Massive protests are underway in India, mobs of lawyers are wandering the streets beating up those deemed “anti-nationalist,” and a crackdown on free speech on the campuses of the “world’s largest democracy.”
Yep, you read that right “mobs of lawyers.” And lest the thought of lawyers carrying out right-wing violence surprise you, we offer this quotation about German lawyers from Sabine Hildebrandt’s The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich: “by conservative estimates physicians were seven times more likely to become members of the SS than the general population, while teachers had an SS membership rate comparable to the rest of the population. Only lawyers were more likely to join the SS.”
And now for the main story, from Al Jazeera:
Thousands of students have participated in a series of protests and Jawaharlal Nehru University has come to a standstill.
The arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar, 28, last week took place after a demonstration that marked the anniversary of the 2013 execution of Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri man convicted of an attack on India’s parliament in 2001.
The attack left 10 people dead and was blamed on an armed group based in Pakistan.
Kumar was arrested after a student group, ABVP, linked to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), filed a police complaint alleging anti-Indian slogans were heard during the demonstration.
A smartphone video of Kumar’s speech, which has since been widely shared, disputes these accusations
And it didn’t take long for the protests to spread, as the Associated Press reports:
A protest that rocked a New Delhi university this week spread across India on Thursday, with students and teachers in at least 10 cities demanding the release of a student leader arrested on sedition charges and accused of being anti-Indian.
The protesters were outraged by nationally televised scenes of Kanhaiya Kumar, the student union president at Jawaharlal Nehru University, being kicked and punched while he was escorted to a court hearing Wednesday, renewing allegations that the Hindu nationalist governing party is intolerant.
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The demands for the student’s freedom in the Indian capital were met by mobs of Hindu nationalists, including many lawyers, attacking students and accusing them of being anti-Indian.
More from NPR:
Some of Modi’s most ardent followers fall on the far right of the political spectrum. A crowd of them descended on the university’s campus this week, swarming the barricaded gate, and vowing to root out what they called “a nest of anti-national activity.”
Hours later, a group of lawyers pummeled students at a court complex as police looked on. According to local media reports, more unruly lawyers rounded on the only defendant in this case to date, thrashing Kanhaiya Kumar.
When bundled into court, Kumar appeared terrified and denied the sedition charge. India has been dissecting the doctoral student’s experience and drawing very different conclusions.
“We Indians will not tolerate this. They cannot raise slogans against our country. It is not free speech — it is speech against our country,” says Radshree Kumar, a supporter of the Modi government. “It’s a plot to destabilize our country.”
From ANI News, here’s a video of Friday’s lawyerly riot:
Lawyers hold protest march in Delhi against ‘anti-national’ forces
Program note:
Lawyers in the national capital took out a protest march against raising of anti-national slogans by Jawaharlal Nehru University students from the Patiala House Court to India Gate on Friday. The protestors raised slogans like “Vande Mataram” and also burnt effigy with “traitor” written on it. The protestors demanded action against JNU students, who had raised anti-India slogans. One of the protestors said that they have suspended their work for today and want justice against anti-national activities in JNU.
More from Indian journalist Barkha Dutt of NDTV:
As goons in black robes rampaged through the Delhi court house where Kanhaiya Kumar is being tried, they assaulted journalists not just on day one, but then once again, a little over 24 hours later, emboldened by the knowledge that no cop was going to come after them and in open contempt of a Supreme Court directive. Euphoric from the taste of blood, they congratulated each other on social media for being the “shers” [lions in Hindi — esnl] who did “what the government and military could not do”. The Chief Goon, Vikram Chauhan, photographed with a slew of BJP leaders – everyone from Rajnath Singh to LK Advani – has been garlanded on the court premises; candles have been lit in “solidarity” for him. The alacrity with which the police arrested Kanhaiya Kumar is in cruel contrast to the inaction against these lumpen lawyers who enjoy political patronage.
Here’s another video of the lawyers’ rampage from the Indian Express:
Lawyers Protest Outside Patiala House Court Against Kanhaiya Kumar’s Bail Plea
The Hindu, one of the nation’s leading newspapers, noted in an editorial the refusal of Delhi police to intervene as the lawyers beat students and anoyone else they deemed an “anti-nationalist”:
[T]o see events that have unfolded over the past week only as the government’s battle for ideological control for India’s universities, as real and as condemnable as the effort is, would be to miss the gravity of the moment. In the national capital this week, the Home Minister gave currency to parody accounts of Pakistani terrorists to build a case against JNU students and yet remained visibly unmoved by the obstinate refusal of the city’s police force, which comes under his charge, to arrest “nationalist” lawyers and a party MLA who beat up students on and around court premises. BJP spokespersons affected condemnation of the violence, but breathed outrage about the allegedly seditious sentiments voiced at a meeting on the JNU campus to mark the death anniversary of Afzal Guru, convicted in the 2001 Parliament attack case and hanged in 2013. Such false equivalence has never been seen since Independence, between a Central government virtually refusing to honour the state’s essential compact with its citizenry to enforce the law and the right of Indians to freely express their sentiments, that too in the especially free zone that university campuses are meant to be. And its utterance should frame an anxiety the Prime Minister must respond to, that “nationalism” is being adopted as a political and executive touchstone by which Indians are sought to be divided between those with the ruling dispensation and those not.
Accompanying the editorial was a cartoon by Surendra [Surendranath Reddy], depicting a Delhi policeman saluting a record player with a speaker adapted from the logo of the BJP:
No one should be surprised that Modi’s police stood by and allowed a bunch of black-robed goons to carry out political violence.
After all, it was Modi who, as chief minister of the state of Gujarat, who ordered police to stand down as Hindu rioters stalked and murdered as many as 2,000 Muslims and burned down their homes and businesses in 2002.
