Why the RSS Projects JNU as Anti-National?

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat announced that JNU is a hub of anti-national activities. The RSS mouthpiece Panchjanya had alleged that JNU is home to ‘a huge anti-national block which has the aim of disintegrating India’. Another article in it alleged ‘JNU is one such institute where nationalism is considered an offense. Presenting Indian culture in a distorted way is common. The removal of Army from Kashmir is supported here. They advocate various other anti-national activities here.’⁴⁰ These statements were followed up by a crackdown on JNU on 9 February 2016, with an alleged claim that students of JNU shouted anti-India slogans that supported the separation of Kashmir from India, and some of them were arrested for sedition.

From openly debating why the Kashmiris demand for a plebiscite may be legitimate, today, even uttering a doubt about the possible human rights violations committed by security forces could count as anti-national activity. Demanding rule of law and accountability from the police and armed and paramilitary forces has become sedition. Raising slogans—however objectionable some of them might have been—is now being seen as an act of terror. Universities have been, perhaps, the last public spaces to assert a right to express and debate, which are utterly indispensable for holding a nation together. The RSS, in its mouthpiece as stated above, argued that JNU is a bastion of anti-national activities and a hub of terror. What we witnessed in JNU is an outcome of that kind of an understanding of a place that is willing to penetrate the political nature of various problems, including the nationality struggles in the Northeast, socio-economic roots of the Maoist insurgency, everyday humiliation suffered by Dalits, marginalization of Muslims, sexual harassment of women, and stigmatization of sexual minorities. Not long ago, demanding reservations for the OBCs and implementing the Mandal Commission report were described as anti-national, and today, the BJP-RSS that had vehemently opposed such demands proudly projects an OBC person as its leader.⁴¹

‘Nationalism without a Nation’

On the day of the public meeting in JNU on 1 February 2016, to protest the police clampdown and demand the release of Kanhaiya Kumar, a handful of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) activists were waving black flags and raising slogans against the massive gathering. They were allowed the space to protest. In no small measure, this reflects the spirit that JNU has stood for all these years. A spirit that stands in complete opposition to the way the current political dispensation has handled students, not at JNU alone but at the University of Hyderabad, Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras), and FTII. A spirit that refuses to be subsumed under the simple-minded, mediocre nationalism of the current dispensation that wishes away every difference of opinion and perceives it as ‘Bharat Ma ka apman’.

Nations flourish when they instil a sense of belongingness and meaning in their diversity. Universities play an important role in this by contributing towards extending the inclusive character and democratizing social hierarchies. Otherwise, we often end up with ‘nationalism without a nation’. The death of ideas is also the death of a nation. In fact, the persistent crisis of the present government is one of a lack of imagination and failure to create a new energy that often comes with fresh and innovative ideas in a democracy. Growth is stuck, and the government is not willing to innovate new welfare policies that can reinvigorate its social mobilization. Communal polarization had failed both in Delhi and Bihar. The only option was hyperbolic nationalism.

The unwillingness to look for new political strategies is also reflected in the way the dispensation was handling problems in universities. Rohith Vemula’s case was striking in the way the HRD ministry got itself engulfed in a crisis that became cynical to the point of denying Rohith’s Dalit identity and the role of casteism on campuses. Part of the problem is the disregard for the autonomy of universities and disallowing administrators from tuning in to the mood and aspirations on campuses.

The way ahead is to listen and understand the way Rohith Vemula and Kanhaiya Kumar have become symbols of a simmering multitude that cannot simply be pushed away or cowed down through the use of force. Even nationalism demands a dialogue. Love for the nation has to be nurtured, not shoved down throats. Diversity has to be acknowledged, not merely by recognizing various social identities, but the ideas that come with them.

Finally, to eventually resolve the Kashmir issue (we will analyse this issue in some detail in the next section), we need to empathize with why Kashmiris feel so distanced from India, and wedge open a social narrative on the growing majoritarianism and radicalization of the Kashmiri youth, problems of Kashmiri Pandits and their resettlement, and unresolved issues of gender and religion, among other not-so-agreeable features of Kashmiri society. But in order to produce such a dialogue, we need to look into ourselves. Are we prepared for the social spaces that such a political dialogue requires or are we filled with the fear of diversity?

