JNU row: How Modi govt shot itself in the foot

By throwing caution to the winds and turning the powerful machinery of the State against Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, the central government has badly shot itself in the foot. The government is now answerable to serious charges of muzzling dissent and victimising a student who had apparently nothing to do with “anti-India” slogans that were allegedly raised at an event to commemorate Afzal Guru organised by a far-Left group with negligible support on the campus. The arrest of JNU Students Union president Kanhaiya Kumar on charges of sedition is a draconian act, which will haunt the Centre in the days to come. It is also becoming evident that Kanhaiya and the slogans were only a pretext and there is a concerted move to dub JNU as a hub of anti-nationals. Home minister Rajnath Singh’s claims that the JNU event had the backing of Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Mohammad Saeed have not been backed by any evidence other than “agency inputs” but social media has gone berserk claiming that these were based on a tweet posted from a parody account. 

The JNU developments are also a repeat of the tragic suicide of Rohith Vemula at Hyderabad Central University  (HCU) where the involvement of Union ministers Smriti Irani and Bandaru Dattatreya dragged the central government into the controversy. The hysteric responses of Singh and Irani to the clashes between various student groups in JNU have made it difficult for the government to dissociate itself from the partisan actions of the Delhi Police. The Indian government, with the onerous task of governing a country of 1.2 billion people, has far more important matters to handle rather than take overt interest in the affairs of a single university. 

The BJP’s discomfiture with JNU is understandable considering that the university has a tradition of Left-leaning intellectualism and activism. But the hurry to tar political opponents as anti-national is unbecoming of a democratically elected government. The beast unleashed by the government was in evidence on Monday at the Patiala House court where media persons and JNU faculty and students were beaten up. It also betrays the Hindu right-wing’s ignorance of what nationalism stands for. To dub those raising uncomfortable questions of the government as anti-national is reminiscent of dictatorships and not democracies.

It is ironical that the BJP, which had been a victim of the police excesses of the Indira Gandhi government during the Emergency, should now be unleashing the same ruthless tactics of the State against the students.

The Modi government is unwittingly giving rise to unrest on campuses where there was none due to inept interventions. In the case of Rohith Vemula’s suicide, the central government retraced steps by ordering a judicial inquiry after a mulish initial response. It could have saved itself many of the blushes, if the probe order came at the very beginning. The central government seems to be repeating the blunder in the clumsy manner it is handling the developments on the JNU campus.

First, the university authorities should have inquired into the incident of alleged anti-India sloganeering and identified the real culprits if there were any and taken disciplinary action against them. Instead, the authorities had called the police, who then file a case against Kanhaiya for sedition. The government seems to have picked up a wrong target. Kanhaiya is not the anti-national he is being made out to be, but a student from a poor family.

This is sure to backfire on the image of the government.