This time, it all began with a seminar. The subject was ‘Cultures of Protest’. Someone, who had become quite famous last year in JNU and also somewhat controversial, was invited to speak at the seminar on Bastar. Some students of the college protested against the invite given to this individual, which forced the organisers to withdraw it.
A large number of students protested against the withdrawal of the invite and some of them raised slogans demanding independence of both Kashmir and Bastar. Yet another large group of students protested against this protest.
It all ended up in a violent conflict with the students beating up each other. As if these protests and counter-protests were not enough, a student suddenly burst forth on the television screens, miming like a character from a Chaplin film, protesting through a series of pamphlets against those violent protestations and suddenly became the rallying point of these protests.
The protests in Ramjas College in Delhi and in some other universities recently follow a very typical template: organise a seminar or stage a play on a subject around freedom of speech or communalism or intolerance or human rights or social justice, invite one or more of the branded speakers, also invite the media and leave the rest to the speakers.
If you have invited the right speaker, you can be sure that s/he would bemoan the crisis facing India today due to the threat to the right to freedom of speech and rile at right wing formations, including the central government, for this. No sooner this is said, all hell would break loose. The thin-skinned nationalists would instantly jump into the fray.
And since the media has already been invited in anticipation of this melodrama, the whole country will come to know about this in no time. It appears now quite obvious that many of these events have been strategically contrived to occur before or during elections or Parliament sessions to have maximum impact.
Some peculiarities of the Ramjas College developments further reinforce the staged/planned nature of such protests. The subject of the seminar, which triggered the chain reaction, has very little to do with the Department of English.
In normal circumstances, very few departments of English in universities would select such a topic from the seminar. By the way, the Jodhpur University event, which triggered a lot of outrage recently, was also organised by its Department of English, and the subject of the discourse had little direct relevance to English language or literature.
One Associate Professor of the college, who kept appearing in television debates, argued that the seminar had been organised in order to inculcate a critical sensibility among the students. Nothing could be a more tenuous argument than this for justifying the choice of the subject.
The reactions to the protests staged by the lone young woman from another reputed college of the Delhi University further reinforce the suspicion that much of these protests had been managed. Throughout, all references to this young woman, both in the electronic and print media, highlighted the fact that she was 20 years of age, that she was a martyr’s daughter, and that she studied English literature in an elite college. What if she had not been any of these?
Would the protest by a 20-year-old daughter of a loco-driver of the Home Science Department of the Government Girls College at Pendra Road in Bilaspur district of Chhattisgarh have attracted such attention from the mandarins of India?
Since the protests and the debates around those are produced for the consumption of the middle and upper middle class, the stakeholders know which elements would enhance the edge of their argument and strike the right chord and therefore, suitably, highlight only those aspects of the protester’s personality. In this case, the age of the lady mattered as it underlined her vulnerability, her parentage as it proved her hereditary claim to patriotism and her college as it denoted her class, both intellectually and socially. In all this, where is freedom of speech?
It is very clear that these are not normal developments. These conflicts are clearly engineered cleverly by some people who have now understood what to say or do so as to provoke another group of people instantly to react and thus trigger a chain of loud and violent protests.
The Department of English Language and Literature organising a seminar on the subject of ‘Culture of Protests’ and inviting someone controversial to speak on Bastar proves this point.
Earlier this year, the Department of English in a university in Rajasthan had also organised some seminar on a similar subject and had invited a speaker whose views about Jammu and Kashmir or Bastar were well-known. That in both the cases, right wing ultra nationalist groups loudly reacted, sometimes offensively and violently, proves how the script writers had presciently anticipated the future course of events. Ever since the NDA government came into power, these conflicts have been occurring with a regularity and with a sharper edge.
In my view, one side is guilty of cynical manipulation of the prevailing conditions and the other side displays total lack of both maturity and wisdom in its reaction to minor provocations. No one is serving the cause of freedom of speech or that of nationalism or patriotism; none intends to.
In the process, more serious problems affecting the quality of higher education in India are lost sight of. Only a hypocrite would claim that freedom of speech in the university campus is the greatest problem the university system is facing today. We must not lose the big picture for small partisan ends.
satyanandamishra@hotmail.com