Opinion The conspiracy theory mongers
BJP is polarising opinion before assembly polls, undermining universities.
M. Venkaiah Naidu’s ‘The Congress-Left bulldozer’ (The Indian Express, March 7) not only economises on the truth but also spreads a “conspiracy theory” for which the pseudo-nationalist Hindutva brigade has become infamous since it came to power in May 2013. It is therefore important to put the record straight and counter the falsehoods being spread by the BJP government. At the outset, Naidu writes that the support being accorded to the students in protesting universities is “crass political opportunism” and that “gullible university students were being targeted by forces inimical to the country”. This charge is a familiar one from rightwing ruling parties, which usually blame the Opposition for all their troubles when they have no answers to the questions against them.
It should be noted that both the incident at the University of Hyderabad (which resulted in the suicide of Rohith Vemula) and the February 9 incident in JNU were instigated and carried to their logical conclusion by the ABVP. Incidentally, the ABVP appears to have taken the moral responsibility to report all “anti-national” elements who oppose M.S. Golwalkar’s conception of nationhood. In both cases, the government, university administration and ABVP consulted with each other to create an impossible situation that led to protests by teachers and students. This has been proved by the doctored video evidence and the invitation to selected “sympathetic” TV channels and the police by the ABVP on February 9. As the faculty of the University of Hyderabad argued, Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani has ignored the medical documents and preliminary evidence on Rohith’s case in order to fabricate facts in her speech in Parliament. If she had spoken the truth, she would have been morally bound to resign as minister and take responsibility for the institutional killing of Rohith Vemula.
In his article, Naidu once again says that a handful of activists with “ultra-left and Maoist” backgrounds are fuelling unrest in selected universities. This is a patently untrue observation as the unions of the protesting campuses are largely dominated by students and teachers who believe in the Constitution and its conception of a democratic nation. The fact that the burning of a fictitious Lord Rama’s effigy in JNU is considered a “mischievous” act shows that Naidu himself espouses an upper-caste Hindu conception of nationalism that contradicts a culturally pluralistic conception of a nation as advocated in the Constitution. The article also characterises the observance of the “martyrdom days” of Mahishasura and Afzal Guru as “mischievous”. This formulation is not only problematic but also shows the ignorance of the minister. Is being “mischievous” the same as being “anti-national” and “seditious”? Further, can a Dalit mythological figure like Mahishasura be equated with Afzal Guru in any logical way? Such a characterisation only shows the anti-Dalit bias of the minister and his party. Further, Irani’s use of the derogatory reference to Durga in her speech was ostensibly from a pamphlet of the JNU ABVP, which misrepresented the position of the All India Backward Students’ Forum (AIBF). Hence, the mischief was created not by the AIBF but by the ABVP, which is apparently accountable to no authority because of the protection it receives from the Central government.
It is worth asking why the NDA government and its ally, the university administration, are aggressively discrediting the first-rate public education being provided in Central universities. There are two obvious answers to this question. First, the dirty tricks department of the BJP is trying to polarise opinion before assembly elections and is utilising its youth and student organisation for this purpose. Second, the government is using the familiar technique of first discrediting public systems and then privatising them. This is evident from the budget speech of the finance minister, in which he proposed a “higher education finance agency” in order to mobilise money from the market and corporate sources. Thus, the government is bulldozing its agenda of religious and market fundamentalism on universities, and any opposition to such an agenda is now being viewed as “anti-national”. But these rightwing pseudo nationalists will be defeated since the agitating students and teachers of JNU, Hyderabad, Allahabad and many other universities have united to oppose this retrograde agenda.
Share
