This country needs thousands of Kanhaiyas ------ Dr. K. Narayana

Narayana Kankanala in New Delhi, India
Yesterday at 7:42am · 
Shame on you!

Dr. K. Narayana,
National Secretary, Communist Party of India

“I feel ashamed of you now, after all these years of admiration. What is your status and what is Kanhaiya’s level? Why did you go to the airport to receive him?”, complains a well wisher of mine.

“A person who had praised deshadrohi Afzal Guru, is getting your support! Shame on you!”, another friend of mine expresses his ire.

“You had followed Kanhaiya to the Central University. Did you ever realize what impression it will create?”, one more Leftist friend enquires.

I concede that I am facing criticism from some quarters like these three typical ones I had listed above. I am not talking about the numerous praises and expressions of support I had received. I will take cognizance of criticism rather than words of support. Expressions of support might elate you and help you to move forward, but their role is limited to that. It is only the criticism that helps us to introspect.

Anti-National

The episode of Kanhaiya had emerged with the events that took place at JNU, Delhi between February 9th to 11th this year. Along with Kanhaiya, the Students Union President of JNU, two other students were also charged under Sedition and arrested.

We are all aware of these events that had led to the arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar, since February 9th. The seven video tapes, in which he had purportedly shouted anti-India slogans, which were widely publicized by some channels, have been sent to a Lab in Hyderabad for analysis. It was established that at least two videos, widely publicized by some channels had been found to be doctored. It is these morphed videos that were used as evidence against Kanhaiya, and he was charged on the basis of these videos. It was also widely publicized by some other channels explaining technically how these videos were morphed. Official investigations by various agencies had established that Knahaiya had neither shouted anti-India slogans, nor had he any role in these events. Legal experts the world over, eminent and veteran journalists and many top politicians had supported the fact that Kanhaiya is innocent and that he had done no wrong. Should Kanhaiya walk on fire to once again prove that he is innocent? I am sure even that will not satisfy the saffron brigade, who are after his blood.

I have full confidence in the fact that this young man, whose age is less than half of my political life, is innocent and if proven otherwise, I declare that I will say goodbye to my political life. I am saying this from the depths of my heart.

Before entering Parliament for the first time, Narendra Modi had kissed the earth. I would like to ask him, will he be prepared to rub his nose to the ground, now that he and his party are sure to be proven wrong? Are they prepared to take this challenge?

Giving me unsolicited advice, that I have a high position in politics and that I should not stoop down to expressing support to Kanhaiya is a blatant attempt to isolate Kanhaiya and play with his life. Their praise of me is in fact subversion.

Irrespective of their age, if anyone comes forward to fight against injustice and for a better India, I will extend my support to that person. Why the hell are you people so scared of him? Is it because the fearless young man is challenging Modi one-to-one. Youth is staying away from politics and even honest and hardworking young cadre is not able to climb up the political ladder. It is only children of the rich and powerful, along with top industrialists who are occupying seats in the Parliament and in other elected houses. And politics for them is a part of their business, a tool to promote their interests. And Parliament’s purpose is narrowed down to serve the interests of rich and powerful. More than 80% of the acts proposed to help the downtrodden and poor farmers are languishing and not able to see the light of the day. Women, who comprise 50% of the population, could not get the 33% reservation. The bill is pending forever.

In this context, it is people such a Lalit Modi and Vijay Mallya, who get all the political support to cheat this country and its people, while no one in power comes out honestly to support a forthright young men like Kanhaiya. I feel proud of this young man and I don’t hesitate to extend whatever help he needs. This country needs thousands of Kanhaiyas. False pride should not come in the way of supporting the truth.

Kanhaiya who was under police custody, was attacked in full public view, before TV cameras by BJP goons, wearing black lawyers’ coats. Even Legal experts deputed by the Supreme Court were not spared. Police remand and all the official machinery were mute witnesses to this blatant violation of the law of this land. Students are now afraid of going to their class rooms and an atmosphere of fear was created. Hyderabad Central University is a glaring example of this. It has been converted in to a concentration camp, with the students deprived of food, water, electricity and communication facilities. BJP had threatened that they will block Kanhaiya from entering Hyderabad and Vijayawada. The moment he landed in Hyderabad, every movement of his is fraught with danger. He was prevented from meeting Rohit Vemula’s mother. Goons on motor bikes tried to pelt stones on the car in which Kanhaiya was traveling. At the closed gates of University of Hyderabad, BJP goons had blocked his path and tried to disrupt his meeting he was supposed to address. While he was addressing a meeting at Sundarayya Vijnana Kendram in Hyderabad, it was again BJP goons who tried to throw chappals though unsuccessfully on Kanhaiya in the full presence of elderly citizens and the media.

