JNU Crackdown: Is India Experiencing America’s Age of McCarthyism?

Paranoid branding of a few students as anti-national reflects the government’s perverse perception of patriotism.

One might be seduced to believe that the Modi government’s response to an otherwise insignificant incident in Jawaharlal Nehru University, involving a handful of students who raised pro-Afzal Guru slogans, was spurred by patriotic sentiments which the BJP has historically sought to assert by branding certain categories of people as anti-Indian or anti-national.

But patriotism, as Samuel Johnson, well-known British writer, so succinctly described nearly 250 years ago, is the “last refuge of the scoundrel”. For sections of the BJP and the larger Sangh Parivar family, the idea of patriotism – devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life – is as misplaced and flawed as their idea of nationalism which is tempered by self-deception.

The Hindutva forces’ variant of nationalism, in the context of its politics over the last 30 years, has been a pathological contamination of the mental process. It has been instrumentally deployed and practiced with the specific objective of capturing power. At the same time, its idea of patriotism does not respect the sentiments of large sections of the population that believe that while their sense of a place or way of life is best in the world there is no wish to force it upon other people.

Contesting Patriotism

The patriotism of Hindutva followers is marked by extreme levels of insecurity and narrow particularistic objectives which thrive on social and political exclusion. This is not new for the BJP. Branding individuals and collectives as anti-national or anti-Indian reflected its paranoia when it led the first NDA government under A B Vajpayee. The Congress too has employed a form of ‘soft Hindutva’ to advance its politics.

And now, the BJP, under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, seems to have given free rein to the rabble-rousers in their ranks, to whip up patriotic feelings over non-issues. The strategy is marked by valourising particularism and not universalism. This particularism is akin to creating enemies and allies from which political parties in India, including the BJP, the Leftists and more recently the Trinamool Congress, have drawn their lifeblood.

Patriotism Must be Colour Blind

For a pluralist country that has tried to adhere to liberal democratic principles, patriotism must not simply be principled but also “colour blind”. This is like the relationship between citizenship and identity, which requires the state to adopt a hands-off approach in matters not just of cultural identity but also, obviously, equitable governance. Surely, justice requires abstractions from particular bonds and loyalties.

Unleashing the police on a bunch of university students is the surest way of losing the support of the intelligentsia and the young voter. We saw this in the case of the Mamata Banerjee government’s decision to send in the police to Jadavpur University, an act which saw students from other universities and colleges take to the streets in massive numbers in a show of solidarity. We know that most political groupings, including the Left, have their own conception of the principle of liberty of thought and discussion.

Is History Repeating Itself?

Though history rarely repeats itself precisely, it does repeat in general themes, and to that extent what Indians are today experiencing bears some resemblance to America’s Age of McCarthyism – be it repudiation of certain events in history, hounding left-liberal intellectuals, giving a free hand to rabble-rousers to polarise society and now this anti-national bogey. All this is designed to defang the people and drive fear into their hearts.

It is scary that the police action against JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiyya Kumar and subsequently SAR Geelani could now become the basis for subjecting every Indian to a ‘loyalty’ test followed by investigations, and then perhaps, arrest.

Dragging in Blasphemy

The unbecoming language used by Delhi Police Commissioner B S Bassi, who has bent himself backwards to please this government, to describe the JNU students’ act as “blasphemous” is as good or as terrible as the language that lunatic fundamentalists in Pakistan and Bangladesh deploy against hapless minorities. Even before completion of investigation – the arrests were illegal anyway – Bassi condemned the students as anti-national.

Bassi’s boss Rajnath Singh led with the anti-national charge, much as rabid mullahs in Pakistan and Bangladesh would if they were to crucify a member of the minority or a woman for real or imagined blasphemy. Rajnath Singh’s allegation, as we now know, was based on a message that emanated from a fake Hafeez Saeed Twitter handle. Both Bassi and the home minister’s statements are nothing short of medieval inquisition.

Contrast the government’s handling of the JNU case with its treatment of the former Gurdaspur Superintendent of Police Salwinder Singh who the National Investigation Agency let off although there was sufficient evidence to proceed against him for action prejudicial to the interests of the country. The BJP-led government’s commitment to patriotism is not only selective but suspect. Its loyalty to the Constitution too is questionable.