JNU Controversy: In The End It Was Raining Slogan On Main Street

The Sangh parivar pushes the battle for control over a ‘leftist’ JNU by invoking the oldest trick—patriotism.

- Uttam Sengupta

India is like a Bollywood film, the industrialist Uday Kotak said in the pink papers this week, suggesting that despite the turbulence in the economy, it would have a happy ending. But the scenes that unravelled in the national capital, even as the Narendra Modi government put up a Bollywood-style ‘Make in India’ week in faraway Mumbai, seemed to be straight from a lurid B-grade remake. The director looked terribly uninterested. The character artistes stole the limelight. The villains had too much beating to do in every scene. The cops bumbled along. The climax dragged on. And ‘The End’ seemed far from happy. But was it how the unseen scriptwriters in long shorts always wanted it?

In a nation of the young, going to university should be a life-changing experience— learning, unlearning, discussing and deb a ting, confronting the other and bracing for another. This week, as the students of possibly India’s finest liberal arts institution saw baton-wielding policemen pick up their union president, Kanhaiya Kumar, for something he’d not done—a news channel has dug up the strong possibility of his slogan-raising video being doctored—watched him being thrashed by lawyers (and TV anchors), and heard themselves being painted as “anti-national” an “pro-Pakistan” by Union ministers, the millions who voted for a hero with hope in their hearts 21 months ago must have felt a gentle thud of fear. For the many millions who hadn’t, this was a moment to silently shout, “See, I told you this was how it was going to be.

A crackdown on JNU was always expected given a) its Congress nomenclature; b) its reputation as a left-liberal bastion; c) a reflex anti-intellectualism the BJP often displays, and d) a general desire to control institutions. When the RSS journal