Calicut University is once again in news, of course, for bad reasons. The university has included Arundhathi Roy’s “Come September”, an anti-national article in “Appreciating Prose”, the book compiled and edited by C.R. Murugan Babu and Prof. Abida Farooqi, in the syllabus for the Semester III of the students of BA (English Literature). The article is the modified print version of Roy’s speech in 2002 in the US.
The introduction of the author by the compilers quotes her infamous and anti-national rhetoric that ‘hanging of Afzal Guru was a stain on Indian democracy’. They say that in 2008, she supported the cause of Kashmiri independence and saluted the unarmed struggle of the Kashmiris against the armed Indian military. She has vociferously attacked the Zionist and Hindutwa ideology.
There were several reports of her statements that the Kargil War was the Bharatiya attack against Pakistan to invade the neighbouring country’s land. The Government of Bharat kills the people in the country in the name of Citizenship Amendment Act. The same sort of killings in Kashmir after scrapping Article 370. Few years back Roy was reported to have said that Maoists are Gandhis with guns!
Pages of the controversial article
BJP, ABVP and several nationalistic movements have protested against the pro anti-national stand of the university. A. Vinod Master, state president of Save Education Movement (SEM) and member of the National Monitoring Committee for Education said that the issue is serious and his organisation would intervene immediately. His organisation has already filed a complaint before the Union HRD Minister.
BJP president K. Surendran has demanded legal action, for anti national activities, against those who are responsible for this anti-national syllabus.
Couple of years back the same university stirred a hornets nest by including “An Ode To the Sea”, a poem eulogising Islamic terrorism, authored by Al-Qaeda terrorist Ibrahim Al Rubashi. He wrote it while undergoing imprisonment in a US jail. When BJP, ABVP and SEM came out with strong protests, the authorities removed it from the syllabus, but with an excuse – “it was included due to carelessness” !!!
Vinod Master says that the influence of the powerful anti national forces who have infiltrated into the Board of Studies and Academic Council of the university are behind this latest development. He is not surprised because the state chief minister’s office itself has turned into a haven for the people who smuggle gold for funding terrorist activities and the minister for higher education is under suspicion in this connection.
