosecution will contest their plea, saying they were engaged in anti-national or seditious activities. It will be argued that they must remain in custody to unravel the conspiracy behind commemorating the hanging of Afzal Guru, who was convicted for his role in the terrorist attack on Parliament in 2001.

In our legal system, the accused is presumed innocent unless he or she is found guilty. But to the larger public, to the consumers of media, Bhattacharya and Khalid will remain stigmatised until they are absolved of their alleged crimes.

The Modi Sarkar will hope to ensure that Khalid, more than Bhattacharya, remains labelled as anti-national. In this era of Islamophobia and the BJP’s relentless targeting of the religious minorities over the last 21 months, a stigmatised Khalid will become the government’s justification for police action against JNU students.

The talk in the Sangh Parivar is that Delhi Police Commissioner BS Bassi goofed up. Instead of arresting Kanhaiya Kumar, Bassi should have first detained Khalid. It would have been easy for the BJP to win the propaganda war as also an extra score of seats in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election, due early next year.

Kanhaiya Kumar was simply the wrong person to nab. He is an upper-caste Bhumihar, albeit a poor one. He belongs to the social group that the BJP has been courting. Kumar is primarily a Hindi speaker, rooted in the Hindu-Hindi tradition, regardless of his critique of it. He is a strong argument against Hindutva’s sanctimonious rhetoric.

Ostensibly at least, this can’t be said of Bhattacharya and Khalid. The former studied in St Stephen’s College, arguably India’s most prestigious institution for liberal arts. Khalid studied in Kirori Mal College. These are just the colleges the Hindutva brigade ridiculously accuses of transmitting Western theories and ideas to students, who they attempt to dismiss as the 21st century version of Macaulay’s children.

Bhattacharya and Khalid can be projected as deracinated Indians whose westernised education has turned them into foes of India. It is a burden twice over for Khalid because of his Muslim identity. He fits the bill of Hindutva’s favourite whipping boy for winning elections. It is the Modi government which is stumbling – and Khalid must pay for it.

Petty differences

Obviously, JNU students will need to do more than pass a resolution to quell the talk in Delhi that Khalid and Bhattacharya will be abandoned to the wolves as their politics was positioned to the extreme Left of India’s ideological spectrum – and did not belong to any of the mainstream Left parties. The communists are known to harbour deep animosity and enmity over ideological differences.

An idea of what stuff the two are made of can be discerned from their past. Both Bhattacharya and Khalid were earlier members of the Democratic Students Union, which is a constituent body of the Revolutionary Democratic Front.

Seeking to establish a new democratic society, the RDF came into existence in 2005, through a merger of All India People’s Forum and Struggling Forum for People’s Resistance. The RDF draws its inspiration from the Naxalbari movement, evident from its manifesto. Its most recognisable name is perhaps its joint secretary, Dr GN Saibaba, the Delhi University professor who was infamously abducted by the Maharashtra Police for having links with the Maoists.

In November 2015, Bhattacharya, Khalid and eight others resigned from the DSU. In a joint piece on a website called Countercurrent.org, they explained they quit the DSU on “questions of gender relations and patriarchal oppression”. They believed the RDF was wrong in tracing the origin of patriarchal oppression to the “vulgar imperialist culture…promoted by TV, cinemas, internet, novels and even feminism”.

The 10 DSU students explain their opposition to RDF’s analysis. “Simply replace ‘imperialist’ with ‘western’, and one cannot miss the uncanny similarity [of the RDF’s] with an extremely reactionary understanding!” In a sense, they are alleging that the RDF’s position on gender relations is no different from Hindutva’s ideas.

Free thinkers

It is indeed a testament to their independent thinking. The group of 10, to which Bhattacharya and Khalid belonged, was also not inclined to fall in line, unmindful of consequences. As they say in the Countercurrent piece, “Rather than maturely responding to the questions that were posed by the organisation [the DSU], people in responsible positions [at the RDF] have acted in the most undemocratic and authoritarian manner attempting to isolate, brand, witch-hunt, ‘purge’, and engaged in the worst forms of personal slander against those raising questions.”

It is this that provoked them to resign from DSU. Ironically, it is the state that is now slandering Bhattacharya and Khalid and acting in the “most undemocratic and authoritarian manner”. There can now be no resignation letters from them, but endurance and opposition.

It is possible the two are incorrigible dissenters. Perhaps both are activists to whom organisational discipline is anathema. It is possible they are given to a more than dash of romanticism.

But it is also possible they constitute the very essence of dissent – habitually contrarian and nonconformists, irritatingly argumentative, perhaps even cantankerous. Given that the JNU movement has become synonymous with the right to dissent, it is important neither the university nor we forget them until they walk into freedom.

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.