Choice before JNU is not between Nehru and Vivekananda, but between a plurality of thought and the psychology of revenge

 

The university should be an ideal place to encourage students and teachers to engage with this plurality of visions, and even live with philosophic ambivalence.

As I move around the JNU campus, I often ask myself a question: What does it mean to look at the statues of Jawaharlal Nehru and Swami Vivekananda, and then enter the Dr B R Ambedkar Central Library? Possibly, this question has acquired its significance because we live in an extremely polarised world with the dominant imageries of “left” and “right”: A world where some might fear a “Hindu” Vivekananda cannot coexist with a “subaltern” Ambedkar or a “secular” Nehru. Or, given the dominant political discourse prevalent in the country, some might think that the unveiling of the statue of Swami Vivekananda at the JNU campus is just a beginning; it is a step to “purify” the “Left-Ambedkarite” university, and bring it closer to our “nationalist” aspirations. However, as a teacher/wanderer with some sort of intellectual and emotional affinity with the campus, I seek to reflect on the ideal of a university beyond the much-used prism of the “left” vs “right” discourse.

To begin with, it is important to acknowledge three distinctive features of the Jawaharlal Nehru University. First, with its galaxy of professors and bright students from all over the country, the university succeeded in nurturing a fairly developed critical mind: A mind well-versed with major debates in humanities and social sciences, or a mind that can raise new questions, and contribute to the domain of knowledge. No wonder, radical thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, Ranajit Guha and Eric Hobsbawm, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault occupied the consciousness of generations of students and teachers.

Second, the dissemination and transaction of knowledge were not separated from the process of political churning. Amongst students and even teachers, there was an inherent scepticism towards the status quo. Be it the anti-Emergency struggle or the recent protest against the CAA, JNU became a major site of struggle and critical voices. In this sense the university acquired a “political” character.

And third, unlike what happens in a traditional/conservative society, the cultural landscape of JNU was filled with experimentations, openness and new possibilities. From protest songs to radical theatre, and from endless addas to colourful posters conveying the messages of Phule and Ambedkar, Marx and Che, one hears the echo of Marxism, Ambedkarism, feminism, and postmodernism all around.

These vibrations of the university enriched us. And one need not be a “leftist” to learn from the spirit of critical pedagogy, enriched socio-political debate and high-quality scholarly activities. For many students, including those who chose to join the Indian civil services, the university became a life-transformative experience, not just a place from where one acquires merely a degree or a certificate.

However, it would not be entirely wrong to say that despite its academic excellence and culture of protest, there were some problems. Possibly, as an island, it became increasingly insulated from the periphery; it evolved some sort of intellectual snobbery and lost its connectedness with local intellectuals and diverse knowledge traditions. Moreover, at times, its radicalism became somewhat intolerant, or suspicious of all those who saw the world differently.

For instance, I have no hesitation in saying that the ideas of Gandhi, Tagore and Aurobindo didn’t get adequate importance; and any reference to texts like the Bhagavad Gita or the Upanishads was often condemned as “Brahminical”. In other words, we were losing the art of listening. This broken communication, I fear, led many to stigmatise JNU as “elitist” and even “anti-national”.

The university needs honest self-reflection. This means going beyond “left” and “right”. This is to cultivate the spirit of epistemological pluralism, and to encourage the art of listening as an integral component of reflexive pedagogy. And this is fundamentally different from the ugly practice of blame game (you “leftists” have dominated so far; and now it is our turn; you spoke of Marx and Ambedkar; and now we will valorise Savarkar and Golwalkar; you celebrated gender studies and peasant struggle; and now we will introduce Sanskrit, yoga and Ayurveda). In fact, a university can be healed only if as students, teachers and administrators, we acquire the courage to break this vicious cycle, and see ourselves as seekers and wanderers, continually learning and unlearning with openness, fearlessness and a dialogic spirit.

It is in this context that the question with which I began this article becomes alive once again. I look at Nehru’s statue and recall his Discovery of India — the way “modernist” Nehru sought to understand the vibrancy of an old civilisation, and at the same time wanted to fight the “dead weight of the past”, and regenerate a new nation. It was rooted, yet cosmopolitan. And then, I look at Swami Vivekananda. I begin to hear the marvellous speech he delivered at the Chicago Religious Congress — the Upanishadic message of fundamental oneness amid differences; I see his passionate plea for “practical Vedanta”, a radical religiosity to serve people. Yes, I laugh at those who think that they can fool me by saying that Vivekananda was a champion of militant Hindu nationalism. Finally, with Ambedkar, I open my eyes, and give my consent to the project of annihilating caste. And I feel that a university should be an ideal place to encourage students and teachers to engage with this plurality of visions, and even live with philosophic ambivalence. And hence, I imagine a student studying Lokayata as well as Vedanta, Franz Kafka as well as Kalidas, Gandhi as well as Foucault without shame and anxiety, or snobbery and instrumentality.

This requires freedom — an environment that respects students and teachers and allows them to unfold their potential. However, instead of the development of this ideal, we are witnessing a process of systematic destruction of the very soul of a university through the psychology of revenge.

Avijit Pathak is professor of sociology at JNU

Deprivation Points Must Stay

The system is commended at the highest policy level, but is under threat in JNU

The business of deprivation points started from JNU, entered the policy systems of the NDA at the highest level of policy advice. But the powers that be, while eulogising this at meta policy levels, went on to question them at JNU. When policy debates become highly politicised in the wrong sense of the term, intellectual consistency and time-honoured criteria of judging good policies, like the relationship between objectives and instruments, go for a sixer.

In JNU, in the beginning, the preference to children from backward regions and poor families was absolute. A new elite was being created, without any discrimination, as it were. You can make out a JNU-trained SP, collector or joint secretary a mile off. It is ironic, but perfectly understandable, that senior intelligence officers monitoring the present JNU story were JNU-trained. When I was a minister going to a meeting, the ranking civilian there would whisper in my ears: “Sir, I am JNU, 1982 batch. Wink wink, nudge nudge.” We won’t say it, but we know what we want, what we are doing, what to say and how to get it done. All clubs are like that and this was then and, I suspect now, not any different.

