After JNU, Sanghi Nazis will be beaten back in Hyderabad

Taken from Chittibabu Padavala’s Facebook post

The regime not long ago couldn’t take the fierce and sustained student resistance of UoH, the enormous energies required of distorting the basic facts about Rohith Vemula, the circumstances in which his death took place and find a way to find the consequences in its wake, and the entire plethora of people’s organisations from across the two states joining or supporting the UoH student struggle, the masterminds of the Sangh Parivar regime apparently thought doing something dramatic in JNU will give them some issue other than the relatively inconvenient one of pushing a bright Dalit scholar to death, given the then upcoming Parliament Session and also helps in spoiling the mobilisation for the Chalo Delhi program for justice for Rohith Vemula, for which the host organisation was JNU.

It was almost certain that Sangh Parivar thought it would have a convenient debate around nationalism
(among other things, the Congress cannot have any moral high ground if the Afjal Guru’s unjust hanging was foregrounded).

The masterminds must have also kept in mind that four-decades of curious incomprehension of the outside world, and amused jealousy of journalists toward JNU – a little pocket of educational excellence, self-confident progressive thought amidst the most barbaric region of India – and to build on the negative stereotypes against the campus and the well-known facts about its activist weaknesses of being unable to take any militant struggles even within the campus and its complete disconnect with the outside world, except a discursive commitment to the interests and rights of the poor.
[pullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Miraculously, within a day, JNU recouped and started striking back, which it didn’t stop since[/pullquote]
It was strategically not any foolish calculation. If we remember the utter collective paralysis of JNU on the day the combined force of the police and the Sangh Parivar thugs attacked JNU campus, it seemed for a moment the Sangh plan seemed more successful than anybody, including themselves, expected. When hundreds of outside hooligans forced themselves on the campus with more than 7000 students, but even went inside the hostels, including women’s hostels, and, unbelievably, none of them got hurt nor even one of the intruders was locked up in any room.

Miraculously, within a day, JNU recouped and started striking back, which it didn’t stop since. The teachers of JNU took the first step (a gift to the Indian antifascist movement given by Hindu Nazist government with far-reaching happy consequences), the timely and wise, practical and effective decision corresponding to the changed times in which the Sangh Parivar regime is no longer attacking the autonomy of Academia but Academia itself.

Taking the cue from the inspiring and exemplary collective step of the SC and ST professors at UoH some weeks before, the JNU teachers overnight became activists, they usefully didn’t do so by sidelining their duties of teaching. They started teaching the whole nation, with a mind-boggling presence of mind, with practical effectiveness, unheard of and unprecedented reversal of fortunes in the fight against Hindutva achieved by a small band of resisters fighting against a mad mammoth in an asymmetrical conflict. They started not only teaching about Nationalism, with their public lectures series available to the whole world, they threatened to teach the whole nation about it.

What the JNU students and teachers did was something even most of us, their supporters, were slow to appreciate, when it started what we didn’t imagine some weeks ago was even possible. It seemed initially they were falling into the trap of nationalism and anti-nationalism false divide, a shallow, sentimental ‘debate’ where the fanatic and blackmailer always comes winner, the JNU professors and the guest lecturers from other campuses and the students, started “complicating” (a favorite word for academics and literary people) the idea of nation and nationalism before the whole country and the world.

Nationalism notoriously can drive people to kill without reason and be killed without asking why, it was also supposed to be something that stalled the Communism to the point of infecting and infiltrating it. What JNU faculty and the students did is one heroic confrontation of a little enclave of the left against the most formidable rival ideology, against the humankind’s most popular ever fascist regime.

In the times of brute force and barbarism, proverbs such as the ‘Word’ being this or that, the pen being mightier than sword look sentimental throw backs from the days of secure civility and guranteed progress, JNU students and teachers created TERROR in the regime, just with words.

[pullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]that deadly joint slogan Jai Bhim-Lal Salam[/pullquote]
Now, the strategy of teaching JNU a lesson and lessen damage done during the propagandistic blunders against Rohith Vemula and his bemoaning brave mother Radhika and to the ultimately inconvenient fact and potential damage in the ugly fact of the whole government and their paramilitaries and collaborationists pitting against a bereaved single Dalit mother boomeranged.

Not a single significant speech went without mentioning Rohith Vemula and shouted without that deadly joint slogan Jai Bhim-Lal Salam (establishment knows it would a death-knell for the whole system). JNU teachers and students proved to be better at teaching lessons. Unlike the students and Dalit faculty of UoH, whose heroic militancy woke the entire country’s oppositional energies up, who got the whole nation speaking about them, JNU scholars, teachers and faculty alike, started speaking to the whole nation.

That the regime has now come heavily on UoH shouldn’t hide the fact that it has fled from JNU.
There indeed was a discernible idea in this attack and lies about the peaceful student protest against an accused in an Atrocity case and fled the campus and arrest with non-bailable arrest warrant against him.

Inspired by the shameful ‘victory’ in FTII for the shameless regime and the example closer home of the disgusting EFLU Vice Chancellor Sunaina Singh’s mad, cheap and murderous ways unsuitable for any educational space, the intension now is to take refuge in the diversion of attention through a war of attrition against the UoH.

Moreover, the energies uncooled from the recent Talangana movement are still alive and ready to flare up. Over-smart ploy of passing the dirty work of repressing students, with the entire media nearly owned by a single caste – Kamma, Apparao’s own – to Telananga police, is also sign of the regime’s search for escape route.

That it had to come back to where it was running away from, UoH, is a proof that things are not fine with the ruling Nazists’ calculations and how things are turning out to be.

Obviously, Modi won the biggest ever election in the history of humankind and he remains very popular. But the society still retains enough of not-yet-poisoned humanity left in it that, even the most popular politician on the face of earth cannot defeat the grieving single Dalit mother’s fight for justice for her dead son with all students of the nation standing up for her.

Raiot

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Chittibabu Padavala Written by:

Chittibabu Padavala is a Dalit Activist and Journalist

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