There’s lots more after the jump, including more protests, international reaction, and yet more murders. . .
The Hindu covers another protest at another campus:
Displaying solidarity with the students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), a large number of students gathered outside Delhi University’s Arts Faculty on Saturday.
In an ‘Open House’ organised by the students of DU, they demanded the immediate and unconditional release of JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar and withdrawal of all charges of sedition from all students of JNU.
Even as the majority in DU’s students’ union is Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarti Parishad (ABVP), students of the university supported the JNU, going beyond party lines. They were, however, disrupted for a short while by ABVP members.
Stating that DU was not a saffron campus and stood with the JNU in the time of crisis, Abha Dev Habib, professor at Delhi University, said: “From the past few days, we are seeing that the BJP is running a shrill campaign branding all those who dissent as anti-nationals. The ABVP is organising a march in different colleges spreading jingoism and terror between the student communities. DU, like other campuses, is not a saffron campus and any such move to impose saffron agenda must be resisted”.
The student protesters have drawn support from around the world. Here’s one from one of the world’s most famous schools, signed by more than 300 scholars, including Noam Chomsky:
In solidarity with JNU: University of Oxford members, alumni
We, the undersigned members and alumni of the University of Oxford, stand firmly in solidarity with fellow students, teachers and scholars at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). We condemn the ongoing persecution of the student community in JNU, in particular the arrest of JNU Students Union (JNUSU) president Kanhaiya Kumar under sedition charges. We protest the use of institutional and state machinery to stifle dissent on campuses, and the attempt to persecute those whose views do not conform to the narrow narratives of ‘nationalism’, ‘nationhood’ and ‘Indian culture’ promoted and endorsed by the ruling party. We view the crackdown in JNU in a continuum with the use of state machinery to clamp down on dissenting views and ideologies on campuses, most prominently at the FTII, Jadavpur University, IIT-Madras and the University of Hyderabad (UoH). We would like to point out that it was a similar witchhunt, backed by state authority, that led to the suicide of Dalit scholar and student leader of the Ambedkar Students’ Association, Rohith Vemula. We also stand in solidarity with the ongoing rally hunger strike at UoH and the struggles of the Joint Action Committee for Social Justice, demanding justice for Rohith Vemula.
We are concerned that sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) have been used to criminalise dissent. University campuses are meant to provide spaces for deliberation and even disagreement; the abuse of the law in order to stifle students’ voices is indicative of an authoritarian state’s attempts to ideologically capture the university space. Further, we believe that Section 124-A of the IPC, which codifies the law on sedition, is fundamentally anachronistic to a democratic state. Even so, for a charge of sedition to be made out, the law requires that violence must necessarily follow subversive speech, which is conspicuously absent in this case.
We are distressed by reported violence targeting students, professors and journalists on the premises of the Patiala House Court, both inside and outside the courtroom, on February 15 and 17, 2016. We urge all responsible parties, including the police and court personnel, to fulfill their constitutional duty in ensuring a fair and secure trial. That this happened under the silent watch of the police and other authorities, is indicative of their complicity. We are also concerned about the profiling and vilification of certain students by sections of the media; for instance, the irresponsible media reportage on JNU student Umar Khalid is a grave point of concern.
We condemn the continued police presence in the JNU campus. We appeal to the government and police to understand us, first, as a broad spectrum of students, who believe in different ideologies, but come together to demand the right to hold these independent beliefs without the threat of state sanctioned violence. We believe that the idea of India, as a multifarious nation, cannot and must not be held ransom by the hyper-nationalism of a particular group. Protecting the university space, where the critical spirit of questioning is nurtured, must remain of utmost importance to any democratic state. These events have, in effect, become a vicious attack on more than just the freedom of expression, speech and ideation guaranteed to us by the Constitution of India.
We admire JNU’s resilience, and we stand with JNU in this moment of crisis, as a mark of our commitment to the freedom of thought and action and in support of the freedom from fear — of the state, surveillance and pernicious political control.
More on what’s happening on India’s campuses from France News:
Beyond the question of Kanhaiya Kumar’s innocence, the turmoil surrounding his arrest at JNU is symptomatic of political tensions within Indian universities.
“A lack of trust is developing in a number of academic institutions regarding government policy and the hardcore Hindu nationalists,” says Jean-Luc Racine, an Indian politics specialist from the Asia Center.
“They [the Hindu nationalists] have their own student union at JNU, and an ideological fight between the left and the right is developing today in Indian academia.”
Kanhaiya Kumar is not the only university member to be arrested on sedition charges: five other students and one former Delhi University lecturer are also awaiting trial.
Raids are also taking place across the states of Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and the Himalayan region of Jammu and Kashmir, where separatist tensions have simmered for decades.
Sedition carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment in India, but Kanhaiya Kuma told the court on Wednesday that he has faith in the Constitution.
And for a comprehensive examination of the roots of the current unrest, try this backgrounder from Reina Gattuso at Truthout.
And it’s not just students who have been assaulted by religious fundamentalists under Modi, as First Post noted in a 31 August 2015 story about murders of Indian secularists:
The shocking murder of 77-year-old Kannada writer, scholar and rationalist Dr MM Kalburgi on Sunday morning sent ripples through the Indian literary community, particularly since this is the third instance in two years where a rationalist author has been killed, ostensibly for his views.
In February this year, CPI leader Govind Pansare — whose biography of Shivaji titled Shivaji Kon Hota riled a handful of groups in Maharashtra — was killed after two unknown assailants fired at him and his wife in front of their house in Kolhapur district.
Narendra Dabholkar, the founder-president of Maharashtra-based Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti — an organisation set up to eradicate superstition, was killed in August 2013, but his killers remain at large.
India is about to get very interesting.