JNU’s admission policies are reviewed every five years. When I was their vice-chancellor (VC), I gave the students union some money to organise debates on this. The business of deprivation points came up. The radicals wanted many deprivation points around the merit criteria to give weightage to backwardness. At least 50 points out of 1,000. The opposite was also argued. The alums who came in were persons like Prakash Karat, Sitaram Yechury and Anand Sharma, all former JNU-ites. Also, outside experts like the historian Barun De and others, joined. Finally, we agreed on 10 deprivation points out of a total score of 1,000.

Around the admission range there is a struggle. At each point there are scores of kids. The VC’s job between June-end and August 15 when it all closes, is just to protect the unique, totally foolproof and non-tamperable admission system from the pressures of the highest in the land. A few deprivation points will matter.

In the final admission system, it was decided, after a lot of bloodletting, that if you were a girl, poor and did your qualifying degree from the poorest quartile of districts, you got 10 points. At the other end, if a boy and poor, you got three. Eight kids made it on account of deprivation thus defined. The radicals went for me hammer and tongs. Only eight! I told them that eight is a lot and my job was to run the best university in the country. I will work for the revolution after I leave JNU.

N.C. Saxena picked it up when he was planning secretary. He did what I wanted, although haltingly. He introduced deprivation points in the national poverty debate. To my regret, he did not change the Alagh Poverty Line but within it, introduced deprivation points to enable entitlements to plan benefits. Arvind Panagariya inherits that and his vision for the next three years is out. Not the chhota press version for those who can’t read and must see PPTs, but a regular plan document. There is something about this planning business. You can say, abolish it, wipe it out, Mahalanobis stuff, and then, you come out with the same; of course, taking into account the changes taking place and of course, the natural fact that you will do better. The ghosts of Yojana Bhavan haunt you; the urge to do better is natural.

So, the document has all the planning and policy chapters and we will, of course, discuss them again. There are targets, financial resources, regional development and sectoral strategies, the works. It starts: “the signs of change began to emerge during the second half of the 1980s, with 1991 proving a turning point. The reforms that followed first under Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and then under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, placed India first on a six per cent growth trajectory and then, beginning in 2003-04, on an eight per cent plus trajectory (emphasis added).’’ Discussing MGNREGA, it says: “Therefore there is a need for developing inclusion, exclusion and deprivation criteria (emphasis added)”. Panagariya’s preliminary thoughts on poverty in a separate note say the same. It’s business as usual; only the Niti Aayog doesn’t disburse. Deprivation points are safe at the meta level, but not in JNU.

The writer, an economist, is a former Union minister

Source: The Hindu, 17-05-2017

JNU library named after Ambedkar

New Delhi: TIMES NEWS NETWORK





Jawaharlal Nehru University's executive council has approved the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad's demand to rename its central library as BR Ambedkar Library on Tuesday .The ABVP , in April, also demanded that Dr Ambedkar's statue be installed there.JNU's library committee approved the proposal, which was then placed before the executive council on Tuesday .
“The proposal to rename the central library as BR Ambedkar Library was approved unanimously ,“ said a council member.
The ABVP earlier wrote to President Pranab Mukherjee and HRD ministry demanding the renaming of the library after Dr Ambedkar, the convention centre after Dr Kalam and stadium ground after Birsa Munda.
Saurabh Sharma, joint secretary of JNUSU and ABVP member said, “The council not only accepted our demand for naming of the central library in the name of Dr Ambedkar but a statue will also be set up there. However we will continue our struggle to name the stadium ground after Birsa Munda and the convention centre in memory of Dr APJ Abdul Kalam.“

Source: Times of India, 22-06-2016

How to be free in the 21st century

The experience of liberal democracies elsewhere shines a light upon the outdatedness of the sedition law that India uses so loosely.

In little more than a month since a partisan and heavy-handed Delhi Police arrested Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union President Kanhaiya Kumar and slapped him with the charge of sedition, reams of newsprint have been dedicated to challenging that odious legal provision of the Indian Penal Code, dating back to 1860, principally on the grounds that it is draconian and specifically that its abuse impairs a critical feature of liberal democracy:dissent

In the process the troubling history of Section 124-A of the IPC has been clearly traced, especially its remarkable survival from the pre-Independence era, when it served the colonial government as a weapon of mass suppression against all opposition, into modern India, where it has now become an untenable blot on the right to free speech guaranteed by Article 19 of the Constitution.

At the heart of this ongoing battle for India’s liberal soul is the argument that speech that is alleged to be seditious may be considered illegal only if it is an incitement to violence or public disorder, a view that has been clarified by a multitude of legal precedents including Kedar Nath Singh vs State Of Bihar(1962), Indra Das vs State Of Assam (2011), Arup Bhuyan vs State Of Assam (2011), and most recently the well-known case of Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2013).

Yet by no means is the tension between the right to freedom of speech and the ambitions of a government to quell criticism of its policies a new dilemma for democratic politics worldwide, and indeed the experience of liberal Western democracy shines a light upon what could be considered a reasonable position on this subject.

Consider first the experience of the U.K., where laws on seditious libel and criminal defamation were summarily abolished by Section 73 of the Coroners and Justice Act in 2009 nearly 40 years after the British Law Commission first recommended doing so, albeit after “after a century of disuse,” according to Professor John Spencer of Cambridge University.

Modern Britain’s struggle with the chilling effects of sedition on free speech dates back centuries to the times of the Star Chamber, and was poignantly illustrated in the 1792 trial of political theorist Thomas Paine, whose work was influential in igniting the American Revolution, specifically for his publication of the second part of the Rights of Man.

In that tome Mr. Paine effectively argued that popular political revolution was permissible when a government no longer safeguarded inalienable rights of its people, rights that stemmed from nature and not any government-written document, not even a Constitution.

Unsurprisingly when an estimated 50,000 copies of Mr. Paine’s manuscript started circulating in Britain it led to a massive furore within government, a trial in absentia, and finally conviction for seditious libel against the Crown. Fortunately for Mr. Paine he was at the time a resident of France and hence “unavailable for hanging,” and so he got away with never returning to his homeland.

