Sedition (?) at JNU

The Americanisation of Indian political journalism has meant that for over a decade now, the most burning issue before the Nation at any point of time is melee around ‘who said what’. If one day, the outrage is on ‘How could Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti use the term 'Haraamzaade', the next day the righteous indignation could be on an issue as mundane as 'How could they not allow us to demand India's destruction?'

While these contrived fracas may have made careers of many TV anchors and increased traffic on Twitter, at one level, these debates are repetitive and tiring. Not only that, contrary to the literal meaning of debate, these controversies only serve to harden pre-conceived notions and sharpen divides, the outcome many a times abetted by brazen duplicity of those who attempt to define and guide the narrative on free speech.

The following note is in response to a widely circulated write-up on Quora by one Harshit Agarwal, a JNU student, who claims to provide ‘a lot of answers’ from an eyewitness’s perspective.

Harshit's post makes a dishonest attempt to sound reasonable and bipartisan. Following are responses to comments Harshit has made in his post.

Whether seminar on Kashmir is wrong?

Seminars and discussions on Kashmir are dime a dozen and no one is really bothered about statements made on the nature of 'Indian oppression' in Kashmir. Hence, it is quote disingenuous to rhetorically question whether discussions on Kashmir should happen. At the same time, one does wonder the last time JNU or any left aligned body expressed solidarity or provided a platform to exiled Hindus, who also coincidentally, happen to be Kashmiris from Kashmir.

Whether objections to court judgements and capital punishment are wrong?

Of course, denouncement of capital punishment is perfectly okay. But people taking a stand against something (strong action against terror convicts) which has significant National sentiments attached to it, should be ready to bear the brickbats. We have feminists coming down like a ton of bricks on people who dare to highlight inherent biases in domestic violence or rape-related laws. Quite unfair but that holds true for all who cross the line of political correctness. That said, quoting Arundhati Roy's opposition to Afzal's hanging does disservice to those who believe that capital punishments are wrong by their very nature, and not just because the hung belonged to a so-called minority segment of society.

Shouting of 'anti-National' slogans

Harshit's paining of ABVP as the 'sole harbinger of Nationalism' betrays his own sympathies and ideologies. Will he care to explain as to why the 'beautiful JNU where all opinions, however radical are listened and respected', declined to let Baba Ramdev talk? Or did the students feel that his being a 'reactionary' automatically disqualified him from being among them?

In Harshit's world, members of sundry leftist bodies are students but that of ABVP mere 'cadres’. Is that respect or is that inclusion?

He claims that the slogans 'Hum jya chaahte? Azaadi!' were raised to ‘create solidarity’ and in response to ‘clichéd’ slogan of 'Kashmir hamara hai'. If it is so ‘clichéd’, just why did it take their goat so much that they had to demand ‘Azaadi’? How does demand for Azaadi create solidarity in between the communists and Kashmiri separatists?  And if the communist disgust at ‘Kashmir humara hai' is justified, what is wrong in many getting outraged at 'Hum jya chaahte? Azaadi!'

In Harshit’s universe, demand for Azaadi is perfectly normal. For did we not ask for it from British or did not USSR break-up? It is amusing that it escapes him that the ‘collective conscience’ of our people gets outraged when Kashmir’s sectarian struggle for secession from India (and merger with Pakistan) gets equated with India’s struggle to throw off the colonial yoke. If, in his words, secession itself is not bad, then just how wrong would it be to ‘plan a conspiracy to overthrow the government and seize Kashmir from India’?

On a more serious note - Why is Afzal Guru important? Because he is a victim of an unjust Indian state? Or because he is a martyr to the cause of Kashmiri freedom? If it is the former, then just how relevant is the slogan ‘Har ghar se Afzal nikalega’? Afzal Guru’s hanging has neither resulted in a social revolution, nor has it resulted in change in any law. For that matter, even in his life, (the presumed innocent) Afzal did nothing which would create an impact in the country. So, even if each communist womb/household does produce an Afzal, just how enriched will the revolution be?

On the other hand, if Afzal is seen a martyr, someone who dared participate in an attack on Indian parliament, he becomes very important, very prominent. And if this is the Afzal who will be born from each communist household, I will have no hesitation in standing with those who would want such Afzal-producing families to be punished in the most severe manner. Afzal as a martyr is not an activist for Kashmir’s azaadi. He is an active agent of India’s destruction.

