***कन्हैया को बदनाम करने की साजिश साम्यवाद पर प्रहार करने को थी किन्तु दांव उल्टा पड़ गया है***
The
PDP which is in the coalition partner with the BJP in J&K, has been
very tolerant, indeed very kind, to these separatist elements as part
of its strategy to coax them into the mainstream. Many who raised
Khalistan slogans in Punjab in the eighties have sneaked back into
Punjab’s social and political life. Separatists in the North-east are
still active. The BJP is not averse to form an electoral alliance with
the Bodo Liberation Front which once upon a time made separatist
demands. In the Red Corridor which passes through Bihar, Orissa,
Chhattisgarh and Andhra vast tracts of Indian territory are now
administered by Maoists who do not allow government functionaries to
even enter! Mere slogan shouting is not going to dismember this country.
We have met bigger tests of sedition and come out triumphant. Punjab is
the biggest single example of national determination and courage to
oppose such elements. I am proud of having participated in that
determination. I would never have agreed, to take up cudgels against a
bunch of idealistic students just to humour the party in power! ..............
was the BJP trying to divide the jawans, who everyone admires, from the
students who are fighting for equality and justice for all dispossessed
segments of society?
To myself I pose a question: “If you were still serving and the Prime Minister calls you and asks you to take on the anti-national elements who shout anti-India slogans in the JNU would you oblige? After all, you obliged a previous Prime Minister by agreeing to lead the Punjab Police in anti-terrorism operations, so why not take on these student anti-nationals?”
My answer – you have guessed it! “Sir”, I would reply, there will be countless takers for the job of Delhi’s Police Chief unlike in 1986 when senior IPS officers were not willing to face mindless violence! No officer we asked was inclined to risk his life and that of his family members to engage AK-47 wielding assassins. But slogan shouting students are easy meat specially with the arcane law of sedition that so conveniently still exists in our statute books!”
When Rajiv Gandhi decided to overturn the judicial verdict in the Shah Banoo case I was the Special Secretary in the Government of India’s Home Ministry. I remember the chill that descended in the Ministry’s corridors with officers criticising the decision, albeit in whispers.
The reversal of the Shah Banoo ruling through the legislative route did not ultimately achieve the Congress Party’s objective of appeasing the clerics and securing the Muslim votes. The Mullahs only become more strident in their unreasonable demands. But the concessions they wanted was not for the educational and economic advancement of the community. They centered around obscurantist religious issues that kept Muslims even more backward though their clergy succeeded in tightening their hold on the believers thereby. The Shah Banoo decision shocked the conscience of all liberal minded Indians. The Hindu right, of course, gained enormously. It gave a boost to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. It was the single largest contribution to the turn in good fortune of the BJP and the decline of the Congress. I have a hunch that the BJP’s miscalculation in the JNU’s student politics will have a similar effect on their fortunes as the Shah Banoo case had on the Congress. It may not be as devastating, but it certainly has brought together all left-of-centre parties on a common platform. How long this bon-homie and camaraderie will last only time will tell. But at present an opportunity to debunk an ideology that threatens to divide this country has been presented to the opposition on a platter. In my interaction with my friends both on the Right and on the Left of the political divide I discern two distinct refrains. The rightists harp on the anti-national slogans raised on 9th February on the JNU campus and emphatically condemn such secessionary tendencies. They are convinced that slogans demanding the balkanization of the country and proclaiming Afzal Guru as a martyr are the beginning of the end. The leftists and assorted liberals, dubbed “pseudo-secularists” by the Hindu right and now given the new epithet “anti-national”, swear loudly by the right of free speech as enshrined in the Constitution but, at the same time, concede that such slogans are distasteful, even condemnable. I am not on the subject of which view is right or wrong. Many more erudite thinkers and opinion makers have written extensively on either side of the divide. I grieve that the identity of those who raised the slogans has not attracted as much attention of the police as their anxiety to please their political masters, by focusing on the JNU students’ Union office-bearers who the BJP’s student wing, the ABVP, want to displace. Even worse, no investigations have begun to find out who doctored the video tapes that were produced as proof of ‘sedition! To my mind Smriti Irani’s intent is very clear. Wherever she has meddled, in the FTTI, the IITs, the IIMs, the Hyderabad University and now the JNU, she wants to use government’s powers and its machinery, including the police, to get rid of all leftist ideology and supplant it with the Hindutva form of nationalism. Her intent can be called legitimate but the method adopted totally misconceived and unacceptable. If the ABVP wants to propagate its ideology in the campus they should use ideas, words, eloquence and example instead of making bee-lines to political mentors and through them to Smriti who obliges without sparing any thought to the consequences. Her foray into the JNU is bound to prove costly. It has already thrown up a potential leader whose ability to sway listeners and float credible arguments to prove his points equals those of Narendra Modi – even surpass him in the use of humour and sarcasm to garner support. For instance, the attempt by the BJP, to appeal to popular sentiment by invoking the sacrifice of our jawans in Siachen had gained ground with people till Kanhaiya countered by pointing out that the jawans hail from the poorer sections of the population, that they are sons of farmers who are committing suicide by the hundreds, that his own father was a landless agricultural labourer and his own brother a soldier. Why, then, was the BJP trying to divide the jawans, who everyone admires, from the students who are fighting for equality and justice for all dispossessed segments of society? His arguments cut much ice with thinking people. Those who shouted separatist slogans on 9 February in the JNU campus are most likely Kashmiri Muslims. They have been chanting such slogans every day in the Valley for years. The PDP which is in the coalition partner with the BJP in J&K, has been very tolerant, indeed very kind, to these separatist elements as part of its strategy to coax them into the mainstream. Many who raised Khalistan slogans in Punjab in the eighties have sneaked back into Punjab’s social and political life. Separatists in the North-east are still active. The BJP is not averse to form an electoral alliance with the Bodo Liberation Front which once upon a time made separatist demands. In the Red Corridor which passes through Bihar, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Andhra vast tracts of Indian territory are now administered by Maoists who do not allow government functionaries to even enter! Mere slogan shouting is not going to dismember this country. We have met bigger tests of sedition and come out triumphant. Punjab is the biggest single example of national determination and courage to oppose such elements. I am proud of having participated in that determination. I would never have agreed, to take up cudgels against a bunch of idealistic students just to humour the party in power!
http://indianexpress.com/article/blogs/kanhaiya-kumar-jnu-row-bjp-congress-shah-banoo/