BJP/RSS and Tacit Consent

The developments after the crackdown on JNU have surprised and offended the democratic sensibilities of many who have been reflecting and demanding a right to free speech and arguing that dissent is not sedition and that difference of opinion is not necessarily anti-national. However, BJP, on its part, has not dithered from moving from one offensive step to the next. It began with an outrageous arrest of the JNU student union president without any evidence, followed by an assault on him and the assault on journalists and others at court apparently by lawyers, where the police, in an act of brazen impunity, simply looked the other way.⁴² Furthermore, the then Delhi police commissioner B.S. Bassi asked for evidence against the lawyers even when their video was all over the news. Along with this, Bassi came up with a statement saying that students needed to prove their innocence.⁴³ This, in a sense, stands for a certain kind of brazenness with which support is mobilized for the government in general. As a sideshow, BJP Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs) joined the chorus to make the event even more muscular. To begin with, O.P. Sharma beat up a Communist Party of India (CPI) activist, later alleging that it was in response to some anti-India slogans that the activist had raised.⁴⁴ A Rajasthan MLA asked for Rahul Gandhi to be shot dead for participating in a public meeting in support of Kanhaiya Kumar, while another MLA asked D. Raja of the CPI to shoot his daughter for extending support to Umar Khalid.⁴⁵ The official BJP spokesperson offered only a token disclaimer but never promised to act against either the lawyers or the MLAs. Much of this was countered as a violation of constitutional morality. Why does the BJP not dither even in the light of mounting criticism and disapproval of the media, academics, legal experts, and other political parties?

It is perhaps because it is clear as to who it is catering to in staging a spectacle of this nature Even a casual conversation with an auto driver, a street vendor, a shopkeeper, and neighbours in a South Delhi colony would allow one to understand that there is a section among us that does not only approve of but wishes to push and even perhaps participate in public acts of what they feel is patriotism. As one among the lawyers from the Patiala House Court hooliganism row revealed on a video, even the police said they would have joined the assault had they not been in their uniforms.⁴⁶ The approval is not merely among the subaltern classes, it is perhaps stronger among the upwardly mobile middle class, which has come to value security more than freedom. The ultra-nationalism of the BJP-RSS kind seems to be a tipping point for the sociological distinctions between the elite and the subaltern. It is understandable why various sections of the society have begun to lay premium on security rather than freedom when everyday life is constituted by violations of law—not as an exception but as a norm. The outrage we witnessed at court along with the violent declarations of BJP MLAs, speaks of a malaise more rampant than we would want to believe. Does it look like an aberration only when it gets into media and we watch it from the comfort of our drawing rooms? If one only looks closer, it is evident that public assault—be it of women found drunk in Guwahati, Africans in Delhi and Bangalore, or by khap panchayats in Haryana—is more routinized and less organized. Even the more organized protests of the kind we witnessed against the 16 December rape case, Nirbhaya, in Delhi used the language of public lynching and castration and demanded death penalty for the accused. Along with these public spectacles that draw silent justification and consent for vigilante justice, there is the omnipresent language of the security state that seems to justify collateral damage, extrajudicial killings, and exceptionalism. One needs to only watch one of these successful Bollywood cop movies where a super cop relishes an encounter or an act of delivering street ‘justice’.

‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ and Vigilante Justice

The roots of the brazenness that BJP pursues also exist in the way our public morality works. It is, therefore, not surprising that anti-national activities also should, as a rule, go with ‘naked dancing, alcoholism and use of condoms’ in JNU, as one of the BJP MLAs remarked.⁴⁷ In public morality, perhaps this makes sense. Sexual freedom, freedom to choose one’s life partner, and freedom of speech and anti-national activities are not as far away as we perhaps imagine them to be. Nationalism, patriotism, and symbols that accompany this language are not manufactured only by the BJP. One has to only pause and look back at the famous movement led by Anna Hazare to realize that the symbolism was so common to what we are witnessing today—from slogans of ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ and ‘Vande Mataram’ to waving the national flag and celebrating celibacy and teetotalism as patriotic virtues. What we witnessed with regard to JNU is not an exclusive creation of the BJP and the RSS. Instead, BJP is only consolidating what is perhaps a more general sense of public morality in India. It is to this constituency that the BJP responds and therefore believes that it can afford to ignore and slight those in support of the agitating students in JNU. It is an interrogation of the morality, language, and symbolism that goes in the name of popular culture and populism that we would begin to make gains against spaces that are closing in on us. The present political dispensation under Mr Modi has undoubtedly provided us with an opportunity, and we need to only look beyond the smokescreen.