These are times of global disquiet. Gales of hatred and bigotry are sweeping country after country around the world. After Donald Trump’s emphatic and stunning electoral success to the office of the president of the US, I wrote this mail to many American friends:
It would be hard to find a building more burdened with suffering and memory in all of Delhi. And yet, if you walked past it, you would hardly turn your head to look at it again. There was nothing that distinguished it from the tens of thousands of other urban cages anywhere in the country.
On the wall is a painting of a beaming Rohith Vemula. Below his face is a poignant engraving: 1989-Forever. Under the painting on the floor are sprawled around 20 mattresses, on which groups of students sit in clusters, work on their laptops, or stretch out listlessly.
I celebrate student leader Kanhaiya Kumar’s walk back to freedom, his audacious challenge to communal politics, and his passionate espousal of what is most precious in our Constitution – justice, liberty, equality and fraternity. But two of his fellow university students, Anirban Bhattacharya and Umar Khalid, remain in jail, without bail, charged with sedition or crimes against the nation.
Kanhaiya says he does not want to make a career in politics. I wish he would: I cannot think of a single national leader from any party who can match his love for his country, its oppressed people and its Constitution. (Illustration: C R Sasikumar)
Former IAS officer Harsh Mander has appealed to the Union government and the Delhi Police to drop the charges of sedition against Jawaharlal Nehru University Student Union president Kanhaiya Kumar, who was arrested last week based on a video showing other students raising anti-national slogans at an event on the campus.
On Saturday, I joined several thousand students, teachers and political leaders outside the office of the Vice Chancellor of Jawaharlal University in Delhi, to protest the arrest of the JNU Students’ Union President Kanhaiya Kumar, and the presence of the police on the campus.
“I died the day my daughter died,” her mother Asha Devi declares, disconsolate and in tears. It is hard for most of us to even imagine her pain and loss. “If I am alive today, it is only in order to secure justice for my daughter. But when the boy who raped her so brutally walks free after just three years, I feel I have failed our daughter.” Her husband Badri Singh agrees.
The fractures around the fault-lines of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ in India have again threatened to surface after the release of the 2011 religious census results.
With the 1983 Nellie massacre, India entered a new chapter of mass communal violence: of large-scale slaughters of religious minorities with gravely culpable state support.