The curse of azaadi: From Lal Chowk to JNU

The powder train on the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus was lit when a “cultural evening” organised by the Democratic Students Union on February 9 to discuss Kashmir, was taken over by masked “outsiders” and converted into a memorial service for Parliament attacks convict Afzal Guru and co-founder of the separatist group Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front Maqbool Bhatt.

The format and background politics of the event on the JNU campus was typical of such events — outpouring of Left rhetoric using the sensitive issue of Kashmir as a prop and that too at a meeting punctuated by calls from different voices among the students for “azaadi” and the destruction of the Indian state.

The speakers centred almost exclusively on azaadi or liberation — a term long associated with Kashmiri separatism in post-Independent India.

Later, these slogans were sought to be rationalised by the organisers as referring to azaadi from casteism, capitalism and other socio-political ills, and did not in any way refer to the separation of Jammu and Kashmir from India.

Political vultures of every description were present and, finally, out of the fog, heat and dust of campus politics emerged Kanhaiya Kumar, the 28-year-old president of the JNU students’ union (JNUSU) who became a youth icon and TV personality extraordinaire.

The JNU campus had temporarily metamorphosed that afternoon into the Lal Chowk in Srinagar, or even the Jadavpur University campus in faraway Kolkata, where patriotism is regarded as a bourgeoisie anachronism and freedom of speech on every conceivable issue, including the very integrity of the country, is open to debate.

JNU is one of the crown jewels of our educational system. It is important to preserve it as such, because universities in India have always been institutions of higher learning where contrary views are tolerated and a hundred flowers are encouraged to blossom through intellectual debate, dialogue and discussion in a liberal academic environment.

However, given the frenzied sloganeering at JNU extolling Afzal Guru, the time may indeed have come for the Indian establishment to seriously examine if there is any “foreign hand” at work to deliberately infuse the slow poison of ideological and political radicalisation into the restless and turbulent student communities in India

Are the slogans raised in JNU supporting azaadi in Kashmir, in effect, calling for the vivisection of India, possible indicators of external influences working to a deliberate plan to influence “hearts and minds” on the campus and build separatist sentiments amongst a volatile and vulnerable section of young Indians However paranoid or McCarthyite these aspects may seem to be, they, nevertheless, have to be taken serious note of by security and intelligence agencies in India.

The warning parable of communal riots and ethnic violence against racial minorities which paralysed Mumbai, India’s economic capital, in 2012, after the war memorial on Azad Maidan was desecrated by mob violence that erupted following inflammatory speeches and slogans at a meeting organised at that venue by an obscure organisation called the Raza Academy — remain relevant in context of the provocative azaadi slogans at JNU as well.

In the current environment, almost every university in India is a potential Tahrir Square or Tiananmen Square heaped political tinder merely awaiting the match.

The Molotov cocktail of ensuing campus violence that exploded in JNU may well have exasperated the Delhi Police charged with the undoubtedly thankless task of maintaining peace, but Delhi was mercifully spared the ultimate drama seen at Beijing or Cairo of students facing tanks.

The JNU episode kept television audiences glued to their screens. But even more importantly, it also provides an almost classic case profile of information warfare and the dark arts of information, misinformation and disinformation, which blend psychological operations and “sting operations”.

It requires further study and critical professional analysis by Indian agencies within as well as outside the government, who are tasked to undertake such operational responsibilities.

Today, aggressive Indian patriotism is in a faceoff against equally aggressive Indian liberalism and though the former has traditionally been dismissed as the last refuge of the scoundrel, it is also being passionately embraced today by increasing numbers who defiantly wear their saffron, white and green hearts on their sleeves.

It is a clash of perceptions and political interests which must be reconciled at the earliest in the best interests of the nation.

Meanwhile, even as politics played out on the JNU campus, an explosive counterpoint was provided at Pampore, South Kashmir, by two young officers of the Parachute Regiment who fought their way into a building held by fidayeen militants and eliminated the intruders.

Both the young lieutenants and their havaldar were killed in the process of storming the building. Both were hardly 22 years of age and barely out of the Indian Military Academy, Dehra Dun. Both held graduate academic degrees from JNU, awarded when they had passed out from the Academy, not all that long ago.

The writer is a former Chief of Army Staff and a former member of Parliament