In the early years sedition came with rather steep punishments, including perpetrators having their ears cut off for a first offense and put to death for recidivism. Later it became punishable up to life imprisonment and/or a fine, and in most cases “Not only was truth no defence, but intention was irrelevant.”

However in line with what Professor Spencer had indicated to The Hindu, on multiple occasions 21-st century debates in the House of Lords agreed that “the common law of sedition had rarely been used in England over the course of the past century,” and the last major case in the country where there was an attempt to try an individual for sedition involved the publication of Salman Rushdie’s book, The Satantic Verses.

Reports in the U.S. Library of Congress quote allegations made that Mr. Rushdie’s book was a “scurrilous attack on the Muslim religion,” and that it resulted in violence in the UK as well as a severance of diplomatic relations between the UK and Iran.

Taking matters further an individual was said to have attempted to obtain a summons against Mr. Rushdie and his publisher, alleging that both parties had committed the offense of seditious libel, a claim that was denied after judges found that there was not a seditious intent by either of the parties against any of the UK’s democratic institutions.

In the U.S., Congress enacted the Sedition Act of 1798 in anticipation of a possible war with France, according to Professor Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago, and the Act made it a crime for any person to make any statement that brought the President, Congress, or the government into contempt or disrepute.

Unlike the U.K.’s sedition law, truth was a defence, but still it was bitterly opposed by those who sought to criticise the government, and the government used it to prosecute numerous journalists and politicians who criticised its policies, Professor Stone said to The Hindu.

While the Act expired by its own force in 1801 amidst condemnation as a serious violation of the First Amendment guaranteeing the right to freedom of expression, a series of compulsions relating the wartime politics, from 1798 to the present led to reinstitution of seditious libel laws.

These included, Professor Stone notes, the government putting some presses out of business during the American Civil War; the government enacting the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 during World War I, which were used to prosecute around 2,000 individuals for criticising the war and the draft; and the federal government and most states enacting laws prohibiting anyone to advocate the violent overthrow of the government During the “Red Scare” of the 1950s.

Notwithstanding this regressive shift during the war years, the U.S. Supreme Court began to address the constitutionality of these laws for the first time during World War I. Although it found them to be constitutional at that time, the Court’s questioning set off a “fierce challenge,” to sedition as a legal concept, Professor Stone said, particularly by Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis.

From that time until 1969 the U.S. Supreme Court struggled with sedition laws and ultimately came to the view in Brandenbug v. Ohio that the government could punish speech because it turned people against the government or might cause them to engage in unlawful conduct only if the speaker expressly incited unlawful conduct and only if the speech is likely to cause such conduct imminently.

Since that time no restrictions on seditious libel have been upheld in the U.S. and Professor Stone argues that this has largely been because the nation and its government have come to encompass the understanding that “It is more important to protect a vital freedom of speech than to suppress views we do not like. The suppression of criticism of the government, we have come to understand, is fundamentally incompatible with the aspirations of a true democracy.”

The Government of India frequently speaks of India becoming a superpower comparable to some democratic Western nations. Yet as this government goes about arrogating to itself the right to victimise those who challenge the legitimacy of its actions, or raise dissenting slogans against widespread inequities in the country, it may have pause for thought if it bothered to glance through the historical evolution of jurisprudential thought on sedition laws in these very same nations.

narayan@thehindu.co.in

Keywords: sedition law, JNU row, JNU president Kanhaiya Kumar

Source: The Hindu, 19-03-2016

This attack on Nivedita Menon

The malicious campaign against the JNU professor is not about expressing dissent, but about bullying and intimidation. It creates a situation where the laws of the land are seen as irrelevant

A notable feature of the university protests that have rocked the nation in recent times is the prominent presence of women. Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula’s mother Radhika was hounded by the media, and her personal life vilified in the attempt to prove that Rohith was not a Dalit. The faculty members from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) who came to the Patiala House courts for JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar’s bail hearing and were attacked by irate ‘patriotic lawyers’ were mostly women. In Allahabad, the first woman president of the Allahabad University Students’ Union, Richa Singh, has faced physical intimidation from her political opponents who are now seeking other ways to oust her from the university. The latest in this series is JNU professor Nivedita Menon against whom a concerted campaign seems to have been launched, including media attacks and malicious police complaints.

One of the events that JNU teachers conducted in solidarity with students in the course of the campaign against JNU as a supposed den of anti-nationals was a series of lectures on nationalism. Professor Menon delivered a lecture in Hindi called “Nation, a daily plebiscite” in which she made the argument that the formation of one nation does not automatically end all nationalist aspirations. Drawing attention to histories of nation formation as crucial to understanding present-day conflicts, she also discussed Kashmir’s complicated history of accession to India.

These lectures are available on YouTube, and some days afterwards, a TV channel started a campaign, continuously playing video clips taken out of context (including a clip from a speech at a political event in 2014), calling Prof. Menon anti-national, and creating an atmosphere of threat, intimidation and incitement to mob violence. In addition, according to media reports, two police complaints have been filed against her in Delhi by organisations linked to the Bharatiya Janata Party, and a complaint lodged against her in a court in Kanpur. The complaints against her are, in effect, part of a right-wing offensive to lay claim to nationalism by attacking any mode of dissent as anti-national.

Does this mean that men are ‘patriots’ and women ‘dissenters’? Any such claim is immediately demolished, of course, by the powerful presence of militant right-wing women like Uma Bharti and generations of ‘sadhvis’ known for their incendiary demagoguery, from Rithambhara to Prachi. So there are plenty of women ‘patriots’. The real distinction is that it is those women who lay claim to the legacy of feminism who are being singled out as ‘dissenters’. Why is this happening? Why are feminist scholars like Prof. Menon being targeted? What exactly is Indian feminism and what are the forms of dissent that feminists in India have adopted? How have feminists become leaders in the present struggles over democracy in India and why is this being perceived as dangerous?

