Making of accidental leaders

Apoorvanand
Professor, Delhi University

KANHAIYA Kumar and Umar Khalid are back in the news. The Delhi Police have finally managed to file a chargesheet against them, along with Anirban, after ‘toiling’ for three years to make it credible, travelling to many states to gather evidence and analysing numerous emails, videos and phone messages to claim that they were involved in a seditious act on February 9, 2016, at JNU. The whole case has been built on an alleged act of raising anti-national slogans, purportedly calling for the dismemberment of the country and condemning the hanging of Maqbool Bhat and Afzal Guru.

Kanhaiya and Umar are no longer names confined to the JNU campus. They have become household cult figures, many hate them and there is a sizeable population which admires them. No other JNUSU president, nor any other student leader from JNU, has received such national attention. These two and others would also have passed out anonymously had the BJP not decided to make them an instrument to test its campaign against anti-nationalists hiding on the campuses and conspiring against the nation. The ploy succeeded with the enthusiastic support from a complicit media.

I was stunned by the cynicism of the move when a leader of the ruling party gleefully exclaimed that the nationalism and anti-nationalism theme has caught the imagination of the masses! So, the idea was to persist with it. He was also dismayed that their attempt to use the Mahishasur martyrdom celebrations at JNU had backfired. People forget that spearheaded by Smriti Irani, the government had tried to leverage it to rouse and mobilise Hindu sentiments, clubbing it with their anti-nationalism discourse. But it met with a backlash from Dalits and Adivasis and the BJP never raised it again.

Wild theories of Kanhaiya and Umar being linked with terrorists across the border were floated, backed by none other than the Union Home Minister himself. His claim proved to be based on a fake Twitter handle, but the Home Ministry insisted that Rajnath Singh’s statement was based on inputs from different agencies. It has, in fact, put the lives of these two in danger as many people trusting his assertion believe that they needed to be punished. Kanhaiya has been physically attacked many times and Umar narrowly missed a murder attempt.

It is remarkable that these young people have not only maintained sanity, but also have demonstrated great equanimity in dealing with the craziness of the situation. The tremendous stress of the continuous media assault on them has not made them bitter. The nation saw in Kanhaiya how you deploy humour to combat hatred.

These two, especially Kanhaiya, were accidental leaders. If the nation now wants to listen to them and also deliberate on their stand, it is only the BJP which has to be blamed for it. I had met Kanhaiya a year prior to his new-found stature. His aspiration was modest: to become a university teacher. It was his dramatic arrest, physical attack on him by ‘nationalist’ lawyers in public view on the court premises, and constant badgering by the media to prove his nationalism that turned him into a figure the nation must pay attention to. People discovered a great and entertaining orator in Kanhaiya.

Kanhaiya and Umar belong to two different shades of the Left. For the first time in decades, the Left parties learnt that there could be a language that can be used for universal appeal, free of the tired Left jargon. Kanhaiya’s ability to build a persuasive narrative has left the BJP ruing the moment it decided to make him a ‘hate figure’ for Hindus.

Meanwhile, the nation also got interested in the story of a boy from the rural backyards of Bihar, the son of a labourer, who from training to be a technician in a Gulf country, accidentally reached JNU. His story is also the story of JNU, which hosts a vernacular boy, uninitiated in the ways of the English-speaking metropolitan educational culture, giving him its leadership. This is what democracies should be.

Kanhaiya’s arrest was a result of the evil hiding in our society, but it also brought out the best in the nation waiting for expression. JNU teachers stood rock-solid behind their students. It would have been much easier for them to shun these ‘anti-nationals’, but they proved to be real teachers. They are still paying for it, but seldom regret their decision. The streets of Delhi also witnessed one of the strongest solidarities which brought youth from different universities together to speak for these wronged young men. Kanhaiya electrified the imagination of the young and the old alike. 

Three years since the arrest and release of Kanhaiya and Umar have been a learning period for all of us. We have seen universities being attacked, intellectuals vilified and scholarship trashed by the government. This period has also seen hatred against Muslims and Christians becoming the national norm. Dalits have become targets of repeated attacks from affiliates of the ruling party and there is a resurgence of regressive social and cultural tendencies in society — the assault on women Sabarimala pilgrims being an example.

We need to reflect on whether there is a direct relation between the attack on Kanhaiya and Umar and the regressive slide in our national life. We can also learn from these youth how to meet this challenge. They seem to be enjoying the battle, even in the face of a real mortal threat. This is how battles should be fought. You must not allow yourself to be infected with hatred while fighting hatred. A smile must not leave your face even when you are subjected to filth from contorted faces. This is what these young leaders teach us.