In JNU's Eyeball-To-Eyeball Confrontation, There May Be No Real Winner

The whole battle has taken on a BJP versus the rest flavour. This will cost the BJP dear in terms of its legislative agenda, but will probably pay it some political dividends.

The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) brouhaha has now become too confusing for anybody to make sense. What began with a video of an event where slogans in favour of Kashmir’s “azaadi” and India’s “barbaadi” were raised, has now been muddied with counter-claims that the actual slogan-shouting was started by an ABVP activist. ABVP is the student wing of the RSS-BJP combine.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh made things worse by needlessly claiming that the anti-national event was supported by Hafiz Saeed, founder of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, while a Congress spokesperson managed to call Afzal Guru, hanged for his role in the December 2001 parliament attacks, “Afzal Guruji, which he later attributed to a slip of the tongue.

Nobody, but nobody, is going to emerge from this political conflict looking good.

The government, having upped the ante by trying to fix the anti-national label on significant sections of the JNU students’ body, will find it difficult to swallow its words. The chances are there were a few trouble-makers, and the rest got carried away by the atmosphere. This is what usually happens in crowd scenarios: people shout things they regret later.

By allowing the student protests to grow, and with all political parties now siding with the JNU students, the government now risks a washout of the budget session of parliament, with the Rohith Vemula suicide and the JNU affair now becoming further reasons to disrupt proceedings.

Rahul Gandhi, who has been busy positioning himself as a champion of free speech by visiting the JNU campus, forgot one thing: it was his government that hanged Afzal Guru, and that too in a cowardly manner. If anything about the Guru hanging three years ago was wrong, it was that the UPA government’s failure to follow elementary courtesies like informing Guru’s family about his proposed hanging. This was done probably to avoid a political fallout in Kashmir Valley, but not following the protocol shows that the UPA acted in a cowardly fashion. Rahul, however, was busy fishing in troubled waters and seemed to be unaware of the role his own party played in the hanging of Guru.

The Akhil Bharat Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP) is making a serious mistake by using its proximity to power to make allegations of anti-national behaviour. If it uses its clout with the centre to settle scores with rival students’ bodies, it is likely to lose credibility. It has to fight its battles on its own.

The JNU Students’ Union may be getting carried away with the current level of support from political parties, but at the end of the day, it is the students who will suffer if the agitation continues – as demonstrated by the pointless agitation carried out by students of the Film and Television Institute of India against the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as Chairman.

The Indian Left, which treats JNU as its intellectual bastion, is fighting to ensure that the BJP government does not tamper with JNU’s finances and autonomy. It is most probably fighting to preserve its own echo chamber on campus. But once they have decided to cock a snook at the Centre, it is doubtful if the BJP will be too well-disposed to the JNU.

The Kashmiri separatists who tried to use the JNU platform to promote their idea of azaadi, will find that the unwholesome publicity will make Indian citizens even more reluctant to believe that any injustice has been done to Kashmir.

While intellectuals may fulminate against the suppression of freedom of speech in JNU, the ordinary citizen is unlikely to see much merit in the speech that denigrates the country and extols those who tried to bring parliament to its knees. The relatives of the men in uniform who died defending parliament are unlikely to see the eulogising of Afzal Guru as freedom of speech.

The whole battle has taken on a BJP versus the rest flavour. This will cost the BJP dear in terms of its legislative agenda, but will probably pay it some political dividends. In a battle over nationalism, it is the BJP which has the edge over the rest.