Daily Times

The discriminatory claim “actors do not good statesmen make” should be squarely rejected by anyone aware of President Ronald Reagan’s pivotal role in winning the Cold War between capitalism and communism. Sadly, not all former actors are of equal utility as politicians in a democracy, and India’s Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Smriti Irani falls way below the bar in terms of her democratic credentials alone. Furthermore, not all ideological wars are worthy just as all wars are not just wars. Allow me to substantiate the comparison.

Reagan may not have been directly overseeing his country’s young’s tertiary intellectual development like Irani, but he certainly rounded the political table with the inclusion of young, bright and opinionated advisors like Arthur Laffer in his Economic Policy Advisory Board. It was a mere three years after Laffer’s completion of his Ph.D at the Stanford University that Reagan, unthreatened by Laffer’s superior academic prowess, witnessed the remarkable results of empowering him to be part of a power lunch with the Nixon/Ford administration. A precocious Laffer folded his napkin into a triangle and demanded to know what amount of revenue the US and USSR could hope to raise at zero percent tax and 100 percent tax respectively. What then seemed like an absurd question culminated in the creation of Laffer’s Curve, the arrow that shot through the logic of communism; i.e. by conclusively settling the debate in favour of taxation low enough to make for a public sector that is small enough and a private sector that is large enough to keep money in the pockets of those who work for it, expressly to ensure the wellbeing of individuals as they so choose to define it!

Smriti, on the other hand — much younger at 39 than a 63-year-old California Governor Reagan at the time, and a beneficiary of three entire decades of the Open Society that he and the UK’s first woman Prime Minister Thatcher created — ironically, has steeped India in anti-intellectual unrest and a shocking crackdown on the very charges she was appointed to protect. Tragicomically, despite being mandated to power India’s economy and polity with knowledge, Minister Irani alludes to herself as some sort of an Indian goddess against student-enemies of her BJP/RSS colleagues’ perniciously concocted saffron struggle to weed out ideological opponents by conveniently labelling them ‘anti-nationals’ using the draconian sedition law. My country’s most prestigious educational institutions like Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Hyderabad Central University (HCU) and the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), though couched in the civil society sphere, have become her battleground. Abusing her position of trust by purportedly marking out young academics like the late Rohit Vemula (26) and the JNU Student Union (SU) President Kanhaiya Kumar (28) as anti-national for the grave offence of holding views other than the BJP’s student wing Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), it is far better she take on the title of an Indian McCarthy.

Senator Joseph McCarthy is rightly reviled for his anti-communist purges of “enemies within,” witch hunts aimed at the victimisation of intellectuals and, markedly, the infamous Hollywood Blacklist, a failed attempt at thought control. The Modi administration’s unpopular appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as the FTII’s Governing Council Chairman is embryonic of a Saffron McCarthyism and a matter of grave concern, given Chauhan controls the body responsible for making sure the institute’s policies mirror that of the information and broadcasting ministry. BJP’s chokehold has not eased despite the FTII students protesting his appointment for 139 days!

Though Indian students are as outspoken as their peers elsewhere and cut their political teeth in the safe and vibrant space their universities provide, in an ideological war, given their relative powerlessness when confronted with state machinery and the malleability of their opinions, they ought to be considered non-combatants. Smriti’s denouncements severely impair students’ freedom of expression and association, and make them easy targets amid anti-national hysteria. That seems to have culminated in the suicide of the HCU doctoral student Rohith Vemula after five letters from her ministry between October 6 and November19, 2015. Vemula was no grand exception to frequent changes in opinions and association and should have been protected by the HCU’s executive and academic councils, which found no evidence to support allegations that he had assaulted a peer belonging to the ABVP. The young man at whom the ire of Union Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya was aimed and whom the HRD ministry so stubbornly wanted to re-investigate was no ‘goon’ or hardliner in “a den of casteist, extremist and anti-national politics”, as he wrote in his letter to the HRD Minister Irani dated August 2015 (on his official stationery, no less).

Ironically, in his very first SU elections in 2009, Rohith cast his vote in favour of the BJP’s ABVP, and following further research decided to switch sides to first the Students Federation of India and then the Ambedkar Students Association. Instead, he was expelled and prevented from accessing his University Grants Commission stipend, with which he supported himself and his parents, an ailing security guard and a seamstress. Prashant, a similarly persecuted student, cites the HCU Executive Council minutes stating the students were expelled “in response” to communication from Mrs. Irani’s HRD Ministry to disallow their participation in academic activities. And that is contrary to her own video-graphed claims that she did not unduly influence the university given its autonomy under the Central University Act of Parliament in 2009, and her pathos-and-fallacy-filled filibuster in parliament, which would likely be censured were it delivered under a coalition and not Modi’s brazen majority government. Nevertheless, three of five letters from her ministry include the guilt-apportioning subject line “Anti-national Activities in Hyderabad Central University premises-Violent Attack on Sri Nandanam Susheel Kumar, Ph.D. student and President of ABVP- reg.” The ministry oversaw the systematic victimisation of Vemula, instead of “be[ing] more sensitive’ in light of the university’s ‘history of Dalit students committing suicide’,” says Associate Professor Srinivas.

Smriti and the Modi administration may have been emboldened by the Twitter bell-jar the BJP has created for itself, which has been ringing for the application of the draconian sedition law to purge JNU-SU’s pluralism. India’s sedition law is seen by some as the colonial twin of Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy law because it prescribes punishment for any form of expression deemed as ‘bring[ing] or attempt[ing] to bring into hatred or contempt, or excit[ing] or attempt[ing] to excite disaffection towards the Government established by law in India’ for an unspecified amount of time ranging from three years imprisonment to a lifetime in jail, with or without a fine. The law, in Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, is conspicuous for its absence in the Constitution and seems a remnant of a rather brutal colonial hangover, given its use by the British Raj against Mahatma Gandhi, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and to hang Bhagat Singh. There is also its recent invocation against three main opposition party leaders — Congress’ Rahul Gandhi, Aam Aadmi Party’s Arvind Kejriwal and Communist Party’s Sitaram Yechury — for speaking out against ideologically driven intimidation of scholars. It is a matter of national shame that the sedition law has not been struck out of the IPC in seven decades despite the post-colonial Britain scrapping its own version of the law in 1967.

Even more telling of Irani’s party’s corrosive politicisation is not simply that the JNU-SU President Kanhaiya Kumar was taken to court because of the booking of a cafeteria for a controversial poetry reading event called “Country without a Post Office” in solidarity with Kashmir’s perceived struggle for self-determination, which on its own merit was attended only by 15 people, but that Kanhaiya was assaulted by lawyers on the Patiala court premises on February 17 prior to his sedition trial.

What is to be done? Smriti’s systemic saffronisation calls for solidarity with objectors but Kanhaiya’s visit to support protests against the ministry’s puppet Vice Chancellor Appa Rao slinking back into office has triggered police action against the HCU. Media too has re-sensitised itself against being manipulated to amplify Smriti’s battle cries and proactively flags up abuse of India’s new prisoners of conscience. The Aligarh Muslim University’s endangered minority status is seen as a continuation of BJP/RSS’s positioning, not a discrete event. I opine, a systemic pathology calls for a constitutional remedy, re-imagination of the legal restraints on the use of state force by way of the creation of a list of ‘Non-subjects for the State and Union’ in addition to the list of existing Seventh Schedule Subjects to structurally reduce overreach and domains within which successive legislatures can make law. This will protect our rights in accordance with international laws India is a signatory to.

The writer is an alumna of Durham University’s Global Security Institute and the University of Warwick and committed to being “Indian beyond borders&rdq