The Big Story: Shut up

As finance minister, Arun Jaitley is expected to showcase India’s best qualities when travelling abroad. Unfortunately, during a speech at the London School of Economics on the weekend, he put forward a thesis that makes the country look rather bad. The finance minister spoke of a shadowy “alliance of subversion” that has taken over college campuses (he did not explain how) and went on to call for limits on free speech.

Déjà vu from last year. In February 2016, news channels like Zee News, sympathetic to the government, accused some students of Jawaharlal Nehru University of shouting slogans that were described as anti-national. As chaos followed and JNU Student’s Union President Kanhaiya Kumar was assaulted by mobs in the city’s courts, the frenzy did not actually culminate in a legal case. Till today, more than a year after cases of sedition were filed, the Delhi Police has been unable to even file a chargesheet in the matter.

Advertisement

It is clear that the propaganda around the slogans was a bogey. There was nothing to the episode beyond ideas that amount to a thoughtcrime in the eyes of many in the BJP and its fans. Yet, efforts to clamp down on free speech and thought continue. That the Union finance minister should think of floating another anti-national balloon to clamp down tighter on civil rights is a scary proposition.

There have been numerous warnings of how ultra-nationalism, of subverting the individual to the tyranny of the collective, has severely harmed human rights. This was how fascism arose in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, resulting in the terrible crimes of Stalin in Soviet Russia. This was how Indira’s Gandhi was able to subvert the Constitution during the Emergency.

Already a pall of fear hangs over Delhi University, following the violence in Ramjas College last week by the BJP’s student outfit, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, who were protesting against an invitation to JNU scholar Umar Khalid to speak at an academic seminar. Teachers are now afraid of discussing topics like Kashmir for fear of a backlash from the BJP and others who claim to be the keepers of the nationalist spirit. On Twitter, the daughter of an armyman killed in the Kargil War who spoke up against the ABVP and its attacks has received rape threats.

This climate of jingoism might be good for the BJP and may even help it win elections. But it will have a corrosive effect on India. Free speech and thought are the bedrock of any society. Without these, the very functioning of democracy is threatened.

Advertisement

The Big Scroll

At what point can free speech cross over to seditious territory – and who decides?

Subscribe to “The Daily Fix” by either downloading Scroll’s Android app or opting for it to be delivered to your mailbox.

Political Picks

  1. The Gujarat government claimed to have foiled a lone wolf attack by two brothers who are suspected to have links to the international terror group, the Islamic State.
  2. The All Jat Indian Arakshan Samiti wore black and said they will not celebrate Holi, as part of their agitation to demand caste reservations.
  3. Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar said he was ready to join hands with the Congress to share power in 17 or 18 zilla parishads in Maharashtra.
  4. As a reaction to the arrest of a senior official, Sudhir Kumar in a question paper leak case, bureaucrats in Bihar have declared that they will not obey any verbal orders from anyone ­– including Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

Punditry

  1. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad’s aggression at Ramjas College can only be explained as a lesson intended for all universities, argues Satish Deshpande in the Indian Express.
  2. In the Hindustan Times, R Sukumar asks if the cab consumer, pampered by Ola and Uber, is now willing to pay more.

Giggle

Don’t Miss

Arrested in 2015, Chatisgarhi journalist Santosh Yadav’s bail plea is scheduled to come up in the Supreme Court on Monday. Malini Subramaniam reports on how Yadav was targeted by the state police for his activism.

“Having grown up in Darbha, Yadav knew the terrain intimately. He became a vital link for other journalists to source news reports and photographs from the area. Many reporters from national dailies stayed in touch with him to verify news coming out of the region, and he accompanied them whenever they travelled to its remote parts. For instance, while reporting on the impact of the closure of schools in Bastar’s conflict areas, Yadav took this reporter to see the state of government schools in remote villages.

When villagers were taken into custody during police operations, Yadav would often bring their family members to Jagdalpur and introduce them to the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group, a lawyers’ collective that offered free legal services to victims of police excesses.”