Mohan Bhagwat’s ‘Hindu rashtra’ remark anti-national, says N Ram

Stating that Kanhaiya Kumar, president JNUSU, who was changed with sedition, is politically mature, he said, “By expecting of Kanhaiya that he should be able to control anything that happens on the JNU campus, he is being charged with a responsibility that any prime minister of India would not be able to do.

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Goons who wore lawyer’s gowns got away lightly. The judiciary allowed the police to go with a fiction. This is the infection brought into the campuses that needs to be cure”.

Agreeing with renowned jurist Fali S Nariman’s point in The Indian Express edit that ‘to be anti-India is not seditious’ he said, “You don’t have to have affection for the government.”

He further told a packed audience in the YB Chavan centre, “Though there are ‘semi-fascist’ tendencies consolidating in the country, we don’t see any rise of fascism..” He said it is pretty clear the BJP no longer commands 31% of the popular vote that brought it to power.” “An India Today poll shows a clear slide in the vote share and that the gap between the popularity of Modi and Rahul Gandhi has narrowed. This government is clearly in some measure of trouble. There is no Modi wave in the country. I’m not proposing a conspiracy theory but the slide is going to get worse,” he stated.

Noted historian Irfan Habib said they are trying to crush such (rational) debate by subverting academic organisations through the use of a shameless distribution of posts as spoils and imposition of their mythical fantasies in the name of nationalism or value education on schools and universities. “This mounting offensive against democratic and secular principles on which our Constitution is based reminds us of the way fascism had established itself in Germany and Italy. The danger in India now is also as real. What should still fortify us is the fact that India is much larger than the RSS and its cohort,” said Habib in a message as he could not attend the event due to health issues.

In a session on ‘Media and communal politics,’ journalist P Sainath said a major area of damage is that the media has managed to sell a national vs anti-national debate. “It came from the people who gave apology to Britishers. It came from people who shot the Father of the Nation. There are larger processes that are damaging journalism. In recent years, we have reduced media to a revenue stream,” he said, adding that of the four estates of democracy, media is the only one that is profit seeking. Sainath added that Indian media is politically free but imprisoned by profits. Stating that there is no serious investigation by media on murders of three rationalists, he said, “Media on the communal issue is going to be high in next 12 months due to assembly elections in some of the state”.

Shashi Kumar, a prominent TV personality from South India, said students cannot be compared to soldiers. “While a television anchor says the nation wants to know, the (English) TV viewership is less than one per cent. Now, there is a crisis of credibility in journalism. When you serve a communal agenda knowing that it is bad and dangerous, it is unforgivable,” Kumar said.

In a session on ‘Hindutva’s appropriation of Icons: Ambedkar, Shivaji and Bhagat Singh’, grandson of Ambedkar and president of Bharip Bahujan Mahasangh Prakash Ambedkar said the BJP is on the opposite side of Ambedkar’s stances on many issues. “While Ambedkar was for annihilation of caste, BJP wants caste to remain. He was also for common civil code but the BJP is now using different line and asking Jains and other communities to demand different religious laws. If this happens, then common civil code will not come into reality,” he said, adding that Ambedkar also said we should do away with death penalty but the BJP is propagating it.