Don't pit Hanamanthappa's patriotism against JNU students

As the grisly spectacle of a systematic witch-hunt against the best and the brightest of Delhi's cherished Jawaharlal Nehru University plays out in our 24X7 news cycle, an insidious double-speak is unfolding at the same time. There has been a concerted attempt - through news programmes, editorial cartoons, opinion pieces and columns, as well as through individual tweets and other social media posts - to pit the "selfless sacrifice" of the 19th battalion of the Madras regiment posted at Siachen glacier, of which the late Lance Naik Hanamanthappa Koppad was a member, against the ungrateful troublemakers, Islamomarxist sympathisers of the publicly-funded JNU. 

The arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar, the JNU Students Union president on February 13, and plastering of sedition charges against the "anti-national rabble-rouser", (as nicely explained by the Union home minister Rajnath Singh, who seems to get his intelligence briefings from fake Twitter accounts, and BJP leaders like Sadhvi Prachi) has been played off against the intercutting montages of Siachen footage: the Army rescue op digging out bodies, nine dead and one alive, of the ten men buried 35 feet under snow and ice, the state funeral and the heartfelt tributes to the "martyrs", "braves", "greats", who laid down their lives at the altar of the country. 

The sheer poetry of the contrast was too "evident" for many news channels and magazines to miss. They highlighted it constantly, as if the two sides of Indian democracy were part of the divinely ordained script, absolutely perfect in its amazing, mind-numbing irony. 

However, in their effort to be dramatists ("high drama all day" - a constant refrain in these chaotic times), they forgot something. That the country isn't just defended at its geopolitical borders - at inhospitable, super-subzero temperature-battling terrains with just 10 per cent of the oxygen that you and I breathe - but also well within its territory. Sometimes, the gravest and most bitter, hard-fought battles are waged in our minds. 

The universities are the battlefields where such wars are fought. 

Since martial terms and phraseology - those of strength and valour, and sacrifice and discipline, duties and order - are the measure of all things Indian nationalism at present, terms that were hitherto the cornerstones of a democratic republic - such as debate, dissent, discussion, freedom of expression, multiculturalism, pluralism, interrogative spirit, doubt, question, rights, liberties, etc. - have been relegated to a second-class status, of course an implied one. 

Since the definition of "nationalism" is the hotbed of this current scramble for patriotism, it is obvious that increasingly a regimented understanding of what it means to be nationalistic is substituting a more democratically robust, ideologically nimble grasp on the same. 

Pitting JNU against Siachen is therefore a sleight of hand that is actually in keeping with the present times, when any expression that is unsavoury for the current custodians of nationalism, who by the way simply sat out the original nationalism bloodsport (you know when the freedom from Brits were a big deal, and not only a cultural albatross termed "paschimi asabhyata"), is deemed "anti-national". 

This is akin to the anti-nationalism and sedition that the Brits, who opposed the rapacious slaughter of their own government's imperialism, must have faced. 

The "anti-nationalism" of Kanhaiya Kumar, if you listen to his speech (so, so brilliant) is similarly questioning the entrenched discriminations perpetrated in the name of patriotism and nationalism.

What kind of a nationalism and what sort of India are we supposed to accept and cheer for which has one of the highest rates of rapes and sexual crimes, oppression against sexual, religious minorities, ritual violence against Dalits, concocted communal controversies, state-engineered paranoia over national security leading to gross miscarriages of justice every other day, manufactured riots, criminalisation of doubt, and many other phenomena that make this side of the Line of Control almost a mirror-image of the grotesquery that many call "Pakistan". 

Surely, if our nationalism is defined against Pakistan, then becoming Pakistan-ish is the highest form of anti-nationalism that one can commit in this side of the border.

[Why balk at the comparison? Don't your jokes and lampoons regularly feature assaults on universities, threatening, arresting and murdering of students and journalists in Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore or Rawalpindi?]  

It is the university that has acted as the radical haven (some would call it the bubble, rightly so, for even the radical campus is not free of its own miniature set of serial discriminations) and housed ideas deemed too explosive for the "real world" to dabble in. The modern university, despite its origins in the 19th century European Enlightenment-induced nationalism (a euphemism for imperialism), has, nevertheless, in the 20th century, been the site where tough class, colour, race and gender wars were fought. In the 21st century, this has transmogrified into solidarity across international borders.  

May 1968 wasn't an aberration; it was a distant preface to what would, three-four decades later, become the norm - student uprisings. In fact, JNU, established in 1969, is a throwback to this very fountain-spring of intellect without borders. In 2012, the National Assessment and Accreditation Council gave it a score of 3.9 out of 4: the highest in India. JNU produces first rate scholars who go on to make significant contributions in fields as varied as international relations to arts and aesthetics.

In a way, universities also tend to highlight internationalism and push outwards the constrictive circumscriptions of narrow definitions of nationalism preferred by the State. University classrooms draw parallels between times past and present, across contexts divided by continents and oceans, between far-off points in the circuits of global movements of peoples.  

Occupy Wall Street has had spin-offs, and successful ones at that, in almost every politically transitioning situation, where arbiters of nationalism and patriotism police, mostly armed, were stationed and unleashed against young men, women and persons carrying only ideas and slogans. 

Were the students who lost their lives in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing any less of a "martyr" than the soldiers who imperil their life, limb and very breaths to secure our borders? Is Kanhaiya Kumar, who hails from Begusarai, Bihar, and questions this paternalistic, upper-caste, upper-class idea of a nation, and speaks up for a Rohith Vemula, not a "braveheart", not a "hero"? 

It's ironic that while we celebrate the idea-makers who have emigrated to foreign countries and risen to the highest ranks, we make intellectual life that much difficult within our own borders. It is also amazing that we forget that the foundational principle of Indian nationalism was mass sedition against the British Raj. 

Moreover, despite its continuance, sedition, in its very architecture, is a law that is meant to contain an unequal subject by an all-powerful master State. It is unfit to be applied against an equal citizen of a democratic republic, unless there's a definite physical and armed violence involved. Sedition law is the rectum of that festering vestigial entity called colonial law. Ours has been an incomplete decolonisation: pun intended.

The incontrovertible courage displayed by Lance Naik Hanamanthappa Koppad and his colleagues in Siachen, as well as by hundreds of other soldiers who fight another day so as we remain secure in our democratic homeland, must not be diminished by calibrating their peerless sacrifice. While a plaque or a post to honour Hanamanthappa at Siachen would be nice, a bigger tribute would be to implement One Rank, One Pension properly, and substantially improve the conditions and ground support under which our soldiers live it out on a daily basis.

However, when those shouting the loudest the merits of nationalism give you reasons in bullet points on why veterans are wrong to protest against a shabbily executed OROP, or insist that Siachen must not delimitarised under any circumstances, you know how these armchair managers of the patriot factory monetise martyrdom.

It's so easy to be a patriot when you have others to do the dying for you. 

Hanamanthappa and Kanhaiya Kumar would have been friends, in my opinion. Both display an extraordinary alacrity and fighting spirit, dedicated to India. You have misunderstood both and insulted their scintillating bravery by playing off one's heart-wrenching memory against the other's intellectual nation-building.

Your competitive patriotism stinks.