Moving from the dangerous to the ridiculous, when Harshit quotes, hold on, Wikipedia! Just which scholar picks up lines from Wiki? Quite funny that two lines in the SC judgement are seen to be over-riding the entire judgement and the cumbersome mercy petition process. Any person who claims to be campaigning against capital punishment should at least be aware that this punishment is to be accorded in the rarest of the rare cases, where the crime is such that it shakes the collective conscience of society. Let him rest assured, that line of SC’s judgement does not mean that Afzal was hung simply to sate someone's bloodlust. The least likes of Harshit can do to refer to the full text of SC judgement  on Afzal's death penalty before deciding that he was innocent. Likewise, let he and others like him refer to the Machhi Singh case and recognise that 'collective conscience' is one of the criterion for 'rarest of rare' since 1983! But when has lazy and haughty ignorance stood in way of prejudices?

As regards terrorist, quite funny that the claim is that only people carrying arms can be called terrorists. Worldwide, across all societies, people supporting and abetting a crime are considered parties to that crime and are punished. Savarkar is sought to be condemned for his supposed involvement in Gandhi's assassination based on some conjecture of his being aware of the assassination plot, based on some supposed testimony of his servant, AFTER Savarkar had died. Here, we have spectacle of support for convicts who attacked parliament. Had it not been for the supreme sacrifice of our security men, many of those who are supporting the terrorists would have lost their lives. But that is okay as the killers are all oppressed by the Indian state. But seriously, does Harshit believe that his fellow-travellers agitating against the hanging of Afzal Guru and calling for destruction of the Indian state are merely court bards and do not actually have to bear any responsibility for their words?

Now the slogans which stirred the pot. This is where Harshit skillfully skirts the issue and portrays demands for India's destruction as normal. He makes quite a few claims. First he says that he was witness to some events on Feb 9. Then he claims that he has never 'witnessed or heard of them (DSU) committing a terror activity'. He further states that he had 'never heard any anti-India' slogans in JNU. He claims that the Kashmiris were outsiders for he had 'never seen them'. That he did not hear any 'Pakistan Zindabad' slogan and then tries to pin the blame on ABVP. Then he triumphantly declares that 'it is clear that no JNU student was involved'

He seems to be quite a man. Whatever he says he did not see cannot have happened! And since he is such a man, let us without question accept the ‘lot of answers’ which he has provided from an eyewitness’s perspective!

(The 'ABVP exposed' video highlights 2 men and a woman. The woman is seen arguing with someone (not sloganeering), 1 man only seen and another seemingly uttering ‘zindabad’. What sort of ‘expose’ is this that of the 3 ‘exposed’, only 1 seems to be actually sloganeering. And is he really an ABVP activist? If so, identity him and question him. Of the so many people chanting Pakistan Zindabad, the communists manage to ‘catch’ half-a-person and are triumphantly declaring that the entire fracas were generated by him!)

JNU is the very place where killing of over 75 jawans by Naxals was celebrated (so much so for being pro-India). The very place where Hindu festivals are suppressed (so much so for diversity)

The 'mild' Marxists, communists, Maoists all belong to political ideologies which suppressed individuals, communities and Nations, clamped down on any form of free speech and killed millions and millions of their own countrymen in purges and class struggle. If it seems too far off, these are the very people who decried independence, commenced an armed struggle, supported China during the 1962 war, committed mayhem in Naxalbari and as Maoists, tapping the many fault lines, are still working for disintegration of the Nation. Do we need to take lessons in democracy and freedom from them?

If rejection of the idea that these killers of freedom of all forms can educate the rest of us on what democracy and liberty are gets called as ‘suppressing dissent’, let us be strong enough to bear that cross. Not all talk is dissent. Talks of subversion are not dissent. The idea of dissent is noble. People who feel they are wronged get listened to sympathetically only when they talk about their misfortune, not when they threaten fire and brimstone on their imagined oppressors.

Dissent can be against the rulers. Dissent can be against entrenched interests. Dissent cannot be against the country, cannot be against our very Nation-hood. If we manage to confuse vicious demands for India’s disintegration with free speech, then, to put it mildly, we have a very serious problem in hand.

The fracas on speeches and slogans calling for India’s destruction at JNU have evoked predictable reactions but for the intriguing stand taken by the Congress. It would have been abnormal for the Communist parties and the born-again secular-socialists like JDU to condemn what happened on Feb 9. However, for the Congress, in spite of its cynical manipulation of the Ishrat Jahan controlled killing case, the Batla House encounter, and the bogey of Hindutva terror, it was quite unexpected that it would side with those who were actively supporting a terror convict and demanding India’s disintegration.

