Spotlight On The Dark Zones In The Ishrat Case

The spotlight is put on PC. And away from the dark zones in the Ishrat case.

- Uttam Sengupta

In the wise words of the German philosopher Nietzsche, there are no facts in politics, only interpretations. Last week, just as a perpetually outraged nation had finished interpreting a glorious chapter on ‘nationalism’ comprising fake tweets, photoshopped pictures, doctored videos and false statements, the tuition masters were readying a chapter on ‘terrorism’, this one built on manual changes made to documents, for interpretation. Uniting the two chapters was a common strand: Pakistan.

If the first chapter was aimed at showing up students and teachers of India’s finest liberal arts institution as “anti-national”—and scaring their brethren across the country into silence—the second is aimed at further shaming a 19-year-old girl who has been dead for 12 years. If the first chapter was co-authored by ministers, policemen, mediamen and academicians owing allegiance to those in power, the second is being written by former bureaucrats no longer owing allegiance to those who were in power.

Ishrat Jahan, a BSc student from Guru Nanak Khalsa college, Mumbai, might never have thought of JNU. But the renewed attempt by the Modi government to paint her as a terrorist, allegedly on her way to kill him in 2004, when he was Gujarat CM, should surely interest some JNU scholar, who might want to learn at precisely what moment, in a liberal democracy, does it become legal to kill even a terrorist in cold blood. As the tale of the Congress-yukt UPA government’s two affidavits of 2009—one linking her to the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the other scratching out such a reference—played out, it seemed to validate widely held perceptions. But, as Nietzsche predicted, few had time for the most crucial questions: