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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

From Seat Of Learning To Cesspool of Sedition

The row in ‘prestigious’ JNU has subsided. What makes it prestigious? In forty-six years of its life, it did not produce a single Nobel laureate, a single outstanding inventor, scientist or thinker… It does not figure among the 200 top universities of the world.

However, it is special for the heftiest budget it annually receives from the HRD Ministry; special because handpicked and assorted band of students get about three lakh rupees per head per annum subsidy from the unsuspecting tax payer to pick up knowledge or the tricks of sedition. Additionally, they get a slew of facilities like frequent national and international trips, accommodation in hostels at just rupees twelve per month in the heart of Lutyen’s Delhi while non-subsidized student pays a rent of 5-8 thousand rupees for a small private  single room in the locality of Munirka just outside JNU Campus.

It is prestigious for clandestinely organizing anti-national and pro-sectarian propaganda functions under the rubric of cultural programmes; it is prestigious because as the country’s super intelligent organization it is able to perpetrate general loot of tax payer’s money through the instrumentality of so-called “expertise” of its faculties without being called to account. And it is prestigious because the politicians with divisive agenda make deep inroads into its student assemblies by brandishing ideology of Marx and Lenin without understanding or practicing an iota of the same.

Little did the founders of JNU know that the institution expected to infuse the spirit of nationalism and national integrity into the student community, as enjoined in its charter so as to become the lodestar for generations of patriotic intellectuals, would be hijacked by elements working for disintegration of the country to the jubilation of our enemies? Nehru often used to say that Bharat has no external threat; the real threat is from internal subversion. And today here we are face to face with the Frankenstein.       

Nehruvian Socialist Ideology

Around the latter half of the decade of 1930, when freedom struggle was in progress, Congress floated Muslim Mass Contact Programme with Dr. Ashraf, a Rajput Meo from Rajasthan, in the driver’s seat.  He set up his work office in Anand Bhawan, adjacent to Nehru’s personal library to which he had easy access. Dr. Ashraf visited Kashmir in 1938 and again in 1939, probably on the behest of Nehru. This was the period when Kashmiri popular leader, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah was having second thoughts about his camaraderie with Muslim Conference led by Jammu and Mirpur Muslim leadership with close affinity to Indian Muslim League.

Drawing support from Nehruvian ideology, Ashraf established contact with Kashmiri students at Allahabad University at that point of time, and cultivated two sharpest of them, namely Niranjannath Raina and Dwarkanath Kachru, as he found them amenable to socialist briefings.  It was in the private library of Nehru where these young Kashmiri students at Allahabad University rummaged through the primary Marxist-Leninist literature, albeit with the patronage of Dr. Ashraf. Niranjannath Raina once told this writer that he distinctly remembered the passages underlined by Nehru in pencil in various primary works of socialist ideologues.

At this point of time, the Great Game in Central Asia was at its peak. Bolshevik Revolution had succeeded in Russia, and Stalin had formulated Soviet Union’s Central Asian policy based on Lenin’s famous 1917 “Address to the Peoples of the East”. The Raj mounted vigil on Kashmir, particularly Gilgit, where the northern boundary of Dogra kingdom met with that of Kyrgyzstan, the nascent southern State of Soviet Turkestan. The British Agent in Srinagar had claimed that Soviet spies had been spotted somewhere in the area of Chitral.

As part of this Great Game, the British Raj carved out Gilgit Agency from the territory of the Maharaja and took it into direct control in 1935. The Gilgit Commiserate was established and a local force called Gilgit Scouts was raised with British officers commanding the columns. For the British, the second line of defence in Kashmir was thrown up by polarizing Kashmir politics.

After Sheikh Abdullah dumped Muslim Conference in 1939, and founded National Conference, he pandered to the political philosophy of Indian National Congress for support, and feigned secularism as an antidote to Jinnah’s two-nation theory. Local comrades made a strong dent in National Conference, and the famous NC Manifesto called Naya Kashmir was drafted in the name of Rajini Palme Dutt, the General Secretary of British Communist Party in London but in reality authored by Kashmiri Left ideologue N.N. Raina, borrowing ideas extensively from the constitution of Uzbekistan, the most prominent state of Soviet Turkestan at that time.

Sheikh Abdullah’s camaraderie with the comrades in J&K helped him in consolidating Kashmiri peasantry as NC’s powerful rural lobby symbolized by the party flag. In the 1944 annual convention of National Conference at Sopor, Nehru had not failed to note that Sheikh Abdullah’s address to the annual convention was interspersed with self-rule cacophony. It served as a precursor to his Quit Kashmir slogan of 1945-46, which warmed up the hearts of hawks in London.  The flag of NC (red base and symbol of plough) did more miracles for the Sheikh than his sonorous recitation of scripture from public platform or the pulpits.

Nehru patronized the minority cell in the Congress. It made inroads into a small tolerant segment of Bharatiya Muslims who gave it the name of progressive movement. It manifested vigorously in Urdu literature to be called Taraqqi pasand tahreek. After independence, Nehru and his progressive team among Muslim intellectuals thought that he had made a great contribution of liberating Bharatiya Muslims from intellectual freeze of several centuries. He strongly defended his conviction, and perhaps on idealistic count, he cannot be faulted.