Feminism in India

First and foremost, feminism in India, going back to the nineteenth century, has never had the luxury to simply be about women. This is because the struggles over women’s wrongs and rights in the Indian context have always been tied to larger issues — to the histories of colonialism and nationalism before Independence; to the meanings of development after 1947; and to the conflicts over democracy today. Feminists have been demonstrating how the hierarchies of gender in India are intertwined with those of caste; how the promises of national development remained unfulfilled for the vast majority of women; and how families have often turned into sites of the worst violence against their very own women.

Second, we as feminists have had to learn over and over again that our movements can only grow if we do not claim immunity from our own tools of critique and dissent. Some of the fiercest debates witnessed in the Indian women’s movement have therefore been internal ones, addressed to each other. Prominent examples of such debates include those over a uniform civil code; over the need and direction for reserved seats for women in Parliament and legislatures; and over how best to combat the scourge of female foeticide.

It is therefore particularly shameful, but also revealing, that sections of the electronic media and countless vicious trolls on social media have tried to instil fear by singling out Prof. Menon among other teachers as an alleged ‘anti-national’. Anyone who is even remotely familiar with her writings should know better. Prof. Menon has drawn from prior scholarship (both in India and abroad) to lay out why, in fact, simple universal theories of women’s subordination will not work in contexts like India. By tracing the effects of colonial rule and the many responses to it, she has demonstrated how both community rights and individual rights have played themselves out in our history, and continue to have a massive impact on women’s equality and freedom to this very day. Some of her finest work takes issue with other feminists in offering a dissenting interpretation of the problems women face. Will a blanket demand for one-third reservation of seats actually be the best strategy for the women’s movement, or should we ‘call the bluff’ of those who demanded a sub-quota? Equally provocatively, might the sheer demand to combat sexual violence against women rebound against the basic freedom from violence that the women’s movement seeks to protect? Such examples could be multiplied. Lest anyone be misled, these are all feminist arguments that work through a form of dissent that simultaneously upholds feminist ways of seeing and feminist forms of struggle.

Does this mean that everything that a scholar like Prof. Menon writes or believes should demand our assent? Not at all. I cannot think of anyone who is more open to disagreement and welcoming of constructive dissent, and who, in fact, encourages this attitude from students and colleagues alike.

An undemocratic mindset 

That is precisely why we are outraged not by the fact that people disagree with Prof. Menon or want to question her views, but by the mode in which they are choosing to do so. The malicious campaign we have witnessed in recent days is not about expressing dissent; it is about bullying and intimidation. It reveals a deeply undemocratic mindset that offers no arguments of its own, but tries to capture public attention by repeated, sensationalised attacks that work by twisting statements and taking them out of their context. What is truly worrisome is that it does not just stop at this; this campaign goes far beyond the limits of public debate to make opponents fear for their lives by whipping up a frenzy and creating a situation where the laws of the land are seen as irrelevant. These are acts of cowardice, not bravery, least of all acts of heroism in the service of Mother India.

Such campaigns are also revealing because they inadvertently recognise the transformational potential of feminism in India today. For feminism believes that genuine gender equality can only come about where fundamental freedoms are guaranteed for all, and where no other forms of oppression can flourish. This is the legacy that feminists in India have been striving for so long to bring to fruition, and which is therefore perceived as being so dangerous. This is also the tradition that Prof. Menon has embodied with integrity and force. And if there are those who would attack such a feminism, they should at least have the courage to attack us all.

(Mary E. John is with the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, Delhi. E-mail: maryejohn1@gmail.com)

Keywords: police complaint, JNU Professor Nivedita Menon, JNU row, student leader Kanhaiya Kumar, JNU ABVP, Saurabh Sharma

Source: The Hindu, 16-03-2016

What it means to be ‘national’

Nationalism that developed in India during the anti-colonial struggle was sui generis, an altogether new phenomenon the like of which the world had not seen earlier. It was essentially a democratic and egalitarian nationalism, as opposed to the aggrandising European form.

When students of my university are being accused of being “anti-national”, it is time to ask the question: what does “national” mean? And the answer is not as simple as many imagine. The terms “national”, “nationalism” and “nation-state” came into vogue in Europe after the Westphalian Peace Treaties in the 17th century. But European “nationalism” had three major characteristics. First, it was never inclusive of the entire population even within the territory of the “nation”. It always invoked an “enemy within” (example, the Jews). Second, it was necessarily imperialistic. Within months of the Westphalian Treaties, Oliver Cromwell had attacked Ireland (the first ever colony of conquest) and acquired for England the possession over its entire land area.

In the subsequent decades, European powers, even while “peacefully co-existing” within Europe, were engaged in bitter wars in far-off places like India, with each trying to carve out an empire for itself. Third, the “nation” was apotheosised for its own sake; the idea invariably was to make the “nation” strong. This was not just a notion of mercantilism to which it has been obviously ascribed; it underlay even classical political economy. Adam Smith’s magnum opus was titled “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” (emphasis added). Smith differed from the mercantilists on what exactly constituted the wealth of nations; but on the need to augment this wealth per se, no matter what it meant for the people, he had no differences with the mercantilists. European “nationalism” in short was an aggrandising nationalism.

Also read: Why our universities are in ferment

Apogee under fascism

It is for this reason that a “nation” like Germany that got formed rather late in the day and therefore came late to the scene of aggrandisement, was even more virulent in its assertion of nationalism to further its aggrandising aims; and this entire process reached its apogee under fascism.

It is also for this reason that the progressive and democratic tradition in Europe, in more recent years, has sought to transcend “nationalism”, after the bitter experience of the two world wars, by setting up the European Union (though that too, not unexpectedly, has not shaken off this aggrandising nationalism which has become associated in modern times with the interests of finance capital and is promoted by it).

It is very important, however, to recognise that the concept of “nationalism” that developed in countries like India during their anti-colonial struggle was of an altogether different kind. Precisely because the struggle was against an immensely powerful adversary, the colonial rulers, it had to be inclusive, to mobilise every possible segment of the population for the cause. Likewise it had to develop solidarity with other such struggles, and for that reason had to have a fraternal rather than an aggrandising relation with other Third World countries. And finally, it had to put the welfare of the “people”, as distinct from the greatness of the “nation” per se, as its central focus, a fact poignantly expressed by Gandhi when he said that the objective of freedom was to “wipe away the tears from the eyes of every Indian”.

