With ‘Anti-National’ JNU Leading The Battle For The Right To Dissent

With ‘anti-national’ JNU leading the battle for the right to dissent, the sedition debate splits India down the middle.

- Kunal Pradhan

On February 21, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, dressed in a white kurta and gilt stole, spoke to a gathering of farmers in the town of Bargarh in western Odisha. In reality, however, Modi was addressing the television cameras that would relay his words to a larger audience across the length and breadth of the country. His message was that black marketeers and disgruntled NGOs with foreign funds were “conspiring” to destabilise his government and defame him. The reference, naturally, was to the imbroglio surrounding the February 12 arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar, student leader of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi on charges of sedition, but the context was left unmentioned.

It was an ironic line of reasoning on several counts. For one, the speech was reminiscent of another address—given on November 11, 1975, on All-India Radio by then prime minister Indira Gandhi in which she had raised the issue of the ‘foreign hand’ trying to destabilise India.The F-word had been one of her principal assertions to defend the Emergency imposed earlier that year. Modi’s speech was peculiar also because his government has been unable to offer any evidence of a larger conspiracy to destabilise it. On the contrary, a series of conspiracies have come to the fore about the arrest of Kanhaiya, his beating in court by a mob of lawyers while the police looked on, and the tampering of the tape that purportedly proved his sedition.