Though permission was granted by the authorities to hold a meeting at Siddhartha College grounds, Venkayya Naidu’s henchmen had seen to it the permission is withdrawn. We had to shift the venues to a private function hall. Two hours before Kanhaiya was supposed to arrive, BJP cadres tries to enter the hall with the intention of creating trouble. They had brought in goons from far off places to enact this drama. I got a call from Delhi, that BJP is planning organize an attack on Kanhaiya by some BJP women. By 4.30 pm, these women were already there in the meeting hall and got in to an argument with the Red Shirt volunteers. Some BJP goons from other districts, who could not be immediately identified by the Vijayawada local comrades, sat in the front row and they tried to throw chappals at Kanhaiya as he rose to speak. Of course, they did not succeed as the Left cadre was alert. We had put up Kanhaiya at a hotel for the night, and even there, the BJP goons went and threatened the hotel management. This all powerful Government, with stalwarts such as Modi and Venkayya – seem to scared of this little boy, Kanhaiya. Why so much snooping and subversion on him? Are you scared stiff that if he speaks, you will be exposed? Disrupting the meeting of rival parties does not exactly fit in to democratic culture.

The Constitution had guaranteed the right to assembly and expression of dissenting opinions for all citizens. If you try to snatch it away from us by misuse of power, the anger of the people will explode on your face.

Your blatant attempts at creating a frenzy of politically motivated false nationalism and your projection of ‘Bharat Mata” to symbolize the interests of the rich is sure to boomerang on you. This whole subversive activity of bringing in Hindutva fascism is being watched with anger by the people and they will teach you a bitter lesson.

With this subversive plan, these Saffron gangs want to thwart the rising tide of opposition against them, by silencing Kanhaiya. At this critical juncture, should we remain mute spectators and allow them to carry on with their nefarious plan? When the police and administration had failed to protect Kanhaiya in the haloed premises of the court, who will trust this government to protect the life of Kanhaiya? Only the committed Leftist movement has to take care of him, at this critical juncture.

Should Kanhaiya be left alone to fend for himself? Is it a sin to protect and help him? You are saying that we will get painted in the same color as Kanhaiya. I say that Kanhaiya is always on our side – he is a committed Leftist cadre. By keeping him away from us, we will be throwing him to the Saffrom wolves. Is that what you want, by cautioning me?

When the movement against BJP mis-rule is picking up, we should put all our efforts by encouraging the newly emerging united student-youth movement. Any hesitation at this stage will prove suicidal to the Left in this country.

28-03-2016
Hyderabad

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1193755193975879&set=a.297075856977155.79057.100000242288451&type=3

What is going on? That Police And Rajnath Singh Must Answer ------ Aditya Nigam

5 Questions On Mysterious Sloganeers In JNU And Press Club That Police And Rajnath Singh Must Answer
March 6, 2016
http://www.indiaresists.com/delhi-police-ever-tell-masked-slogan-shouters-jnu/

Police plan Big-Brother cameras for JNU, we have learnt. A senior police official told The Telegraph that this measure would help in identifying

students who often raise anti-national slogans and stage protests. It will also help us in preventing clashes among students belonging to different ideologies – the Left, the far-Left and the ABVP.

Remember, dear citizens, the police were actually present at the event at JNU on February 9th. We will return to this point, but they don’t really need CCTV surveillance, they are physically present on JNU campus in civilian clothes, and with JNU ID.

This,  also recollect, is the very same police force that stood by while a mob attacked JNU students and faculty and assaulted Kanhaiya at Patiala House; the same police who cannot arrest the man who publicly, with name and phone number, offered a reward for killing Kanhaiya – they “booked him for defacing property”, and will “analyse the poster carefully” before deciding whether other provisions of the IPC apply.

When all the evidence is available – the name, picture and phone number of a man who issues a death threat, he cannot be booked for anything more serious than the actual pasting of the poster on walls, because “the posters have to be analysed”.

Violence unfolds before their very eyes, and the Delhi Police cannot act.

These guys need CCTV surveillance?

This entirely compliant police force, now acting as the private army of the BJP, is concerned about preventing clashes in JNU, which has never ever had violent clashes, when it cannot carry out the normal functions of a police force anywhere else in the city.