Also read: ‘Gandhi was uncompromisingly secular’

An egalitarian nationalism

This was a nationalism which was sui generis, an altogether new phenomenon the like of which the world had not seen earlier. It was essentially a democratic and egalitarian nationalism as opposed to the aggrandising European nationalism, differing from the latter in all the three aspects mentioned earlier.

To say this is not to paint it in rosy colours as a wonderful creature that emerged fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. There was indeed an admixture of aggrandisement even within it, but every transgression on its part into aggrandising nationalism has the potential effect, as I argue below, of damaging the project of “nation-building”. It has to be an inclusive democratic nationalism if it is to succeed at all, a proposition whose validity is not altered one iota even though colonialism as such is long over.

When Gandhi in his last days insisted, against the horrendous backdrop of Partition and in opposition to demurring Congress leaders, that India must make full payment of the amount that was due to Pakistan, he was not being “anti-national”; he was merely taking a position in conformity with the democratic “nationalism” underlying the anti-colonial struggle. Central to this nationalism is tolerance, accommodation and negotiation in the event of differences, not the use of brute force to enforce silence and assert hegemony. This nationalism demands that if people from some particular part of the country raise anti-India slogans, then, as long as no terrorism or violence or incitement to violence is involved, that should become an occasion for introspection and analysis, with a view to overcoming the contradiction, rather than for repression by invoking the infamous sedition laws inherited from the colonial era.

Also read: Sedition and the government

BJP’s substitution

What is disturbing today is that the BJP is substituting the first kind of nationalism for the second, an aggrandising nationalism for the democratic nationalism that ideally informed the anti-colonial struggle and that constitutes the conceptual basis of the Indian state. What is worse, the very existence of the second kind of nationalism is being denied, with the terms “national” and “anti-national” being used entirely with reference to the first kind of nationalism.

No doubt, the democratic nationalism of the anti-colonial struggle is not easy to realise. For a start, untrammelled capitalism with its immanently inequalising, even impoverishing, tendencies, cannot possibly constitute the appropriate economic framework for its realisation, a fact recognised by the major leaders of that time, Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar (though each of them had a different perception of the requisite framework). But capitalism, albeit restricted by state regulations and surrounded by a public sector, is what came to be instituted; and in due course even these restrictions were removed as the hegemony of globalised finance capital asserted itself and neo-liberal policies were adopted.

The shift to an aggrandising nationalism is clearly linked to the emergence of neo-liberal capitalism in the country; and the BJP which promotes the former is a votary of the latter. But no matter what the circumstances that have conspired to put in office a party committed to an aggrandising nationalism, such a nationalism is fundamentally inimical to the project of building an Indian nation.

Also read: State overreach on the campus

Destroying India’s finest institutions

Consider first an obvious point. Here is a government that has sought to browbeat the students at the Pune Film Institute, the Hyderabad Central University, the Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the Department of Fine Arts of the M.S. University of Baroda. These are among the finest institutions in India, and their destruction only makes the country parasitical on institutions located in metropolitan countries. In short, in the name of “nationalism”, we are, paradoxically, making our nation parasitical on advanced nations. But this inevitably follows the promotion of an aggrandising nationalism in a Third World country that prioritises repression over tolerance.

An aggrandising nationalism does not just constrict democracy and freedom of expression, with, as we have seen, lynch mobs taking law into their own hands, sedition laws being applied even to young idealistic and sensitive students, and lies and misinformation being liberally used to tarnish the innocent and discredit them in the public eye. It inevitably generates reactions that are equally extreme. Such an aggrandising nationalism, in short, sets up a disastrous dialectic, of repression generating extreme reaction, which in turn brings forth greater repression, causing even more extreme reaction, and so on.

To believe that the “nation-building” project in a Third World country can survive this disastrous dialectic is a chimera. The Third World in fact is full of so-called “failed states”. Behind these “failed states”, no doubt, one can often see the hand of metropolitan powers; but the modus operandi is invariably through the generation of internal conflicts. This is precisely what an aggrandising nationalism generates.

There is a major difference between the aggrandising nationalism of Europe and its incarnation being invoked in our context: the “enemy within” that the aggrandising nationalism of Europe had identified had consisted typically of a minuscule minority (this is true even of Nazi Germany where the Jews were only about 0.7 per cent of the population); the “enemy within” that an aggrandising nationalism will have to take on in India is far larger. The threat of social disintegration that such “nationalism” brings is correspondingly larger. If India is to avoid the fate of a “failed state” such “nationalism” must be stopped in its tracks.

(Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.)

Keywords: Jawaharlal Nehru University row

Source: The Hindu, 27-02-2016

Patriotism without nationalism

Nationalism without liberalism is a monster. The way to manage tensions is not to give up one for the other, as the left and the right wing demand of us, but to insist on both.

The recent events in New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Patiala House courts have deepened the state of tension, suspicion and discord that has afflicted the country over the past several years. At one level, the events bring to sharp focus the mindset of the Narendra Modi government, the partisanship of university and law enforcement authorities, the brazenness of lawbreakers, the nature of student politics, and the inflammatory role of some television channels. Every one of these aspects demands serious debate, review and a new broad consensus if we are to retain our hard-won and hard-preserved freedoms.

At another level, the events call upon us as citizens to reflect on our relationship with the entity that we call India; to reflect on the nature of the feeling we have for India, and indeed, what is the “India” that we have feelings for. The mindless frenzy which a lot of us have got ourselves into over the alleged chanting of anti-India slogans at JNU is partly a symptom of the lack of a clear personal understanding of our own feelings of love, patriotism, nationalism, civic responsibility and devotion. Having not reflected on this, we fall for the seductive tunes of entrepreneurs of emotion, who often use our feelings to promote their own political ambition. Take a look at where the visible and invisible champions of the famousanti-corruption movement of 2011-12 currently are.