Still, the Congress under Sonia Gandhi is a much regressed version of the party under the original Mrs G, or even PV Narasimha Rao. It is quite scary to imagine that the only party with a truly National footprint can stoop to such pettiness but then we deserve the politicians we have.

As far as the JNU culprits are concerned, it would have been better had these student-activists been charged under NSA rather than with sedition. Given the outcome of even Binayak Sen’s case, we may see courts dismissing sedition charges. On the other hand NSA, if nothing else, could have been a good charge, particularly considering the way the Marxists have always applauded its application on Varun Gandhi, Kamlesh Tiwari, Swami Yashveer and many BJP leaders from Western UP for merely expressing their views.

The Road Much Travelled

It is not very often that communal riots, particularly which see the number of dead running into single digits, get raised in the parliament. At the same time, it is also not often that a local skirmish in a single village sparks off chain events in nine adjoining districts of the region. While it is sad that Jammu had to yet again undergo the cataclysm of riots, the only very thin silver lining in this otherwise dark cloud is a hitherto unseen appreciation of the fact that communal fault-lines in Jammu are strong enough to tear the region asunder.

For a very long time, the general public have been made to believe by the Government and the media that the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir is a non sectarian land and that a common thread of Kashmiriyat, seeded and nurtured by generations of Sufism, had made those citizens truly secular. So far as the secessionist movement is concerned, it has been painted as the result of disillusionment of the youth, a feeling which was completely independent of the religious identity of people demanding azadi.

If the contemptuous assertions that the Kashmiri Pandit migrated en masse of his free will and in connivance with the evil Jagmohan were not enough, we have been fed stories on how the Amarnath Yatra and the Kheer Bhavani fairs are supported by the local Muslims, the economic benefits being purely an irrelevant afterthought.

While the above tales were probably meant to control Hindu retaliation elsewhere, the general belief in the rarefield public decision making offices, which is supposed to be aware of ground realities, that the entire secessionist movement was restricted to the Kashmir Valley alone and that the general population of Jammu and Ladakh were absolutely pro-India, belies credulity.

This commentator may be accused of generalizing stray observations and presenting it as applicable for the entire region. However, when that generalization is seemingly proved by sequential events and evidence to the contrary seems absent, the hypothesis stands validated. Those interested in more details may refer to the post ‘Oh Kashmir’

It was only a few weeks back that Ramban was hit by skirmishes, instigated by a local Imam maliciously claiming that a copy of the Quran had been desecrated. The initial disturbances were only a precursor to riotous mobs chanting Azadi slogans taking over the town. Now, we have the spectacle of Azadi demanding mobs taking over Kishtwar and other Muslim majority areas of Jammu.

The reality was and still remains that other than the two and a half undivided districts of the Jammu region and the Leh district of Ladakh, the rest of the state of Jammu & Kashmir identifies itself as a body united in its desire for Azadi. This independence is not independence for political ends. Few even in J&K are unaware that residents of Pakistani occupied portions of the State have received a much worse deal compared to them. Hence, the demand for azadi is merely the yearning to fulfill the unfinished agenda of partition, which is securing a land of the pure, made even more pristine by the absence of those who do not follow the doctrine of the ‘pure’.

Communal riots in J&K are not a new phenomenon. The 1931 skirmish which resulted in cold blooded killing of 31 Muslims by the Dogra troops resulted in an uprising which immediately morphed into large scale attacks on Hindu lives and properties across all regions of the State. In 1947-48, it was not the Pakistani troops and Tribal invaders alone who targeted the Hindu population across areas which are called POK today. Perhaps only a few care to remember that not only did the towns of Mirpur, Muzaffarabad, Gilgit and Skardu have large Hindu populations, the countryside, right upto Gilgit had significant pockets of Hindu presence. Just a few weeks of mayhem and the entire POK was cleansed of non-Muslim presence.

The more informed amongst us, particularly of the liberal variety, justifiably condemn the disgraceful conduct of Dogra troops when they, by their inaction, became party to massacre of Muslims in some Hindu majority areas of Jammu. However, what many forget is that overall; the conduct of the Muslim Police in Jammu was all the more reprehensible as it was an active participant in the massacre of Hindus, particularly in areas of mixed population. Unlike what many would now like us to believe, the mayhem in Indian areas of Jammu were plain communal riots in which there were a large number of casualties from both the communities.

The events of 1947-48 were not isolated in nature. Riots have recurred with nauseating frequency in the districts of Ramban, Doda and Kishtwar. True, the casualties were never as high as those in many other parts of the country but unlike those riots, the design behind communal unrest in J&K has always been more sinister. On a very statistical level, the absence of a large number of dead does not necessarily denote that the riots were minor, particularly when the number of dead is juxtaposed against the small populations of these districts. The Kashmiri Pandit community too faced around a thousand direct killings in the last few years leading to their forced exodus. The relatively small number against the supposed much larger number of Muslim casualties are sought to be presented as proofs that the terrorist movement in J&K is non-sectarian in nature. However, this half truth cleverly glosses over the fact that the thousand odd dead belonged to a small minority of some three lakhs, who overall comprised only some five percent of the Valley’s population. In effect it meant that almost each extended family was directly impacted by the terrorist activity – in form of a dead cousin, uncle, nephew or in-laws.

The forced exile of Kashmiri Pandits was not an overnight event. Disempowered and discriminated against by the rulers, target of frequent riots, the targeted brutal public killings of 1989, threat letters and public warnings from mosques, the Kashmiri Hindu took recourse to the only option he had. He left, perhaps never to return, the land of his forefathers with only his life and barest of necessities as his possessions. The residual Hindu community, holed up in villages continued to be the target of both the terrorists and the locals alike and today, barely three thousand Hindus survive, if it can be called such, in the Valley.

In this land of the pure, Anantnag and Verinag of 1986 are history and will never be repeated. After all, one needs an adversary to riot against. Still, the Valley is not tranquil. Each summer, the Valley denizens manage to find some issue to rally around and vent their hatred for India. Be it Shopian, Amarnath Land Transfer, Summer of 2010, hanging of Afzal Guru or simply alleged army high-handedness, each demonstration becomes the excuse for vandalizing of a few more temples and beating up of the residual Hindus and migrant labour population in the Valley.

Some amongst us might remember that the in the immediate afterglow of success of their ethnic cleansing strategy in Kashmir, the terrorists had tried to replicate the same formulae of targeted killings and public warnings in the undivided Doda district of Jammu. A series of massacres, specifically targeting the minority Hindu community, raised the specter of yet another forced exodus in the State. Fortunately for the country, at helm was a Prime Minister, who believed in securing his countrymen. It was PV Narasimha Rao who was instrumental in creating the Village Defence Committees, which managed to secure the Doda district against the nefarious designs of the terrorists.

This bulwark against the secessionist movement and indeed the safeguard against yet another forced exile of the Hindu minority is obviously not palatable to the secessionist forces of the State. While the likes of Geelani and Yasin Malik have long called for disbanding of these committees, now the Chief Minister of the State has joined their ranks. That this demand does not arise from some intellectual conviction is starkly obvious when we realize that this worthy does not appear to know that February in a non-leap year has only 28 days! Be it the demand for revocation of the AFSPA or the pre-1953 autonomy for the state, there appears little difference in between the political and secessionist belief systems in the Valley. With a Central Government indifferent to their plight, it will not be long before the hapless Hindu minority of the Muslim majority districts of Jammu gets overwhelmed and is forced to share the fate of their co-religionists from across the Pir Panjal.

Not only should the Village Defence Committees not be disbanded, for the very simple reason that the secessionist movement is still on, it is imperative that the artificial state of Jammu & Kashmir, an agglomeration of disparate people and geographical entities, brought together only by the expansionist zeal of the Dogra Kings, be restored to its natural boundaries. Not only will a trifurcation of the State on geographical lines secure the Hindu and Buddhist minorities of Jammu and Ladakh, drawing of new borders and a new political establishment will ensure that secessionist sympathies in the new states are crushed comprehensively.

It is likely that any move to trifurcate the state will face resistance from the secessionists as the dominant view in those circles seem to center around allowing only the heavily Hindu majority districts of Udhampur, Reasi and Kathua to separate from the State. The National Conference, it its controversial report on Regional Autonomy, which suspiciously mirrored the recommendations of the ISI backed Kashmir Study Group, has sought division of the Jammu & Ladakh regions on communal lines. The Muslim majority districts of Jammu and Ladakh have been positioned as the Pir Panjal & Chenab and the Kargil divisions respectively.  Such arguments cannot be accepted as none of the Indian States with mixed majorities saw such granular partition. Had that been the case, Thar Parkar and Umerkote districts of Sindh and Chittagong from East Bengal would have been ceded to India. The trifurcation of J&K has to be on geographical lines alone, to protect the land and its people from an otherwise certain descent into chaos. The need of the hour is not some high sounding politically correct pontification but firm actions to secure large sections of our Nation from its adversaries.