Date: Friday, February 19, 2016.
Fighting fascism in India
The reaction to the protests at the Jawaharlal Nehru University has shown the real face of today’s India, not the Shining India propaganda we hear about so much. First there was the police which manhandled protestors and arrested student union leader Kanhaiya Kumar. They then produced a report saying the protestors were seen eating beef, a big no-no in Modi’s India, and revealed they had been spying on students for two years. Then there was the BJP government which called the protestors anti-Indian and desperately tried to find a Pakistan link, first saying Hafiz Saeed was behind the protests and now accusing Umar Khalid, a PhD student at JNU of being part of a Pakistani militant group. Then you have the lawyers, who should be upholding the right to protest and rule of law, chanting slogans against Kumar at his hearing and pelting reporters with stones. Even the jailors have shown the same instincts, throwing Kumar into the same cell in which Afzal Guru – the anniversary of whose judicially dubious conviction and execution sparked the protest – was once held. These protests are now not only about Afzal Guru or the occupation of Kashmir; they are really a test of whether dissent is allowed in India.
To show their peaceful intentions, JNU students, joined by labourers in Delhi, marched on Thursday armed with nothing but flowers and tricolour flags. They were rerouted by an apprehensive police force but this was more than compensated by the solidarity shown at universities around the country. It is a sign of how this protest has grown that disenfranchised workers too have joined in. The BJP, mixing xenophobia with neo-liberalism, is the most anti-worker government possible. One of its MPs, Gopal Shetty, has even said that farmers are committing suicide not because of starvation and poverty but because it is in ‘fashion’. The government also ordered that the Indian flag be flown at all central universities. None of this stopped students, not just from JNU, but around the country, from taking out solidarity rallies. They even had to endure clashes with BJP goons in places like Bihar. Congress has also taken the side of the protestors, although one cannot be sure if that is for opportunistic political reasons. The Aam Aadmi Party, which rules Delhi, has shown its name to be a misnomer. While it has attacked the government, it has done so on the wrong grounds. It taunted the BJP, claiming that if it cannot arrest a few anti-Indian protestors it will never be able to find those who carried out the Pathankot attack. Calling the brave students of JNU anti-Indian is a slur. They are holding up the best progressive traditions, aspiring to form a more democratic society.
She shouldn’t have died
The tragedy of discrimination and lack of dissent in our schooling system has been captured by the tragic suicide of a 17-year-old girl in Quetta. Reports confirm that the girl had committed suicide after her college, the Government Girls Degree College Muslim Bagh, had refused to send her intermediate-level examination forms to the education board. The girl’s family reported that she had been organising protests against college authorities, including the principal, over the poor quality of education; this reportedly led to the principal deciding to withhold her examination forms. The college had suspended classes owing to a shortage of female teachers. Twelve other girls from the college were also been reported to have been denied the right to sit in exams on the charge of protesting against the college administration. The tragedy of 17-year-old Saqiba is that she was a bright student who wanted to get educated at all costs. Her damning suicide note is addressed to her principal. A position-holder, she was willing to take up the cause of education for others. Her’s was a precious life that should not have been lost.
The police have resisted protests by the girl’s family to register a case against college officials. It is unclear what kind of justice a criminal case would be able to provide in this matter, but the reality is that the role of college officials in pushing the girl to commit suicide cannot be discounted. While a probe into the incident has been ordered by the Balochistan chief minister, the suicide is nothing short of a damnation of our public education system. The Balochistan education minister himself spoke of a brilliant girl who had been demoralised by the petty attitude of her principal. A girl who wanted to get education was denied that by the schooling system. This is a story we can tell many times over in our country. What was different is that this girl chose to take her life after being denied an education. It is easy to dismiss her decision as immature. Like the recent case in India, where a Dalit student committed suicide in a university, the girl’s suicide should instead be taken as a moment to kick off a national debate on our schooling system. The life of a girl who protested being denied her right to education must not go to waste. We must also talk about the victimisation that our students face generally – whether in public schools and colleges or the more elite universities – when it comes to their right to question their teachers or their educational institutes. There are no mechanisms in place for students to turn to when they face bias or unnecessary censure merely for speaking out.