I/II. http://thewire.in/2016/02/26/something-extraordinary-is-going-on-in-this-country-22822/
‘Something Extraordinary is Going on in this Country’ BY PREM SHANKAR JHA ON 26/02/2016 The hyper-nationalism being fuelled by the government’s aggressive stand on the JNU issue is proof that the RSS senses waning support for the BJP across the country. Hindutva Undivided Family: Narendra Modi and Amit Shah at the funeral of VHP leader Ashok Singhal. Credit: PTI ‘Something extraordinary is going on in this country’. So said two respected supreme court judges on the Kanhaiya Kumar bail issue. Supreme court judges are not given to expostulation. So when these judges brushed aside legal objections and decided to hear a simple bail petition in the highest court of the land, their decision to intervene expresses their mounting disquiet even more loudly than their words. The ‘something extraordinary’ that has so distressed them is the re-emergence of a totalitarian threat just when most Indians have assumed that their democracy is finally secure. These are some of the recent events that have made this threat apparent: A small fringe group of students met to protest against “the judicial killing of Afzal Guru and Maqbool Bhat” and express solidarity with “the struggle of Kashmiri people for their democratic right to self-determination”. The meeting was cancelled by the vice chancellor at the last moment, but the students insisted upon their freedom of speech and went ahead with it nonetheless. Some inflammatory anti-India remarks were made by a small group of Kashmiris. A fracas ensued, at the conclusion of which the president of the main JNU students’ union Kanhaiya Kumar gave a fiery speech defending freedom of speech and thought but explicitly condemning “any act of violence, terrorism, any terrorist act, or any anti-national activity.” Despite this, the Delhi police came to the campus four days later and arrested Kanhaiya on charges of sedition and criminal conspiracy. It did so because Union home minister Rajnath Singh received a phone call from BJP MP Maheish Girri, and tweeted to the world that “anyone who shouts anti-India slogans & challenges nation’s sovereignty & integrity while living in India, will not be tolerated or spared”. Abuse of the law Singh did this without bothering to find out what the demonstrators said and whether it qualified as sedition. Had he been more circumspect he would have found that even the most extreme slogans raised on February 9 did not qualify as sedition. In five separate past judgments the Supreme Court had drawn a sharp distinction between the advocacy (of) and incitement (to) violence, and defined sedition as an “incitement to imminent lawless action”. Based on this definition it had rejected as sedition the slogans raised by some Sikhs on the day Indira Gandhi was assassinated — “Khalistan zindabad, the time has come for us to expel Hindus from Punjab and seize the reigns of power” — because it was an expression of desire and did not suggest when or how it should be carried out. But Singh did not have the patience to educate himself on the finer points of the law, and instead issued the order to arrest Kanhaiya and other demonstrators, leaving it to the police to find sufficient grounds for doing so. In doing so he broke the boundary that separates legal process from witch hunt and mob rule. What followed shows how far we have fallen. While Kanhaiya was in police custody three lawyers – Vikram Chauhan, Yashpal and Om Sharma – beat him mercilessly for three hours. The police watched the beating without raising a hand to stop it. In secretly filmed interviews with reporters from India Today, the trio boasted that they had planned the beating administered to journalists, students and professors who attended Kanhaiya Kumar’s bail hearing inside the Patiala house court on February 15. Via Facebook, Chauhan had issued nine appeals to ‘boys’ from all over Delhi to come to Patiala house and teach the traitors a lesson. The three had initially toyed with a plan to throw a bomb, but settled for administering a sound beating. The beating was watched by the police and CRPF on duty, several of whom expressed their regret at not being able to join in because they were wearing their uniforms. Yashpal boasted that he was looking forward to being arrested and would not ask for bail because he wanted to be in the same jail as Kanhaiya so that he could beat him up some more. Journalists present at the court and lawyers who watched the many clips that went viral that same night identified several of the lawyers who beat Kanhaiya as members of the BJP’s legal cell, the Adhivakta Sangh. That evening, on Rajdeep Sardesai’s prime time news channel, Sharma aggressively justified his actions on the grounds that everything he had done was in service of ‘Bharat Mata’, and asserted five times that he would kill anyone who dared to speak against ‘Mother India’. Silence on the part of the Modi government What is most disturbing is the Modi government’s lack of reaction to the fracas at the courthouse. Police commissioner B.S. Bassi described it as a minor scuffle caused by students and professors who refused to vacate seats in the courthouse reserved for lawyers. When Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who had been in another courtroom emerged, the journalists who were being pummelled on the ground in front of him appealed to him for help, but he ignored them and walked away. The judge could not spare 23.05 minutes to watch the video of Kanhaiya’s speech to decide whether or not to grant him bail, instead remanding him to Tihar jail for another 15 days. But the same court, if not judge, gave bail to Sharma, Yashpal and Chauhan within hours. As for Prime Minister Modi, he has responded to the rise of mob rule on February 15 in much the same way as Hitler responded to Kristallnacht – the Nazi storm troopers’ attack on German Jews in 1938 — by completely ignoring it and everything that led up to it. More than anything else, it is this calculated silence that makes it necessary to face the possibility that the Delhi incident is not an accidental confrontation that went out of control but a first testing of the waters of Hindu chauvinism to