“Umar Khalid My Son” Rebels Against Normal Canons Of Rebellion

Umar Khalid, the fugitive hiding inside Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University and toying with the idea of making a surrender application before the Delhi High Court, should be the son everyone should pine for says Apoorvanand, the self-confessed renegade communist in his article titled “Umar Khalid my son” in Indian Express of 23 February, 2016. 

He admittedly has not met him much less interacted with him but yet gushes that he is the one who can fill his filial void-he has a daughter but no son.  What has made him pen this eulogy of the man even Left parties are careful not to take up cudgels for is therefore presumably is his nocturnal rants inside the JNU campus first on 9 February 2016 and again on the 21 February. Among the choicest encomiums showered on him is he is courageous. Touché 

It hasn’t occurred to Apoorvanand that the rabble-rouser was underground for twelve days before resurfacing not before police or magistrate but inside the safe haven of JNU where both teachers and fellow students are ready to spring to his defense.  That he is ready for a ‘conditional arrest’ i.e. without bodily harm being done to him in the course of interrogation also shows the kind of stuff he is made of though no civilized society can condone much less approve third degree treatment during interrogation.

“His heart bleeds for the oppressed of the earth” says Apoorvanand taken in by the dig taken by the fugitive at the Modi government’s policies in a manner of saying one swallow makes a summer.  And then he goes on to romanticize rebellion. Life would be boring if one is a conformist and toes the parental line and works hard for a fat pay cheque and wiles his time clicking. 

To the benighted author of the ridiculous article apparently, the terms such as ‘startups’ and ‘disruptive creativity’ are hogwash but the call to dismember the nation is an act of valour if not patriotism (because both Khalid and Apoorvanand detest the idea of nationhood with its constricting borders.).

Or is he so obsessed with the idea of violent rebellion that he scarcely gets to hear about the happenings on the scientific and technology fronts.  After all Luddites were pristine leftists, weren’t they?

The jury is still out on whether the freedom of expression includes the right to give offense but Apoorvanand’s kitsch has breached all norms of journalistic decency by defending the one who is facing possible sedition charges, the one who wears a permanent sneer on his face.

A section of India’s media as well as the intelligentsia uses the term ‘lunatic fringe’ freely without restraint to describe the extreme elements subscribing to the rightist ideology but avoids any critical reference to those from patently unpatriotic left.

Modern Indian parents by and large pine for wards, sons or daughters, who would do them proud with their accomplishments be it as doctors, engineers or techies or even with a fat pay packet. In some families in Punjab the eldest son is even today earmarked on birth for the Army which while giving a short shrift to individual aspirations at least meets the touchstone of noble aspirations.  But no parent pines for a rebel without a noble cause.