So what will a CCTV system establish that the Delhi Police don’t already know?

Consider the following facts, and do come to your own conclusions. We have.

a) Pramod Ranjan’s article in Forward Press, also posted on Kafila, shows uncanny similarities between a Panchjanya editorial of 2015 and the Delhi Police report of 2016.

In its issue dated 8 November 2015, Panchjanya, the Hindi organ of the Sangh, carried a sensational and provocative cover story titled “JNU: Darar ka gadh” (JNU: Den of Divisiveness). That is not all. The weekly took pains to inform media organizations about the cover story and requested them to take notice. In the first week of November 2015, this cover story of Panchjanya grabbed the headlines on TV channels….

The charges levelled by Panchjanya in November 2015, surprisingly, became part of an intelligence report filed in February 2016. The Panchjanya article and the report of the intelligence department have uncanny similarities. Their tone is the same, basic content is the same, charges are the same and both smack of a conspiracy to associate students’ organizations of Bahujan ideology with extremist leftist organizations. The only difference is that of language. While the language of Panchjanya has a literary touch, that of the intelligence report is dry government-speak.

On 9 February 2016, after the so-called seditious sloganeering in JNU, the Delhi Police, on the basis of the report of its intelligence wing, submitted a report to the Government of India. This report was leaked to the media by “sources in the Home Ministry”…

The list of charges in the police report is a rough translation of the ‘JNU Leela” published in Panchjanya.

So the Delhi Police cooked up its report on the basis of the Panchjanya Action Plan outlined a few months ago.

b) Leaks from media rooms now suggest that on the morning of the 9th of February (the event was that evening)  there was a buzz that “JNU mein bawaal hone wala hai” (There is going to be a ruckus at JNU today)

These rumours are confirmed by the entry of Zee into JNU one hour before the programme at the invitation of ABVP, as revealed on India Resists.

c) The police were actually present at the event. During one of Kanhaiya’s bail hearings, Justice Pratibha Rani pointedly asked why the police present at the event did not record it, and why did they have to rely on Zee TV videos, (which turned out, as we know, to have been doctored):

“Three policemen were there in civil dress. Don’t they know what it means? Why did they not record the incident? Were they not supposed to take cognizance of the issue?” asked the bench. The bench also asked why the SHO had not asked for the video footage to be recorded. “What were your men doing?”

d) We know what a couple of them were doing. One of the former members of DSU, who joined the programme on February 9th, Srirupa Bhattacharya, wrote in Sanhati about being followed home after the event, in a clear bid to threaten and intimidate:

I returned home around midnight. My friends dropped me at my door in a rented car. I was alone as usual. It began exactly 15 minutes after I had entered. Heavy intermittent steps climbing up and down the stairs. Dry leaves on the terrace crumbling under soft footsteps. My doormat heaving rhythmically with the breath of person/persons peeping underneath the door. No knock, eerie silence for 20 minutes, and then again the entire round. You might say this could have happened on any night, but I would ask you why then was it this night? The same night photos are doing rounds thanks to a group of zealots in the media. Why this attempt to mark, to intimidate, repeatedly from 12:30 am until 2:30am? To speak the truth it was a blood-curdling night.

Whatever the anti-national slogans that were shouted (Pakistan Zindabad isn’t one of them, we now know), the question is – Why did the policemen present not follow the men with their faces covered who did shout the slogans? One of the repeated attempts during interrogation of Kanhaiya, Umar and Anirban was to have them identify those men, which they were unable to do:

When asked to identify other accused in the video, the two did name few persons but the ones raising slogans were not identified. There are some masked persons in the group and some people who apparently are not from JNU,” the officer told dna.

The Delhi Government-ordered Magisterial Report said:

Many students who protested on the JNU campus on February 9 were ‘outsiders’, the DM inferred. He stated “It may be difficult to arrive conclusively whether other four students (Kanhaiya, Khalid, Anirban and Ashutosh) have shouted anti-national slogans or not but it was visible and heard beyond doubt that ‘these outsiders and possibly Kashmiri students’ were heard raising anti-national slogans. They should be identified for further investigation.”

The question, let me reiterate, is this – why did the police personnel present at the event not follow these men to find out who they were?