Liberalism vs. nationalism

It is in the nature of democratic politics for ambitious politicians to use emotions to climb up the ladder of power. The problem is not manipulativeness or political ambition; it is the willingness with which otherwise sensible citizens allow themselves to follow the Piper. These are times when outrage broadcasts from television studios merge with the echo chambers of social media and break into violence on our streets. If we are not to make grievous mistakes in the name of such good things as fighting corruption or countering anti-nationals, we, the people, must reflect.

If you go by much of the public debate playing out in the media, we are asked to choose between liberalism and nationalism, conveniently represented by the Left and the Sangh Parivar respectively. If you support the right of the JNU students to shout anti-India slogans until they are blue in the face, as long as there is no violence, you are automatically seen as supporting their slogans. Similarly, if you support the Indian nation state, you are perforce deemed a right-wing nationalist. Further, ideologues will tell you that nationalists cannot be liberal, and liberals cannot be nationalist. You have to choose one side. If you don’t, you’ll be disparaged as a fence-sitter.

Here’s the point though: from its earliest origins, Indian nationalism has been liberal in nature. The signature of the freedom movement was to expel the British, without hatred. The setting up of a secular state with a liberal constitution, in the face of a violent demand for and reaction to the creation of a Muslim Pakistan, is a remarkable monument to that national sentiment. This is consistent with India’s civilisational ethos and daily practice as well. We are liberal to varying degrees. We are nationalistic and patriotic to varying degrees. Some may be more liberal, others might be more nationalistic, but most of us are both.

Like the bumblebee that insists on flying despite scientists’ view that a creature of its shape and weight is incapable of flight, we live our liberal nationalist lives regardless of what political philosophy says. This is not to say all is hunky dory — there are regular tensions over what the limits of one’s rights ought to be — but we manage our affairs reasonably well, given our immense diversity and divisions.

The way to manage these tensions is not to give up one for the other, as the left and the right wing demand of us, but to insist on both. Individual liberty is mere theory unless the state protects it and makes it real. We saw this at the Patiala House courts where journalists were beaten up as the police refused to intervene. Nationalism without liberalism is a monster. We saw this when lawyers and a local Delhi politician brazenly resorted to violence in the name of nationalism.

The nation as a project

In fact, Rabindranath Tagore, who became increasingly ambivalent in his opinion of nationalism, wrote, “I am not against one nation in particular, but against the general idea of all nations. What is the Nation? “It is the aspect of a whole people as an organised power. This organisation incessantly keeps up the insistence of the population on becoming strong and efficient. But this strenuous effort after strength and efficiency drains man’s energy from his higher nature where he is self-sacrificing and creative. For thereby man’s power of sacrifice is diverted from his ultimate object, which is moral, to the maintenance of this organisation, which is mechanical. Yet in this he feels all the satisfaction of moral exaltation and therefore becomes supremely dangerous to humanity. He feels relieved of the urging of his conscience when he can transfer his responsibility to this machine which is the creation of his intellect and not of his complete moral personality.

“By this device people who love freedom perpetuate slavery in a large portion of the world with the comfortable feeling of pride of having done its duty; men who are naturally just can be cruelly unjust both in their act and their thought, accompanied by a feeling that they are helping the world in receiving its deserts; men who are honest can blindly go on robbing others of their human rights for self-aggrandisement, all the while abusing the deprived for not deserving better treatment.”

Here Tagore was being anti-national in the literal sense of the word. Yet it would be absurd to accuse him of being a traitor to India. He is proof that it is possible to be deeply loyal to the country, have immense concern for the well-being of its people, while opposing nationalism.

Tagore also noted the dangers of fetishisation of the nation — where from childhood he “had been taught that the idolatry of Nation is almost better than reverence for God”. It is little wonder that people get enraged when anti-India slogans are chanted, because many of us have adopted the concept of blasphemy in Semitic religions and therefore cannot tolerate insults to the object of our worship. This, more than any concern for national security, explains the popular sentiment around the JNU controversy. If we realise that it is our sentiments that were offended, not our security, perhaps we will see the issue with greater equanimity.

We can be patriotic without being nationalists. We can be liberal without being libertarians. We are like this only.

(Nitin Pai is director of the Takshashila Institution, an independent think tank and school of public policy.)

Source:  The Hindu, 23-02-2016

Who is an anti-national?

For both Rohith Vemula and Kanhaiya Kumar, nationalism was about the welfare of the Indian people over that of the Indian state. This political vision made them threats in the eyes of goonda nationalists

In the rest of the world, history repeats itself first as tragedy and second as farce. In 21st century India, history repeats itself first as farce, and second on prime time.

Can a bunch of hysterical TV anchors really fool a nation into believing that the brightest students of one of its best universities are “anti-nationals” and their thuggish persecutors, “nationalists”? Can India’s famed diversity — of intelligence levels, if nothing else — save it from falling for the tired old game of witch-hunting anti-nationals? Well, the ruling dispensation seems to be betting against it.

So we’ve heard Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national president Amit Shah say that the Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi is an anti-national. Why? Because he has been siding with the anti-national students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). The political intent behind this accusation cannot be misread. But unfortunately for Mr. Shah, the idea of Mr. Gandhi as an anti-national is, at best, amusing; at worst, an affront to the imagination.

Already, according to the nationalist taxonomy of the Sangh Parivar, Adivasis in central India, Dalit students, Left intellectuals, human rights activists, a certain religious minority, anti-nuclear activists, beef eaters, non-haters of Pakistan, inter-religious couples, homosexuals, and labour activists are anti-nationals. If we take into account Monday’s episode of goonda nationalism at Patiala House in New Delhi, we must expand the list to include journalists, people dressed like JNU students, anyone without an identity card, anyone recording goonda nationalists in action, and anyone opposed to the said goonda nationalists.

At this rate, it seems likely that by the time the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) finishes its term, the vast majority of Indians — who are unfortunately still not members of the Sangh Parivar — would have turned into anti-nationals. The only cure for their anti-nationalism being the healing nationalist brutality of an Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) or Bajrang Dal lynch mob, while India’s nationalist police presides over the ceremony, peacefully.

What exactly is goonda nationalism? A goonda nationalist is anyone who arrogates to himself the job of certifying citizens as anti-national. So if I walk up to you on the street, slap you, grab your collar, and brand you an anti-national, I would be a goonda nationalist.