see if it can be harnessed to realising the RSS’s long-cherished dream of creating a ‘Hindu Rashtra’. For, with the BJP at last in unfettered power, and two devoted pracharaks at the helm of party and government, it cannot but believe that its time has finally come. The RSS’s hyper-nationalism The RSS stoutly claims that it is nothing but a social organisation that leaves politics to the BJP. Over the 68 years that have passed since the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi – culminating in the benign tenure of Atal Bihari Vajpayee as prime minister from 1998 to 2004 – we have lulled ourselves into believing this. But the RSS has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. By an extraordinary feat of intellectual gymnastics, it remains convinced that snatching independence from the British was not a triumph for Hindu India. Not even the partition, which removed two-thirds of the Muslims and gave the Hindus an 83% majority was sufficient to create a Hindu Rashtra. For the RSS, the Hindu Rashtra must be a country purged of all ‘impure’ elements. With non- Hindus still making up almost a fifth of the country’s 1.3 billion population, this purging cannot be physical. So, it must be cultural. But as the European nation states have found to their immense cost, cultural homogenisation cannot be achieved without the sustained use of force. The RSS is therefore not only a totalitarian organisation, but also one that cannot afford not to be one. One has only to read Jawaharlal Nehru’s letters to chief ministers in 1947 and 1948 to see how little the RSS has changed. On December 7, 1947 he wrote: “We have a great deal of evidence to show the RSS is an organisation which is in the nature of a private army and which is definitely proceeding along the strictest Nazi lines, even following the techniques of organisation. It is not our desire to interfere with civil liberties. But training in arms of a large number of persons with the obvious intention of using them is not something that can be encouraged”. Similarly, on January 5 1948 he wrote: “The RSS has played an important part in recent developments and evidence has been collected to implicate it in certain very horrible happenings. It is openly stated by their leaders that the RSS is not a political body but there can be no doubt that policy and programme are political, intensely communal, and based on violent activities. They have to be kept in check”. That was 25 days before Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. On December 5 1948, looking back on that tragic year, he wrote: “The RSS has been essentially a secret organisation with a public façade, having no membership, no registers, no accounts… they do not believe in peaceful methods or Satyagraha. What they say in public is entirely opposed to what they do in private.” Reading these excerpts 68 years later, one is overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu. For the RSS is still a ‘social’ organisation that operates through more than two dozen shadowy, unregistered organisations. Of these the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, the Dharma Jagaran Samanwaya Samiti, the Hindu Dharma Sena, the Hindu Janjagruti Samiti, the Durga Vahini, the Adhivakta (lawyers’) Sangh, and of course the ABVP, are the most aggressive. It is we who constitute the rest of the nation who persuaded ourselves that Vajpayee and Advani were not an aberration and that the entire Sangh Parivar had changed. And we were not entirely wrong. For, responding to the inexorable pull of the simple majority voting system, which forces all political parties to moderate their ideologies and woo centrist opinion if they wish to capture power, Vajpayee and Advani had pulled the BJP a long way away from the RSS, and made it entirely acceptable to other parties as a coalition partner. This enabled them to give India one of its best governments since independence. But the RSS had only gone into hibernation and, as his ‘new year musings’ show, no one knew this better than Vajpayee himself. Step-by-step descent Had the NDA won the 2004 elections, both the economics and the politics of India would have taken a different turn. But the RSS was able to seize upon its defeat to discredit not only Vajpayee, but also his message. With Modi as prime minister and Amit Shah as BJP president, the four-decade long attempt to distance the BJP from the RSS has been reversed. As of today, the chain of communal provocations and cultural onslaughts that began with ‘love jihad’, ‘ghar wapasi’ and the casual dismissal of the Agenda for Alliance signed with Mufti Sayeed, has shown that it is the RSS that is in the driver’s seat. Throughout this step-by-step descent into mob rule Modi, Shah and Singh have maintained a studied silence. But the administration and the police have already learned the lesson it is meant to convey. In Ahmedabad on the evening of February 27 2002, TV channels showed clips of charred corpses being removed from the Sabarmati express at Godhra. The next day, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad called a bandh and Modi announced state sponsorship for it. This handcuffed the police and prevented them from rounding up ‘history sheeters’ in Ahmedabad and other cities, to prevent riots from breaking out the next day. The result was some 2,000 dead in terrible communal riots. Today, state sponsorship of violence is no longer needed. Modi and Shah are achieving the same goal through their silence. The most puzzling feature of the RSS’s campaign is that it seems utterly unfazed by the inevitable loss of electoral support that will follow the resurgence of ideology within the BJP. In 50 assembly by-elections in 2014, held to fill seats whose incumbents had moved to the Lok Sabha, the BJP was able to hold on to only 19 of the 40 seats it had held before. This was followed by its shattering defeats in the assembly elections in Delhi and Bihar. To stand a chance of winning the 2019 general elections, the BJP must widen its appeal and actively court the support of coalition partners. Under Modi and the RSS, it is doing the opposite. Could this mean that the RSS is planning to ‘derail’ democracy once more? The possibility is no