Wash. U. Stands with JNU

Stephanie Aria & Krishna Melnattur | Class of 2016 & Staff scientist, department of neuroscience

Kanhaiya Kumar, the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Student Union (JNUSU) in New Delhi, India, was arrested on Feb. 10 on charges of sedition and criminal conspiracy. Two more students, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, were arrested yesterday, and five others were also charged. Kanhaiya’s arrest followed an event on Feb. 9 organized by the Democratic Students Union, a student group at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), held to commemorate the anniversary of Mohammad Afzal Guru’s execution. Afzal Guru was a Kashmiri convicted and ultimately executed for allegedly being the mastermind behind an attack on India’s parliament in December 2001. His case became a lightning rod for issues of capital punishment and police misconduct in cases of national security. Accordingly, attendees of the Feb. 9 event included anti-death penalty advocates, human rights campaigners and students concerned with the Indian government’s record in Kashmir.

At this event, some apparently incendiary slogans were raised. The slogan-raisers remain unidentified. It remains unclear if they were “agent provocateurs” or indeed students at all. Curiously, Delhi police do not appear to have invested much time or effort towards solving this apparent mystery.

Kanhaiya Kumar is not accused of raising the slogans; his mere presence on the fringes of this meeting apparently suffices to establish his guilt. Sedition is a very serious charge, originally promulgated by the colonial British government in order to suppress the Indian freedom movement. Prominent Indian freedom fighters were jailed under this law, including Gandhi and Nehru (after whom JNU is named). Its continuation in independent Indian law is a travesty that provides an instrument for the government in power to suppress politically dissenting speech. Rulings by India’s supreme court have established that speech, no matter how distasteful, can be considered seditious only if it includes an incitement to immediate violence, conditions clearly not applicable in this case. Further, in a rousing public speech only a day before his arrest, Kanhaiya called out raisers of anti-national slogans while affirming faith in the constitution and denouncing the communal and exploitative policies of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Kanhaiya thus appears to have been targeted merely for being a charismatic student leader of the opposition to the incumbent BJP government. His arrest appears to be an intimidatory tactic to chill dissent. High government officials, the police and a ratings-driven news media have convicted the students before their day in court and worked together to create a climate of fear in the academy. Police action was only initiated on the complaint of a BJP legislator, who wrote the home minister, and approved by new university administrators appointed by the BJP. India’s home minister, Rajnath Singh, immediately announced that Kanhaiya was associated with a terror group; this accusation was based merely on a tweet from a parody Twitter account. The very next day, Singh proclaimed that anyone caught raising “anti-India” slogans would “not be spared.” To top it all, a sitting BJP legislator was filmed assaulting a member of the opposition outside the courtroom where Kanhaiya was to be remanded.

The actions of the Delhi police have not inspired much confidence in the impartiality of law enforcement. Delhi police commissioner Bassi declared that it was up to the students to provide evidence of their innocence. In the days since Kanhaiya’s arrest, police have arrested a theater group merely on the suspicion of being from JNU. In addition, they have stood idly by as irate lawyers claiming affiliation to the BJP have assaulted journalists and JNU faculty, not to mention Kanhaiya himself. The fires appear to have been stoked by a sensationalist news media using doctored videos.

This kind of a coordinated assault is new to India’s elite institutions, like JNU, but it isn’t news to India’s marginalized peoples. This episode at JNU has followed closely on the heels of the suicide of a young Dalit scholar, Rohith Vemula, in Hyderabad, after his organization was hounded by the BJP student wing as being “anti-national.” In Kashmir, only a day before the assault on JNU, Shaista Hammeed, a recent graduate, and Danish Farooq, a teenage college student, were shot dead by government forces. Standing with JNU means standing with these and other struggles as well.

As Umar Khalid, one of the charged students said, “They may have many seats (in Parliament), they may have the media, they may have a repressive state apparatus, but, in their hearts, they are cowards. They are afraid of us, the people. They fear us, because we ‘think,’ and in these times merely ‘thinking’ is an anti-national act.” Think. Act. Rise up. Join us as we #StandWithJNU.

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