Did they perhaps know who they were, as they knew “bawal hone wala hai” on  the morning of the 9th? Were they perhaps, not “Kashmiri students” but people the IB and Delhi Police know well?

e) Was it the same men shouting the same slogans at Press Club, who also mysteriously cannot be identified? Why were they permitted to shout slogans and leave, in full view of police present?

Who were these outsiders, why were they not immediately grabbed and questioned? Why were the names of eight other students most of whom had nothing to do with the event produced out of a hat?

The slogans purportedly shouted, about destroying India and so on, have never been heard before at any event organized around Afzal’s execution in Delhi, and there have been several in different parts of India since the execution in 2013.

Where did these slogans suddenly come from? Who were these men?

What is going on?

The beauty of sedition : eloquence of Kanhaiya's language ------ Tunku Varadarajan

N.d. Pancholi

 06-03-2016 · 

"The first (speech) catapulted him to fame, incurring as it did the wrath of an obtuse Home Minister; of a dopey — but pernicious — Police Commissioner of Delhi; and of a tinpot-nationalist news anchor who disregarded the truth in a peerless display of hysteria. Together, they sucked young Kanhaiya into a vortex of political and judicial thuggery that would have made Gandhi and Ambedkar weep."

JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar

Reverse swing: The beauty of sedition
Let us hail Kanhaiya. If not for his politics, then certainly for the eloquence of his language.

==========================================

An anthology of the greatest political speeches of Independent India would make for a scrawny volume. Indian politicians aren’t strong on oratory, in large part because they’re uncultured, and have contempt for the Indian electorate.

Nehru was elegant, of course, though his speeches in English were not understood by a majority of Indians. Vajpayee was a master-speaker, his Hindi (and his sarcasm) being of the rarest poise. Annadurai electrified the Tamil people in a language that has, perhaps, only Bengali as its equal in its political prosody and spoken rhythms.

Of those in office today, Narendra Modi is India’s orator-in-chief, in spite of a tendency toward self-congratulation. He can mesmerise a crowd, his words a mixture of promise and menace. His granite face and bearing add to the effect of authority. Lalu Prasad is a favourite: not for his message, which is provincial and bogus, but for his jaunty folksiness, his devil-may-care phrasing, and his obvious glee in playing the bumpkin who steals a march on city-folk. And then there’s Shashi Tharoor — an old friend — who stands apart as an Indian politician who can actually debate. (In truth, he’s not a politician at all, which is his strength and — it could be said — also his weakness.)
Which brings me back to my anthology. Why confine it to elected politicians? In my view, no compendium of Indian political speeches would be complete now without an entry for Kanhaiya Kumar, the young PhD student from JNU who has arrested India’s imagination and ensured that the word “sedition” is part of the vocabulary of every citizen.

Like others with access to a computer, I have heard repeatedly the two speeches that Kanhaiya made most recently. The first catapulted him to fame, incurring as it did the wrath of an obtuse Home Minister; of a dopey — but pernicious — Police Commissioner of Delhi; and of a tinpot-nationalist news anchor who disregarded the truth in a peerless display of hysteria. Together, they sucked young Kanhaiya into a vortex of political and judicial thuggery that would have made Gandhi and Ambedkar weep.

If Kanhaiya’s first speech was impressive, his second, after his release on bail, was pure protest-poetry. One doesn’t have to share his politics to find pleasure in his language. I certainly don’t want “freedom from capitalism” — in fact, I want much more of it; and yet I found his revolutionary fervour endearing. Here is a young man with a serious rhetorical gift, and a mastery over the Hindi language that is a joy in this ugly age of “Hinglish”. His cadences and tempo are made all the more sweet by his Bihari lilt and his self-deprecating purabiya manner. This is Hindi as it should be declaimed—Hindi as a political rasmalai.

One needs to hear the speech, not read it, to appreciate fully the theatre of Kanhaiya’s delivery; his sawaal-jawaab —call-and-response — with the avid and idealistic crowd; the pregnant pauses, so essential in feats of rhetoric; the cutting humour of the occasion; and the verbal up-yours he delivered to those who would jail him for his views. All the while, another young man waved the Indian flag behind him. This was not sedition. This was the heaven of college life.

After this speech, the case for the prosecution is stone cold dead. The judge who released him said that Kanhaiya suffered from an anti-national virus, an “infection”. That virus, in truth, lives in those who would lock him up — those who have, by their own bigotry, sent this young Indian spirit soaring.

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/reverse-swing-the-beauty-of-sedition-jnu-jnu-row-kanhaiya-kumar/