Opinion Back off

Student leader Umar Khalid at JNU campus on Sunday night.

Umar Khalid, Anirban Bhattacharya, Riyazul Haq, Rama Naga, Anant Prakash and Ashutosh Kumar, gone missing since February 12 after JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested for “sedition”, and also named in the case, spent their first night back on campus surrounded by fellow students who kept an all-night vigil, while the police waited outside the gates. In this moment of pause, the police must ask itself a question: Just where is it going? The facts are these: The charges against Kanhaiya and others, flimsy to begin with, were based on a video, cited in the FIR, whose veracity is in serious question. Delhi Police chief B.S. Bassi has said the onus is on the students “to present evidence of their innocence”, but surely Bassi is not serious. It cannot be that the police chief is actually overturning the fundamental principle of criminal jurisprudence — that you are innocent till proven guilty? The unprecedented exertions of Delhi Police so far — it has questioned at least 50 people, including professors and journalists, in the last 10 days, to trace the whereabouts of one of the missing students — have already made it look like a misguided, if not malign, force. At the JNU gates, it must decide to cut its losses, beat a retreat, lest it should disgrace itself further.

It is not just Delhi Police that needs to pause, and reconsider. At a farmers’ rally in western Odisha on Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of “conspiracies” hatched every day to “finish and defame” him. This was happening, he suggested, because his government had asked NGOs for details of their “foreign funding”. Which NGOs was the PM speaking of? And does he see the turbulence in JNU as one of the many “storms of protest” his government has been engulfed by, because “these people ganged up against me”? Where is the evidence for that? And what is the way out? The PM must tell the nation whether or not he thinks there is a “foreign hand” at work to destabilise his government. In any case, the entire JNU controversy has been marked by an “us and them” rhetoric from the top echelons of this government vis-a-vis young university students. There has been no effort to reach out to them, to play the elder, to be firm but also compassionate.

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On Monday, addressing the Centenary Year Convocation of Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, the PM spoke of the importance of “jigyasa”, curiosity. “The student in us has to be alive always,” he said. Cut to JNU, where on Sunday night, a hounded student was forced to say: “My name is Umar Khalid but I am not a terrorist.” The dissonance is tragic.