Why the strikes at JNU are valid
By Cynthia Roli Gupta
With a legacy of Leftist views, ideologies and opinions, Jawaharlal Nehru University is in the news for 90 of the students studying there holding protests and shouting slogans that have been deemed anti-national. Kanhaiya Kumar, the student leader was arrested and has been in police remand for interrogation. The protests became a huge contentious issue at the national level because of their nature in which Afzal Guru’s name was used in slogans by the students to present their views. Afzal Guru, convicted by the Supreme Court in the 2001 Parliament Attacks was hanged to death on 9th February, 2013. Guru, hailing from a village in Kashmir, was encouraged towards Jihad by a man he met in his business venture.
He crossed the LOC and entered Muzzafarbad in POK. He became a member of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front there and returned to IOK to continue activities towards the liberation of Kashmir. He graduated from Delhi University and did odd jobs. In 1993-1994 on advice of his family members, he surrendered to the Border Security Force (BSF). He even returned to New Delhi and continued his work in pharmaceutical business. When the 2001 Parliament attacks were investigated, links were established between the terrorists and Afzal Guru. He was charged under several section of POTA. Based on circumstantial evidence, he was awarded capital punishment. The SC upheld the sentence in 2005. However, there were clemency pleas by several human rights groups, stating that Guru had not received a fair trial and that it was flawed. He was, however, hanged after his mercy plea was rejected by the President.
Students in JNU started protesting and shouting slogans like “Bharat ki barbaadi tak, jung rahegi, jung rahegi!”, “India, Go Back”, “Hum kya chaahte? Azaadi!” and “Tum kitne Afzal maaroge, har ghar se Afzal niklega!”. No doubt these were anti-national slogans. This incident has also occurred at the time Lance Naik Hanumanthappa Koppad passed away in ICU after being buried under ice and snow for six days in Siachen. A martyr who secured Siachen for India this winter, as do many other soldiers of the Indian armed forces. The student leader Kanhaiya Kumar was thus arrested, following which the media has gone all out to denounce and condemn the event and even shame the students. Home Minister Rajnath Singh issued a statement saying that Lashkar-e-Taiba Chief Hafeez Saeed had claimed to back the protests. Hafeez Saeed later dismissed it and it was found that a fake twitter handle with Saeed’s name made the claim, with his name even misspelt. Hafeez Saeed’s twitter handle was banned long ago. Several teachers, journalists and students have started strikes against arrests of protesting students.
A point to be contested here, which most of the mainstream as well as a large section of social and online media have brushed under the carpet, is that the students have not been given a chance to put forth their side of the story. No one has tried to find out why exactly they were shouting the slogans, what the protests aimed to oppose and what their ideology and rationale is. It has almost failed to occur to the country that is watching the drama unfold, that students of a university of such repute, in the capital of the country must presumably not be stupid enough to stage a protest with such strong anti-national shades unless they have a strong point of view and reasoning of their own. What can be derived is that they were protesting against the suppression of opinions and voices of the youth and the public in Kashmir, suppression that is against the spirit of democracy. By dragging Afzal Guru into the matter they are whipping up the issue that seemed to have died with his death, that of the protests during his trial and against his sentence that highlighted the scepticism of various groups, including human rights ones, about whether he was really so acutely involved in the attack on the Parliament in 2001 and whether he really deserved the death sentence. What the media has extracted for the public to see is merely the fact that the protests had slogans derogatory to India and containing the name of a terrorist who was sentenced and hanged for his crime. Everything that can possibly hype up this angle and pile up shame for the students and the university, which has always been a medium of dissemination of leftist and centrist views of the Congress, has been portrayed by the media.
Several student groups have also condemned the incident and protests, but some of those have at the same time maintained that they are against capital punishment. There is no denying that the slogans gave the protest a radical and extremist disposition. However, it was still held at a university and they are still students. The matter could have very well been handled by the university authorities and there was no need for the Central government and the Home Minister to step in at the first instance. To add to it, the Home Minister’s first statement was proven wrong. This sequence of events with the government involving itself right from the start has got the media on a roll, albeit a lopsided one, and has almost painted the students traitors at once. Perhaps if just one student panel discussion was a held on one news channel where the protesting students would be questioned, but allowed to explain their actions, it would do more justice to the issue.
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