The turn to goonda nationalism

Goonda nationalism is not a new phenomenon. The German historian Arthur Rosenberg, in his book,Fascism as a Mass Movement, refers to two conditions (among others) as prefiguring the rise of fascism: the rise of right-wing nationalism, and an active connivance between the state and identitarian storm troopers. What India has witnessed over the past month, first in Hyderabad Central University (HCU) and now in JNU, is early consolidation of these two conditions for the furtherance of an agenda that we shall not call fascist because, as we’ve been assured repeatedly by eminent Indian liberals, India is too diverse and Indian democracy too resilient for us to use the f-word.

Yet the pattern is too striking to miss. In HCU, the crisis was sparked off by a students’ association expressing sympathy for Yakub Memon, whose execution has been questioned by several legal luminaries. The HCU unit of the ABVP spearheaded the persecution of this student body by branding them as “anti-national”. Its case was taken up by a BJP member of Parliament (MP) Bandaru Dattatreya, who sent a complaint to the Centre. The outcome: a pliant vice-chancellor and a pliable police acted against the students targeted by the ABVP, and the story hit the national headlines with the suicide of Rohith Vemula, a vocal critic of the ABVP and its violent majoritarianism.

In JNU, the crisis was sparked by a group of students organising a protest meeting in support of Afzal Guru, whose execution has been questioned by several legal luminaries. The ABVP spearheaded the persecution of the students involved by branding them as “anti-national”. Its case was taken up by a BJP MP, Maheish Girri, whose complaint led to an FIR being lodged. The outcome: a pliant vice-chancellor and a pliable police acted against the students targeted by the ABVP, and the story hit the national headlines with the arrest of JNU students’ union president Kanhaiya Kumar, a vocal critic of the ABVP and its violent majoritarianism.

The stick used to beat the students in both cases was nationalism — and not just any nationalism but one specifically of the right-wing kind, by which we mean one that is directed against a section of the country’ own citizens whose nationalism is deemed suspect. The stick is wielded, as Rosenberg noted, by the state giving free rein to identitarian storm troopers — in this case, the ABVP.

In the past, the marauding storm troopers have belonged to one or other of the mutant spawn of the hydra-headed Sangh Parivar — the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Bajrang Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, etc. Sadly, India’s liberal intelligentsia — and what’s called the Left in India is liberal and not left-wing in its politics — has been content to engage in a politics of exposure, trying to shame the perpetrators of repressive violence on the grounds, most famously, of intolerance.

It is therefore worth noting that the crackdown on dissent in the JNU campus, as well as the attack on journalists at Patiala House, comes after much public shaming of the NDA’s unwillingness to uphold the virtue of tolerance. It is as if the months of liberal backlash over intolerance has had zero impact on the NDA. Or perhaps it felt encouraged by the whole “award wapsi” phenomenon. Now that the awards have been returned, petitions have been signed, protests have been marched, and editorials written on the virtues of tolerance, what else can liberal pluralistic India throw at the ruthless advance of a divisive, monocultural nationalism?

Let down by the liberals

India’s bane has been the failure of its self-proclaimed ‘constitutional’ liberals to acknowledge that the forces of Hindutva and economic liberalism (or neo-liberalism) are a package deal. It is this failure that leads them to time and again frame such violence simply as attacks on free speech, while remaining blind to their own complicity in the political economy of repression.

In their heated embrace of economic liberalism, India’s liberal elites looked away as the state either went after or neglected the interests of labourers, the urban poor, the farmers, the landless, the land-poor — the vast majority of whom are from socially marginalised castes. Now they find the state looking away as their own liberal freedoms come under siege by state-endorsed illiberal forces.

Incidentally, both HCU’s Rohith Vemula and JNU’s Kanhaiya Kumar had the clarity of vision to see through such self-serving liberal delusions. Vemula tried to unite the twin minorities of Dalits and Muslims on the HCU campus. Mr. Kumar’s agenda was to unite the student community and informalised labour against the divisive politics of the ABVP inside JNU and neo-liberal economic policies outside. It was this acuity of political vision — owed in no small measure to their underprivileged origins — that made them such threats in the eyes of goonda nationalists.

Cops prowling around a university campus is a terrible cliché — one that’s been enacted hundreds of times in the brief history of the nation state. So is the use of ultra-nationalism to substitute the interests of a repressive state apparatus for the interests of the people it represses. Put another way, is nationalism about the welfare of the Indian people or that of the Indian state, which anyway seems beholden to foreign capital rather than Indian labour?

A more pressing question in the present context being: who has the right to label anyone as anti-national? And how should the average Indian citizen respond to the charge of being an anti-national?

The battle is already lost if one seeks to answer the charge by trying to prove that one is not an anti-national. The correct response, as Mr. Kumar showed in a brilliant speech that went viral on social media, is to go on the offensive, and ask what qualifies goonda nationalists to issue certificates of nationalism, and to question the motives of a government that allows them to do so.

sampath.g@thehindu.co.in

Keywords: Jawaharlal Nehru University, ABVP, JNU

Source: The Hindu, 18-02-2016

JNU, and the idea of India

The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) imbroglio has produced two important issues for public discussion. The first focuses on the limits that sedition (patriotism?) places on freedom of speech. It asks, for example, whether shouting anti-India slogans, by unknown persons as the First Information Report says, constitutes a ground for booking the students’ union president under sedition laws. If fine distinctions were to be made between slogans, protests, speeches, dissent, and incitement, and further between fuzzy and definite consequences of such actions, would not only some (very few) free speech expressions be considered seditious? These are crucial issues for our constitutional democracy today, and the JNU case has presented our courts with a great opportunity to give us a doctrine on the limits to free speech in India. Will we see in the court’s judgment its finest hour, as when, in the Kesavananda Bharati case, it set out the Basic Structure doctrine which places limits on the amending power of Parliament, or will it be its darkest hour, as in theHabeas Corpus case where unrestricted powers of detention under the Emergency were permitted? Will Justice H.R. Khanna be the court’s guide, or will it be Justice P.N. Bhagwati?

