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IS IT THE REVENANT'S REVENGE? Ravi Munshi
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At the 69th BAFTA awards ceremony held last night, the movie, ‘The Revenant,’ received several awards including one for the motion picture of the year. Not knowing what ‘revenant’ meant, I looked up the Wikipedia which defines the word as a fictional “creature whose desire to fulfill a special goal allows it to return from the grave…. a visible ghost or animated corpse that was believed to.... terrorize the living.” I was immediately drawn to a fleeting thought how, after years of being laid to rest, Afzal Guru’s revenant has come to visit the JNU campus to incite a political storm in a country that gave him a fair trial, but perhaps not fair enough according to his sympathizers who want to avenge his death by breaking India into pieces. Controversy over the anti-India sloganeering and those who participated in it shows no signs of recession. To any reasonable person who believes that the freedom of speech isn’t unfettered, the event that took place on the JNU campus is a clear case of an anti-national activity. Even if the demonstration, as argued by some disgruntled protesters, was organized by a group of unknown miscreants who didn’t belong to the student body, one can’t deny that the protest calling for the destruction of India couldn’t have ensued without the connivance of the student’s union, of which Kanhaiya Kumar is the president. While we do recognize that the charges of sedition are extraordinary, but equally extraordinary were the subversive slogans chanted by the protesters and the rebellious messages displayed at the protest site. Unfortunately, what should have remained a matter for the local police to dispense with in accordance with law of the land, has now been hijacked through political opportunism. To give it a partisan hue with an unmistakable intent to undermine the propriety of the actions against some students even when taken in the supreme national interest the Congress party and others expeditiously descended on the campus to offer their ideological backing to the raging fires of anti-India sentiments vented freely while pretending to protect free speech and expression. An institution that has produced many worthy bureaucrats, scholars and thinkers of our time, the JNU, as many would argue, is a cesspool of radical thought where anti-nationalism is allowed, even encouraged, to breed and thrive in a conducive environment. It’s no secret that the institution is a bastion of brash, iconoclast, left-leaning ideologues who live out their entire lives priding themselves on their misplaced sense of intellectualism. Ideological support to the students’ anti-India activities by their professors is testimony to the latter’s commitment to create ideal conditions in which to clone their own breed of anti-nationalists. If the students are taught to champion free speech, what’s wrong in teaching them to uphold the integrity of their motherland? During the television debates on the fallout of the campus arrests, it’s common to watch the Congress and other political parties repeatedly zeroing-in on the apparent irrationality behind the BJP’s political alliance with the PDP, reminding the audience of the PDP’s longstanding ideological support for Afzal Guru and his cause. With no easy explanation, the question is tricky how can the BJP brand the students supporting Afzal Guru as anti-national on one hand and with the other, shake hands with the very PDP that has routinely demonstrated its propensity for stoking anti-India sentiments and favoring self-rule? The answer can be found in, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” a well-known dictum that I believe has reigned over the fragile yet mutually beneficial political arrangement which existed between the BJP and the PDP until the grand wizard migrated to a better place. Time has come for the BJP to stop digging for a credible reply and start acknowledging with pride that the alliance with the PDP was not of their choosing but out of a necessity to safeguard the larger interests of India keeping India-baiters in check by “keeping the enemy closer.” It’s no wonder that Mehbooba Mufti’s deep-rooted apprehension about aligning with the BJP has its origins in the latter’s ideologically divergent and non-negotiable views that threaten to derail the PDP’s soft-secessionist agenda.
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