[From my column Obviously Opaque in the UTS Voice, 16-31st August]
No, this cannot happen in JNU, as the Jawaharlal Nehru University is
popularly known. An assault and a suicide, this is simply impossible was the
first thought that had hit me. And then, my mind had gone blank. I was staring
at the screen of the blessed phone on which I had opened the app of a reputed
news channel, as I often do while going to the office. The news had shaken me
to the core. It had sent shivers down my spine some 3000 miles and two oceans
away from where it had taken place.
But then, this has really happened; that too in a classroom I had
visited a hundred times, at least, for everything from election campaigns to
political meetings. The images of that classroom had started haunting me.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, can justify the attack. It came as a proof that
even we, proud torch bearers of a glorious legacy of resistance have started
faltering at least if we have not outrightly failed ourselves.
Have we, the JNU, not been the name of that hope that twinkles in eyes
fighting injustices across the country? Haven't we been the place which stood
by one and all? Yes we have. We have painstakingly built a model of resistance
that works. We were known for being the safest place for women in the country
despite being located in the heart of Delhi, the rape capital of India. We have
built a real, working alternative in the face of those parroting ‘There is No
Alternative’ (TINA) mantra of the neoliberal world order.
JNU has always been the thorn in many fleshes. Right from those out to
sell the country to those in the mad rush for turning the country into a Hindu Rashtra, it
pricks in the eyes of all those who are against the idea of equality and
justice. It is not for nothing that Pravin Togadias have been demanding the
closure of the JNU they term as a Madarsa. It is not for nothing that the JNU
had become one of the nerve centers of the protests against emergency imposed
on India.
What has gone wrong, then, in JNU? What is it that is giving
birth to such despicable acts in a campus known for standing by equality, peace
and justice or the idea of India abandoned by those oath bound to protect it?
There is another question, though. Why is mainstream media using the two
incidents to assassinate the character of the campus? Why are they in a mad
rush to declare JNU as a University of Crime? JNU is not the first university,
after all, to have witnessed such incidents of crime on the campus? Neither
does it compare with many other universities which dwarf many of the known
badlands of India. JNU would not rank even in top 100, for instance, if one
makes a list of universities ranked by sex crimes. Does anyone remember Delhi
University ever being referred to as a sex crime university despite being miles
ahead of JNU in misogyny?
Though JNU must not merely be feeling ashamed for the fact that
one has to make such a comparison, it must also have realised its failure. It has
not been known for merely being a torchbearer of glorious legacy of the
peoples’ resistance, after all, it has built a thousand of them. This is
what explains the unholy alliance, the mahajot, that has assembled itself into
an almost impossible alliance to attack JNU. You would see political rivals
sharing space with news websites publishing porn in the name of news for a few
hits. You would see newspapers running outright misogynist stories with titles
like ‘the girlfriend had even had sex’ and blaming her for inviting the attack
on herself. Ask them if their reporter was hiding under the bed or what, and
they would meekly telling you that they translated ‘there was a lot between us’
of the suicide note into ‘the girlfriend had had sex. As if alone, add to this,
as the story did never mention the ‘boyfriend’ once.
Though asking where do they get the courage of running such
insensitive, baseless, false and irrelevant to the crime stories from in these
time of immoral web media, yet they make two things absolutely clear. First,
that a few media groups are ready to fall to unfathomable lows for TRP and hits
and second, that there is an urgent need for a regulatory body to look into
such lowly act. Why should there not be something like a censor board, for
example, to monitor websites that distribute pornography, a cognizable offence
under Indian Penal Code, in the name of news?
Having said that, JNU too has to answer a lot of questions in
the light of these attacks. It cannot run away with the excuse of its glorious
past. To put it in the words of a journalist friend Arvind Shesh, JNU must
answer why is the values (or the lack of them) of outside society are spreading
in JNU while it was JNU that must had spread in the society.
There comes another question. Think and you would realise that
unlike most of other universities where crime was organically linked to the
‘politics’, in JNU crime has started seeping in since elections were banned.
Interestingly, even that ban defied logic as it came after the recommendation
of a Lyngoh Committee that had found JNU election process to be ideal! Why had
that committee found JNU election process to be an ideal one?
Simply because JNU politics has always been a politics of
engagement where there was no difference between students and student leaders.
It was a politics that had affected even the right wingers, forget the Left
groups that have painstakingly built this culture. This is why that in JNU even
groups like Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad organised late night public
meetings nstead of issuing a fatwa on dress code. This is why political battles
in JNU were fought more over dinner time pamphlets than anything else. This
process of engagement was the one that first startled the students coming from
bastions of patriarchy with girl students leading protest demonstrations and
then slowly made them a part of the groups.
Conversations were never a one way road in JNU. They engaged
students, teachers and the workers alike. They led diehard political rivals into
lifelong friendships. These were the friendships that weathered all storms.
This is not for nothing, again, that the number of such impossible seeming
friendships in JNU can easily surpass, perhaps, the same ones in all of the
country taken together.
The
ban on elections had affected this engagement the worst. It has created a gap
between student leaders busy with the Supreme Court case and students. It had,
in fact, created a difference between the student leaders and ‘ordinary
students’ for the first time. Needless
is to say that this was the distance that blinded JNU to the two of its
students, even if out of thousands, turning into criminals. This was a blunder.
Such a blunder for the bastion of resistance called JNU that could only be
unconditionally apologised, not explained.
JNU got to answer where has it failed. The ban, ultimately, was
merely on elections. The politics was still intact as elections are but a very
small part of politics. Despite having fought, and won, countless valiant
battles, JNU leadership has lost a front, a very important one nonetheless. Of
course, the responsibility for this failure does not lay with the leadership alone
as the decline has been set in by things beyond their control. The blame partly
lies with the neoliberal economic policies that have shrunk the public space of
interactions to a considerable extent and have imprisoned many students to
their rooms and computers. But then, can JNU take an escape route opened by
this argument? No, JNU cannot. Neither can it run away by blaming it all on
current leadership.
We are all responsible for this. We, who could not see it coming
in our times. We, who could not plug the gaps and forced such a huge
responsibility on already embattled JNU leadership. We should all be ashamed
for the failure. We are all the culprits of two of our young friends who have
paid the price for our failure. We have to apologise to them and the only
apology possible is ensuring that this would never ever happen again.
We know that JNU will do it. JNU will have to. Not only for the
fact that this is about us and our JNU. It will have to do this because the
shameless forces trying to assassinate our character in the garb of these
attacks know that JNU is the most pro-people opposition of the country and they
won’t succeed in their nefarious designs until they demolish it. This is
exactly why we too cannot lose this most important front.
Comments
Post a Comment