The second issue, entangled in the first, is with respect to the place of JNU in the postcolonial nation’s public life as the university nears its 50th year. I belong to the first decade of JNU, a magical period during which we gained perspective and learned the power of ideas and of democratic deliberation. It was a time when we became passionate about causes and when no tyranny was fearful enough to suppress our dissent. It covered the period of the Emergency and of the years immediately after, when a traumatised nation delved deep into its inner resources to discover what it stood for and what it stood against. It was a time for serious reflection.

Campus life in the heady 1970s

The 1970s was a period of ferment both globally and in India. The students’ movement was shaking up the Western world as was the peace movement and the challenges to orthodoxy in the form of music, fashion, poetry, and films. Demands for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) and a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) were being made. ‘Make love, not war’ was the slogan of the young who wanted to be unshackled from social conservatism. At this time the women’s movement was being seeded in JNU, as were many non-party political formations. The Emergency was on and JNU students had been picked up, including the students’ union president, and were languishing in jail. Yet the university was a magnet for students from across the country, from different backgrounds, and from different disciplines. Students who had graduated in the natural and applied sciences were flocking to the social sciences to understand what was happening to the nation.

In this turmoil JNU was able to give its education a national character by the points system it had developed, and by the examinations held across the country, to produce a level playing field. Students from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and regions, would be compensated for their disadvantage and thereby could face the competition. Soon after my joining in 1976, I recall taking out morchas to the surrounding areas shouting ‘Tanashahi nahi chalegi, nahi chalegi (down with despotism)’, and then rushing back into the sanctuary of JNU before the police came. The Emergency was on. We shouted slogans against the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) in the Mavalankar auditorium. We debated the articles of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) constitution on the lawns of the Gandhi Peace Foundation. We deliberated on an Agenda for India at the India International Centre. We collected funds for national tragedies such as the supercyclone in Orissa (now Odisha) and the Yamuna floods in Delhi.

But India alone was not our theatre of politics. The world was. Looking back I find it funny that we had to face the lathis of Delhi Police for protesting against the regime of the Shah of Iran or the sell-out of Palestinian interests by the Camp David accords. We campaigned for India to send foodgrain to Cambodia (then Kampuchea) which was just emerging from the genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot. In these heady days of politics we also saw art films from across the world and learnt to perform street plays. We were the earliest supporters of the Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music And Culture Amongst Youth (SPIC MACAY). In JNU we discovered voice and what it meant to stand up against tyranny. We became political.

Steady stream of who’s who

But this article is not about nostalgia. It is about the public legacy of this great university. It is about the place of JNU in the national imagination. JNU gave the students who entered it many things. It gave them opportunity. If we were to do a roll call of bureaucrats, journalists, artists, translators, writers, activists, professors, vice chancellors, heads of important institutions, and politicians, JNU would have a fair share of the leading members of these groups. It is not for nothing that in the last two years the heads of the Intelligence Bureau, Research and Analysis Wing, Central Bureau of Investigation, and the Foreign and Cabinet Secretaries have been from JNU. They do not look like anti-nationals to me. So where does all this ‘anti-national university’ stuff come from? What I have presented are the facts. Will those who have benefited from JNU please speak up in its defence?

Ask any of them what JNU gave them, and they will tell you it broadened their perspective, introduced them to ideas, even dissenting ones, prepared them for competition, gave them self-confidence, and fired them up with the making of a just India. It made them realise that dissent could be a virtue. In addition, JNU gave them networks. Anyone who understands success will know that networks are as important for success as merit and scholarship. That is why the Ivy League universities in the U.S., and Oxbridge in the U.K., and the Indian Institutes of Management and Indian Institutes of Technology in India have the reach they enjoy within state and society.

Crucible of the alternative

In addition to opportunity, self-confidence, personality development, and networks, JNU also gave a student perspective about the nature of the world, not just in terms of the global order, but also in terms of the structures of power, dynamics of society, drivers of change, and aspirations of citizens. We learnt how peasants became citizens. We learnt how elite capture was a problem for democracy. These ideas enriched our public discourse. At JNU we produced and reproduced the idea of an India that was inclusive, anti-discriminatory, gender-just, environmentally sustainable, artistically creative, cosmopolitan and socially redistributive.

There were many things wrong with JNU. For example, the liberal persuasion was not allowed the space it should have been given by the Stalinist Left. The political spectrum was wide but it could have been wider. Analytical thinking was feeble, and ideological camps gave protection to the less capable. But it was possible to question these ideological hegemonies. To dissent, experiment, collaborate, this is the signature of JNU. Debate was polemical but it was peaceful. There was no violence. By providing personnel to the civil services, academic institutions, civil society organisations, and media, JNU has been a significant incubator for the task of nation-building.

In addition to being an incubator of personnel to the state and civil society, JNU has also been an incubator of dissenting ideas. For a nation to cope with the pressures of modernity and the challenges of globalisation it needs to have an army of intellectuals who can prepare the nation for this new world that is upon us. It needs to engage with these new ideas. Go to a seminar in JNU, and you will be delighted by the intensity of the questions and the earnestness of the search for answers. It is one of the few places in the country where interdisciplinarity is a habit and where conversations between aestheticians and political scientists do not raise an eyebrow. Nor do dialogues between the cosmologies of the East and of the West.

A cosmopolitan university is a precious resource, for it continuously feeds the public sphere with questions and answers, with challenges to accepted truths and alternative readings of canonical texts. This is under threat today. Censorship of ideas and social relationships is being demanded by outsiders to the idea of JNU. Incidentally, the University of Chicago has issued the following statement on freedom of speech: “It is not the proper role of the university to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable and even deeply offensive… Concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as justification for closing off discussion about ideas, however offensive.” This represents the idea of JNU. Let us protect it from the hecklers who are knocking at the door.

(Peter Ronald deSouza is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. He holds the Dr. S. Radhakrishnan Chair of the Rajya Sabha for 2015-2017. Views are personal.)

Keywords: Jawaharlal Nehru University, JNU, ABVP

Source: The Hindu, 17-02-2016