Jawaharlal Nehru University students protest the arrests of students in New Delhi on Feb. 13. (Photo by John Mathew)
Indian media and the public have been debating aspects of nationalism for almost two weeks after police arrested some students of India's prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) on charges of sedition.
The students were accused of shouting anti-India slogans while rallying to mark the anniversary of the execution of a Muslim Kashmiri separatist.
A group of students had organized the program with permission from the university. However, the university hastily cancelled the program ostensibly at the behest of senior leaders of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that runs the federal government in New Delhi.
Now, the police intervention led to the biggest nationwide student protests in a quarter of a century. What happened in JNU has more to it than meets the eye. It's the latest government crackdown on the nonconformist.
The alacrity shown in arresting students made many suspect political motivations in the actions of police. The incident, read from the background of the alleged increasing "saffronization" (Hinduization) of Indian higher education, was interpreted as a conscious right-wing attack on academic freedom.
The intelligentsia read that the charge of anti-nationalism against the university students was meant to demoralize its intellectuals so that the right-wing government could control the university through administrative and police measures.
Unusual forms of protest erupted from within the university and its academic community began organizing public lectures on nationalism to large crowds of students and public who gathered in JNU from all over the country.
The ostensible aim of such lectures was to redefine nationalism in multicultural and multilingual India against the monolithic Hindu-India slogan of the right wing.
Incitement of popular nationalist notions was BJP's route to power. In its crude forms, it has used language (Hindi-Sanskrit), religion (Hinduism) and race (Aryan) to define its nationalism in a multireligious country that has the second highest population of Muslims and nearly a fourth of the world's 6,000 odd languages.
The JNU students seem to believe that nationalism is now moving toward ideology-based nationalism and is in conflict with the party that upholds language, race, and religion as core to its nationalism.
Even prosecutors told the media how they beat up a student in the presence of policemen while the student was in custody and was being taken to court.
This made the arrests one of state-sponsored kidnapping, forcing those who dissent to fall in line. Some see attempts to reduce India into a police state actively promoting state-sponsored terrorism.
More worrying is the question of academic autonomy of Indian universities. JNU, which is seen shoulder to shoulder with the best in the world, is already on the hit list of the BJP-led government as various interferences have shown already.
Efforts to interfere with the autonomy of academic institutions that refuse to toe the official line are increasingly observed. Fear of intelligentsia is a hallmark of fascist political structures.
The promotion of a climate of fear and oppression, effort to rob universities of autonomy through new regulations are increasingly observed to the detriment of public educational institutions.
The fear of fascist suppression using the ideological state apparatus is real and the government should take heed from history that has shown students have always been at the forefront against government authoritarianism.
Joseph Koyippally, a former JNU student, is a social commentator and a professor of comparative literature at the Central University of Kerala.