Opinion A gun in the capital

The unidentified armed assailant who escaped after dropping his gun, has been caught on CCTV, but the scene of crime implicates several more.

This August 15, let the nation go back to that moment, two afternoons ago, when a young student and activist was attacked by an unidentified armed assailant, outside Constitution Club in the heart of the capital, a zone of high security, stepped up for Independence Day. This Independence Day, let that image linger, and be heard. Because the dispiriting things it says also have to do with freedom, its shrinking. The student, Umar Khalid, who had a narrow escape on Monday, still has an “anti-national” tag and a sedition case pending against him for slogans allegedly shouted on the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus in February 2016, even though more than two years later, the police has been unable to file a chargesheet still. The unidentified armed assailant who escaped after dropping his gun, has been caught on CCTV, but the scene of crime implicates several more. It points to a larger climate of unfreedom that has made possible the targeting of a student for no other reason apparently but that he was opposing the ideas of the dominant and the powerful, for no other seeming reason but that he was speaking his mind.

The nationalism debate that was spawned by the events of February 2016 in JNU is an important national milestone for at least one reason. It marked the easy labelling of all dissenting voices as “anti-national”, even those raised within the precincts of a university, which must be a safe house for all arguments, especially those deemed to be provocative and extreme. It drew lines that-must-not-be-crossed by those armed with nothing but ideas. These boundaries have only deepened in the days and months since. This is, in large part, because the intolerance of opposing views has been given sanction by an establishment that has enthusiastically contrived and used the national-anti-national divide to relegate and discredit all ideas and ideologies that differ from its own. The brunt of this intolerance, and hate, has been borne, not just by its political opponents, but in general by the minorities and the weak. The shrinking space for debate diminishes the nation, affects everyone.

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Going by the statements and whataboutery of those in power whenever confronted by the issue of an imperilled freedom of speech and expression, they seem to believe that it is an elite concern, that it is not an issue with electoral traction. In this calculation, they may even be right. Not many marches and processions have been taken out in defence of the right to speak out. But it is an impoverished calculus, indeed, that on this, the nation’s 72nd Independence Day, does not acknowledge the exhilarating promise of freedoms that it was born to fulfill — for all its citizens.