Dangerous coliseum!

A dangerous trend is being set. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its affiliate, the AkhilBharatiyaVidyarthiParishad (ABVP), now have the power to decide who or what is anti-national and are getting the support of the state power to silence the political opponents.

The duo committed tactical blunder by escalating a campus issue in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) into a national dispute which now has the potential to become another bone of contention between the ruling party and a combined opposition in the forthcoming Budget session of Parliament.

Group of people and not just students at JNU rose anti India slogan in support of Afzal Guru, who was hanged to death three years back for role in attack on the Indian Parliament. Delhi Police instead of arresting those involved, went on to arrest the student leader Kanhaiya Kumar. Kanhaiya was not the organizer of the “objectionable program” on the campus. Instead, in a speech now freely circulating on social network sites Kanhaiya Kumar has affirmed loyalty to the Constitution and has expressed strong opposition to anyone who may question it.

The students who were raising their voice were entirely wrong in their choice of words while raising slogans against India that called for “breaking India into pieces,” and hailing Pakistan. However they are now being reported as saying that they didn’t do so to support Afzal Guru, but were raising their voice against the process of “Judicial Killing.  Their perception of “Judicial Killing” stems from the fact that on 3 February 2013, Afzal Guru was hanged at Delhi’s Tihar Jail and afterward buried inside jail grounds. His family was not informed prior to execution and his dead body was later denied to his family. Guru’s family was informed of his execution two days after by a letter. The students rated the process of carrying out the hanging as “judicial killing”. The ABVP let loose its goons in the JNU and when Kanhaiya was produced in court, he was attacked by a group of lawyers with in court premise in the heart of the national capital. Media that tried covering the event were also not spared.  BJP and ABVP have completely lost the script. What began as a political campaign between two contrasting ways of looking at the political narrative in Jammu and Kashmir has snowballed into an all-out attack on anything liberal and opposed to the ideology of the BJP. Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi paid the price for painting everything as having a “foreign hand” and now the BJP claims that Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) chief Hafiz Saeed has a role in every political action in India!Home Minister of India Rajnath Singh did not care to get his facts right. Once the name of Hafiz Saeed got associated with the event, the activists of ABVP got a free hand who brutally thrashed anyone who seemed to be associated with the event. While Delhi Police was proactive in arresting the student leader, it looked the other way when the media and teachers were being attacked within the court premises.  Action by Delhi police was based upon two simple rules that it has been following ever since BJP came to power in the center: Arrest first, investigation later; follow the diktat of ruling BJP blindly.

Students who raised slogans were not more than 100, since it is not easy to identify them through the videos now gone viral; police opted for an easy task. Round up the student leader!

By linking the protest at JNU with active support from dreaded terrorist sitting across the border Hafiz Saeed, India’s Home Minister Rajnath Singh has shown the weaker side where by the implied meaning amounts to that ideology of dreaded terrorist has infiltrated into India and the students are now an easy prey to those kinds of separatist activities. The action taken by Delhi Police raises the question-Will the state of India act against anyone that it finds has support of Hafiz Saeed? By that logic, the BJP-PDP government in Jammu and Kashmir should have arrested all those voicing anti India slogans in Kashmir.

When arrested student leader was to be produced in the court, teachers from JNU, media person were roughed up by activists of ABVP in the attire of lawyers and a prominent MLA from Delhi OP Sharma in broad day light with the police turning a blind eye. What initially started as murmurs of ABVP indulging in bashing of students got confirmed with the involvement of OP Sharma.

The series of events reveal serious danger to the autonomy of institutions, and the tenancy with which the police are being used to terrorize all those who have a different opinion than BJP only makes the problem gigantic where rational discussions are not permitted.

While the ruling BJP should have taken an immediate step to arrest all those who showed their anti-India feelings, it should also rein in its leaders from turning up at rallies as goons. The police needs to be rationale in tackling such cases and stay above politics and avoid getting entangled in controversies.