JNU’s political legacy

It is not for the first time that there has been ‘trouble’ in New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. Let it be clarified that ‘trouble’ is indeed not the right word here but it is used intentionally. 

Way back in 1975, PS Bhinder, then Delhi Police Commissioner, had picked up Prabhir Purkhayastha, like Rambo would do in cinema, driving his white ambassador car with doors open and pulling into it the student that Prabhir then was. Well. He had not intended to pick up Prabhir. He had mistaken him (wearing thick rimmed glasses) to DP Tripathi, now a senior leader of the Nationalist Congress Party, then President of the university’s students union. Prabhir, nevertheless, was also critical of the Emergency and Indira Gandhi and hence Bhinder ordered (or was it Sanjay Gandhi) to keep Prabhir too behind bars. Tripathi too was arrested soon, apart from such others as Sitaram Yechury (all of them SFI leaders then) to secure the integrity of the nation, which was in danger according to Indira Gandhi. There were such others as the late Digvijay Singh, who would become a minister in the Union cabinet and represent India as its junior minister for foreign affairs for a while. He was not a communist. JNU also was home to Prabhakar Parkala (he was a Congress students wing leader then and now in the BJP) and his wife Nirmala Sitaraman, now a Union minister (though not known to have held any political positions then). Selvaganapathy, who was last seen in the DMK, was also a student of JNU. There was Maneka Gandhi, who too was a student then in JNU and now a Union minister.

The list will be endless if one tries to name those in the bureaucracy, the Intelligence agencies, including the RAW, and the scores in the media at various levels. Baburam Bhattarai, whose comrades ruled Nepal for a while was also a student of JNU.

In 1983, then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi was shouted down by students while addressing a function. Slogans against her were, incidentally, heard on the AIR, broadcasting her speech live that day. Over 300 students were arrested, charged under various sections of the Penal Code and even sent to the Tihar jail the same year when the administration decided to put down a strike in the campus. And when members of the Sikh community were massacred in the three days after October 31, 1984, students and teachers of JNU turned the campus into a shelter to those who ran away to escape the killer gangs. Together, they protected a few hundred of them from being murdered.

Students in JNU had greeted Dr Manmohan Singh, when he visited the campus as Prime Minister, with black flags and Rahul Gandhi was heckled with questions. It is also a fact that Arun Shourie (now a renegade in the eyes of our regime), Uma Bharti and many others had been to speak there and they were all put tough questions. Sitaram Yechury, when he came to hold a brief for the violent reprisal of students at the Tiananmen Square was also heckled in the Periyar Hostel mess. 

This long note (could have been longer and yet not exhaustive) should only show that the campus is not a den of anti-national forces as it is being made out. But instead, the university is true to its proclaimed objective which is etched in the university’s website as well as its prospectus: One of Jawaharlal Nehru’s considered opinions that “A University stands for humanism. For tolerance, for reason, for the adventure of ideas and for the search of truth. It stands for the onward march of the human race towards ever higher objectives. If the Universities discharge their duties adequately, then it is well with the Nation and the People.”

And now we hear cries, from responsible members of the Union cabinet to smoke out those who hold views that are not in conformity with the party in power. While there cannot be any quarrel over the law taking its course, the hysteria across a section of our people that the campus is haven for anti-national elements is indeed worrying. The law of sedition — Section 124 A of the Indian Penal Code — that was resented to even by Macaulay (when he drafted the Code in the first instance and hence deleted in its final version and added a decade later to the Code) is sought to be invoked by those who brand the Marxists and other sections of our intelligentsia as Macaulay’s descendants is indeed baffling. This is apart from the fact that this provision was used against Tilak and Gandhi to stifle dissent and its use restricted considerably by the Supreme Court in the landmark Kedarnath Singh case in the 1960s itself. It may also be noted that this was the basis on which Ram Jethmalani, a fellow-traveller of the ruling BJP as much as he was of other political parties, invoked this ruling to obtain bail for noted physician and human rights activist, Binayak Sen (who too taught briefly in JNU).

It is hence pertinent that the hysteria against one of India’s institutions of learning — where dissent is essential for a democracy — stops forthwith. As for the slogans that were raised in the midst of a gathering (and it now turns out if images in the media is to be believed), it appears that there were agent provocateurs too doing that. One is reminded of a similar act by the National Socialist Party in 1939, when a gang of petty criminals, wearing Polish Army uniforms, were engaged in smashing a German Radio station in the border and this turned into a justification for the invasion of Poland. Documents establishing this are available in the captured records and presented at the Nuremburg trials post-war.

Having said this, it is necessary to add one more point. That those on the campus and elsewhere, who seek to contest the idea of the Indian Nation and shout slogans praising another nation — Pakistan in this instance — should ponder as to whether they condone the rampant violation of human rights by the regime there as well. In other words, it is necessary to interrogate nationalism in a manner as to render it in the same legacy as the idea of India that those like Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev had in their minds when the walked up to the gallows with fortitude rather than ending up celebrating the nation-state in Pakistan.

The writer was a student in JNU from 1985-91, and is currently teaching in Sikkim University, Gangtok