'Down with Sanghis': Why journalists' Patiala House march was important

This afternoon, about 300 or so journalists marched from the Press Club on Raisina Road, a stone’s throw from Parliament, to the corner of Tilak Marg, within shouting distance of the Supreme Court. We would have gone right up to the Supreme Court itself, if it hadn’t been for the barricades put up by Delhi Police in front of us at the Tilak Marg traffic light, while police cars were parked a few feet behind.

A DTC bus had been commandeered just in case it was needed to be filled up with protesting journalists to be disgorged elsewhere, anywhere else but in the heart of Delhi.

Certainly, a strong sense of camaraderie pervaded the protest march. Some of us old enough to remember the heyday of our youth, talked of the time when we had marched against Jagannath Mishra’s infamous Bihar Press Bill in 1982 (against the word “scurrilous” and larger powers to magistrates to punish journalists), against Rajiv Gandhi’s Defamation Bill in 1988 (the Congress was already being hauled over the coals for its alleged involvement in the Bofors gun scandal), and the Indian Express strike of the early 1990s – perhaps the last time several journalists had put felt pen to chart paper and written slogans about freedom of the press, speech and expression.

Also read - Scariest day of my life: First-person account of Patiala House Court assault

The spark that lit the flame of the protest on February 16 was the beating up of journalists inside the Patiala House court on February 15, which Delhi Police commissioner BS Bassi had termed "extremely minor" in nature.

Students from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) have been variously accused of sedition as well as disturbing peace. Some had shouted slogans, ranging from the mild-mannered “halla bol” and “sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamaare dil mein hai” to other more extreme and laudatory ones in favour of Afzal Guru, the man who had been hanged for his role in the 2001 attack on Parliament.

They had been summoned to the Patiala House Court on February 15 and the journalists present were reporting the story, simply doing their job. But several were attacked viciously, threatened and mauled, and one reporter from Kairali TV even suffered a dislocated shoulder.

Also read: The misguided students (and failed teachers) of JNU

Who were the attackers? It seems now that no one will ever know, because when some of the journalists went to the Tilak Marg police station to pick up a copy of the FIR that they had filed on February 15 after the incident – they were told that there was no real FIR. The Delhi Police reportedly had filed an FIR against unknown persons in this case.

The journalists pointed out that BJP MLA OP Sharma, who had been caught on camera, bashing up and kicking various people, could at least be picked up. There were others in lawyers’ garb, the journalists said, who had rained several blows on them. It seems from a variety of eyewitness accounts that policemen just stood by and watched.

Also read: Why Mother India in jeans haunts Modi bhakts

The march on February 16 was in protest against the behaviour of these policemen, although at times the sloganeering veered towards a criticism of “Sanghi” behaviour (“Down with Sanghis,” the journalists said, referring to the RSS).

It was in protest of JNU Student Union (JNUSU) president Kanhaiya Kumar being arrested on the charge of sedition, a ridiculous charge considering he had never lent his voice to the pro-Afzal Guru slogans; on the contrary, Kanhaiya had consistently pleaded for reposing faith in the Constitution framed by Babasaheb Ambedkar. Perhaps that speech should be mandatory reading for all those interested in the political turn India is taking these days.

So who were we, the marchers? We belonged to the Left and the Right, and certainly all shades in between. And why did so many of us gather, within hours of the event at the Patiala House Court, to protest against the beating up of journalists just doing their job?

Certainly, for those few hours this afternoon, it seemed that each of us was answering that simple question that led each of us to become journalists in the first place: the absolute freedom to report the story, without fear or favour.

During the Emergency, from 1975-'77, journalists had protested the censorship of their freedom and speech and expression; many hadn’t, of course, leading the then Jan Sangh leader LK Advani to memorably say that “many journalists had crawled, when asked to bend”. In the intervening decades, as the media grew larger and more and more influential, that old, simplest of questions about free speech reared its head in the oddest of times.

For instance, now, with Kanhaiya Kumar being charged with sedition for a speech he never made, or those who chanted slogans – albeit, peaceably - in favour of the break-up of India being vilified. "Ghar ghar se Afzal niklega (an Afzal will emerge from every house)," some said. With minister after minister in the Modi government – Rajnath Singh, Venkaiah Naidu, Smriti Irani and even BJP president Amit Shah – accusing the JNU students of being anti-national, it seemed as if the right to dissent was being slowly whittled away.

Should the right to dissent be subservient to national interest? The answer to that question can never be "yes", if only because the definition of “national interest” must necessarily change with the times. The death anniversary of Afzal Guru has been marked every year in JNU and elsewhere – including in Jammu and Kashmir, where the BJP is in a political alliance with the PDP, which went on record criticising the decision to hang Afzal Guru in 2013 – but the charge of being “anti-national” has never before been invoked. It seems that former JNU vice-chancellor Sudhir Sopory would fine the students marking Afzal Guru’s death anniversary a few thousand rupees – and everyone would go their way afterwards.

Admittedly, several JNU students were challenging the state and calling for the break up of India, but were they doing it violently? The answer must be an unequivocal "no".

Today, there seems to be a distinct change in the air. Today, the list of things sacrosanct and banned, and revered, venerated and sanctified is growing longer and longer by the day. Mother India seems all the rage, and indeed all her variants – the national flag and national interest and of course, everything anti-national that must be protested against, along with mother’s milk.

It is to protest this subtle change in the air that today’s protest march by journalists took place. For some of us, the fracture of Kairali TV journalist Manu Shanker’s shoulder by unknown goons in the Patiala House Court was enough reason. Others were protesting the indistinct attempt to categorise people, to put them in silos, to conflate national interest with patriotism and even, constrain the freedom to write and criticise.

To laugh or not to laugh, to use certain words in Hindi films, to eat or not to eat certain kinds of meat...

What happened to the absolute right to absolutely dissent, as long as it’s peaceful? That’s how the Mahatma overthrew the British Raj, didn’t he? So what have journalists to do with people who demand that they circumscribe the story, limit the asking of questions, and perhaps in the subtlest of ways, self-censor themselves?

That’s why today’s march was so important. Journalists of all shapes and sizes and ideological colour – those who believe in Afzal Guru and those who don’t, those who believe in Kanhaiya Kumar and those who don’t, those who support the BJP and those who don’t – came out to walk together, in protest against the deliberate drawing of parameters, of staying within the "lakshman rekha" if you will.

How could we not protest that last most archaic and fundamentally prohibitive of restrictions?