Kanhaiya is more than a brilliant speech, a hashtag, a viral video

Excuse me for my scepticism, but as Kanhaiya Kumar himself said in a speech of a lifetime, we have short memories. "Hum Bhartiya log bhoolte jaldi hain...," the JNU student leader said in his electrifying address, perhaps also keeping in mind his own defiance and courage that must be replicated and remembered. 

There is a reason why a political ideology, which models itself on European fascism and patronises a dangerous network of violent groups for its majoritarian xenophobia, is in power today. That ideology today has its most emphatic presence in India's parliamentary history, the arrogance over which has given its leaders a free run to trample over the very idea of India.

That reason has been our collective gullibility (at its best), or plain indifference (at its worst), fueled by an adrenaline-inducing culture of consuming rhetoric as reason, and falsehoods as facts. Doctored images and videos, the mainstay of right-wing propaganda as seen in Muzaffarnagar or JNU, are passed on with impunity, feeding on the divisive demons lurking inside and around us.

Since late Thursday night, when even the TV channels accused of airing doctored videos and making a bizarre case of "sedition" against a section of JNU students, were forced to give Kanhaiya a national stage, the speech by the student leader from Begusarai trended worldwide, beating the likes of Donald Trump et al.

It was a speech that resonated like no words have done in the last two years. That those words came from a young man jailed for three weeks for anti-national activities, and hounded by the ruling party, could not have been a bigger irony. 

It was a speech that underscored "azadi" of the people as the cornerstone of any democracy. It was a speech that spoke to power, high on idealism and the seductive dreams of revolution. Still, it was a speech delivered by a 28-year-old doctoral student in a university with barely 6000 students. 

In other words, Kanhaiya is not a people's leader. Yet. He is marginal to the extent that he is fighting primarily to assert the right of an educational institution to have its autonomy and diversity of views. That he chose to speak to the nation, and so to all of us, is a privilege he accorded. 

That's where the onus is on all of us to prove Kanhaiya wrong. And remember.