The campus battle has nothing to do with ideological or intellectual discourse. Idea is to gain political mileage at the cost of integral character of the country
Shshank Saurav
The Delhi University campus is still boiling with protests and atmosphere is still tense. Youngsters, with placard, are being used as pawn by their political masters and people are busy in fixing the responsibility for the Ramjas college fiasco. This is not the first time when the university campus is used to fight the political battle on issues like free speech and nationalism.
We Indian love discussions even if we do not reach any conclusion. With respect to the recent controversy which happened on the Ramjas campus, there are two matters responsible for creating ruckus. First, the concern was relating to the person who was invited as speaker in the seminar and second, the topic which was to be discussed there.
Campus Trouble : An ill-designed plot falls flat again
It is worth mentioning here that Umar Khalid is enjoying bail on purely technical grounds and inviting him to speak on matters relating to security forces is similar to inviting a rape accused to speak on women security. A news channel recently published an article on web portal saying that forensic laboratory report of video footages establishes Umar’s involvement in anti-national sloganeering at the JNU.
Freedom of speech is not absolute and even the Constitution, which grants us the right to dissent, clearly provides that this freedom is not
available in certain cases. Article 19(2) of the Constitution which has been amended twice, clearly carves out the restriction on this freedom. There is media outcry that the ABVP disrupted the event in Ramjas College but, at the same time, people should be told what this event was all about. They should be told the fact that in this event Umar Khalid was supposed to take on our security forces in his well-known gesture and here the question comes whether the freedom of speech is absolute?
Umar was to deliver his speech on the topic “The War in Adivasi Areas” and the title itself suggests the malicious intentions of organisers. What purpose they wanted to achieve by calling the anti-naxal operations as a war against our own people and trying to manufacture a dissent which in-fact doesn’t exist at all? As a nation do we need to grant so much freedom to any individual or any section that it can be utilised wrongly by them to create a chaos? As a concerned citizen I get upset over these questions and I can’t join the anti-establishment bandwagon of free speech unless I get a convincing response.
The next point which arises in this entire episode is the right to speak being available to a selected individuals only who subscribe to certain ideology. Does this freedom of speech is limited to the left leaning intellectuals and democratic right to dissent ,get affected only when the disruption is caused by right leaning organisations? Lot many times left has stopped the ABVP from organizing
seminars in JNU and if Umar has a right to dissent then so does others. It’s not too long when the ABVP rally was stopped from entering Jadavpur university campus when students were protesting against anti-India sloganeering. Recently, Shazia Ilmi was stopped from entering Jamia Milia University campus where she was to participate in a debate on Triple Talaq. Self-proclamed champions of free-speeach conveniently ignored the incident as if the the right to speak is reserved for those who bash the idea of India.
There has been phenomenal increase in free speech outcry after Modi uprooted the opposition and even small matters are blown disproportionately which shows the desperation of a particular section. When this section got rejected by the people of this country, then they tried to fight their existential crisis through backdoor and university campuses. Level of desperation can be understood from the fact that despite knowing that Rohith Vemula was not a dalit, his suicide was highlighted as atrocities against dalit in high decibel. This is just an example.
In India we are not afraid of any right wing dictatorship but we are more concerned about the autocratic left. Person like me get frightened when they think of the atrocities which the other part of world has suffered in the hands of rulers like Stalin, Castro, Kim Jong, Mao etc.
Intellectuals need to introspect the reasons behind debacle of the Left in India and lack of administrative
abilities can’t be disguised in the
rhetoric of dissent. West Bengal is a classic example which demonstrates a failed model, which in-turn led to death of the Left in India. Efforts of reviving the political alternative to a rising BJP (which is considered as right leaned) should be made on the basis of facts and merits because people of this country are used to witness the staged drama and it is unlikely that the left will get any leverage out of the Ramjas episode. This campus battle has nothing to do with ideological and intellectual discourse and the entire idea is to gain political mileage at the cost of pluralistic character of this country.
(The writer is a Chartered Accountant and Anti- Money-Laundering Specialist)
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