longer remote, because hyper-nationalism has been the final card played by governments of other countries that have felt their support waning. Delhi shows that the BJP is beginning to play it too. Prem Shankar Jha is the Managing Editor of Financial World and a senior journalist. II. http://scroll.in/article/804293/what-is-happening-in-india-today-is-similar-to-the-mccarthy-era-partha-chatterjee FULL TEXT 'What is happening in India today is similar to the McCarthy era': Partha Chatterjee There is something ominously new in the manner in which the attack against freedom of thought and expression has been launched this time, says the noted political scientist. Partha Chatterjee · Yesterday · 08:58 pm Photo Credit: Dalitcamera Ambedkar via YouTube Full text of the statement titled by the noted professor of political science to his colleagues and students at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata This is not the first time that freedom of thought and expression has been attacked in the Indian university. But there is something ominously new in the manner in which the attack has been launched this time. We know that the sedition charge was applied across the board by British colonial rulers against anyone who expressed anti-colonial or nationalist views. Writers, artists, poets, and thousands of students and teachers were arrested for sedition alongside political leaders and agitators. But the British colonial officers, who were themselves among the best students of British universities who sat in a fiercely competitive examination to enter the highest paid civil service in the world, respected the British principle of the self-governing university. The unwritten rule that the police must not enter a university campus was observed in the early decades of independent India when I went to college. Student agitators engaged in a street fight with the police would often run for safety into the college campus, and the police would unfailingly stop at the college gates. The rule began to be violated from the 1970s. In regions of the country rocked by political agitation, the university campus was drawn into partisan conflicts between the government and the opposition. Students and teachers were arrested on charges of participating in violent agitations. Needless to say, in the North-eastern states or Kashmir, where state repression is long-standing and indiscriminate, the university campus was not spared. Not since the Emergency But I cannot remember, except for the period of the Emergency in 1975-77, a national campaign that asserts that certain political questions cannot even be talked about in the university. Are we to accept that national loyalty must be so unquestioned that the origins and present status of the nation and its boundaries, the nature of the constitution and the laws, the mutual relations between different regions and cultures, the demands of oppressed peoples and minority groups, cannot even be discussed and debated among students and teachers? One would have thought that such debates were the very essence of a democratic public life. And of all public places, the university campus is the most precious arena where freedom of thought and expression is the foundation of the vibrant intellectual life of a nation. Even in the United States, that paradise of market-controlled capitalism, university professors are protected by tenured appointments on the specific ground that they must not be exposed to victimisation for the content of what they teach or publish. This demand was recognised after the experience of the notorious McCarthy witch hunt against alleged communists in the 1950s. What is happening in India today is similar to the McCarthy era. Whether the alleged “anti-national” slogans were raised on the campuses of Hyderabad University or JNU by those who have been charged is, of course, important for the future careers of those students – for Rohith Vemula the matter is, tragically, beyond rectification. But as far as the broader issues are concerned, that is beside the point. What school of jurisprudence is it that claims that a sentence of capital punishment pronounced by the courts and the subsequent political decision to carry out the execution cannot be debated in a democratic public forum, especially in a university? What is the constitutional theory that says that the existing boundaries of the nation-state or the structure of relations between the constituent units of the Indian Union are not open to question when only the other day the Indian government transferred dozens of hitherto Indian villages to neighbouring Bangladesh through a treaty and the number of constituent states of the Union and their federal relations are regularly changed by constitutional amendments? Or is it the claim that while grave matters like these might be left to the mature decisions of politicians, impressionable students must not be exposed to such dangerous scepticism? Is the plan then to turn the university into some sort of patriotic seminary designed to produce brainwashed nationalist morons? A blanket licence While we may be forgiven for laughing about the farcical quality of the latest campaign, with such gems as the decision to fly national flags from 207-foot high steel poles on every Central university campus, it is actually spine-chilling in its implications. What has now been sanctioned by the highest political authorities of the country is a blanket licence to every Hindu right-wing vigilante group to target individuals belonging to the Left-Dalit-minority fraternity on university campuses. They can be identified as “anti-national” simply on the basis of their political convictions. Charges of sedition brought by the police would help, but it does not matter in the least if they do not hold up in court. The object is to smear and intimidate. The extreme example was set by the murder last year of MM Kalburgi. What we are seeing today in the attack on Kanhaiya Kumar and his friends in the Patiala House court or on Professor Vivek Kumar of JNU in Gwalior may only be the beginning of a long and bloody series. A great deal is at stake. We must be strong, resilient and united. -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