Nevertheless, the fault line was that Nehru treated Muslims of Bharat in exclusiveness, trying to delink them from the Islamic world in general and Pakistan in particular. For any astute historian, this was unrealistic and historically indefensible. Surrounded by a circle of diehard sycophants in the name of Left wing politicians, Nehru, like every half-baked socialist, began to believe in his own myth. 

How did JNU transform from a seat of leaning into a cesspool of sedition?

When Jawaharlal Nehru University was incepted in 1969, the “progressive brigade” among the Bharatiya Muslim intellectuals looked at it as the custodian of their ideological metamorphosis. Aligarh Muslim University, the well-established institution founded and nurtured by Muslim scholars, intellectuals and philanthropists was not open to socialist ideological inroads.

This group was bound to come into ideological conflict with the staunch nationalists on the campus. Realizing the need to reinforce their intellectual exclusiveness, the “progressive” groups took quick and decisive steps to fraternize with JNU Left where, exploiting Nehruvian line, it had become a fashion to be counted among the adherents of Left ideology. Indira Gandhi had little time and less capacity to fathom academic nuances that were shaping at the JNU. For cleverer ones among the JNU alumni, chances were fair to grab sensitive bureaucratic posts in the MEA and other Ministries and organizations. Their tribe increased fairly well when the spoiler of Shimla talks, P. N. Haksar, then Principal Secretary to Indira Gandhi, held her under a spell. JNU became his private fief.

The “progressives” became camp followers and strong supporters of the Left in JNU student union elections. Then also was introduced the progressive culture of conducting mushairas (poetic symposia), and a host of cultural programmes with palpable though guarded pro-Leftist slant. Some thought that the JNU was gradually shifting from an academic institute to political battleground. Its managers stuck out their necks with pride feigning influence in the corridors of power. Actually, student community began to be exploited and used for political motives.

The Left in Bharat had made its position clear on Kashmir dispute in Adhikari theory (late G. Adhikari was a Politburo member), which supported Kashmir’s cessation from Union of Bharat and accession to Pakistan on the basis of two-nation theory. They and their counterparts in Pakistan stuck to it. It was not for nothing that Pakistani “progressive” Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s commemoration function was organized in JNU and some more universities of Bharat with extraordinary zeal and enthusiasm, and those making presentations in these seminars meticulously kept away from Faiz’s pro-Adhikari Kashmir line. Even to the diehard Islamists in Bharat, Faiz, the so-called communist, became a hero.  Needless to mention that when the tribesmen attacked Kashmir in October 1947, Faiz accompanied their hordes.

The rise of armed insurgency in Kashmir in later part of 1980s had nothing to do with what was brewing in JNU at that time. However, Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 had reverberations on the campus. Iran became active in overtly selling the concept of export of Iranian Islamic revolution. A couple of its propagators clandestinely visited Kashmir in early 1980s and even a bank owned by the Shia community in Mumbai opened its branch in Rajbagh, Srinagar. However, alerted by the networking of Iranian Shia revolutionaries among Sunni dominated regions of Asian countries,  Saudi Arabia embarked on massive retaliatory campaign in Sunni dominated regions of the world, more conspicuously in Kashmir where Pakistan was already active.

After armed insurgency broke out with full force in Kashmir in early 1990, and entire Kashmir polity shifted its goal post, Bharatiya policy in Kashmir and safeguarding the secular fabric of the valley proved to be abysmally in shambles. Denigration of Sheikh Abdullah and NC line became a priority with Pakistan-backed militants. When the western media publicized Kashmir insurgency as a freedom struggle, Pakistan felt it necessary to back up her Kashmir perfidy with making a dent into Bharat’s intellectual structure. Sections of shameless media continue to be the beneficiaries of their external funding sources.  

There was no looking back for Kashmiri radicals, separatists and secessionists. Enormous funds provided by the Saudi sources immensely strengthened the engines of anti-Bharat propaganda. Externally abetted secessionists found JNU a haven for their underground seditious activities and then a vast network of anti-national chapter came to be formed. The actors were mostly sections of Bharat’s media persons, pseudo-intellectuals, pseudo-academia and perverted think tanks.

The “progressive” brigades spread over the length and breadth of the country and supported by the orthodoxy as well as the rootless Leftist/lumpen camp followers, now cast aside the long sustained mask and made common cause with the Muslim world projecting itself as the victimized and vandalized segment of humanity at the hands of the blood-sucking leeches in the oil rich Gulf. For the “fundamentalized Left” and “radicalized progressive” in JNU, democratic America is the enemy and democratic Bharat is the enemy, not the conservative monarchy of Saudi or the barbaric ISIS of the Caliphate. Therefore, raising slogans against Bharat, disrespecting the tricolor, celebrating the massacre of CRPF jawans by Naxals, denigrating Bharat’s Army is all in a day’s work; and this is what they claim as their right to freedom of speech and action.

In our country, history is in making, events are carried on the crest of waves flowing from different climes and regions of the world. Nehru’s prediction comes true that if Bharat faces a threat, it is from internal subversion

(The writer is the former Director of the Centre of Central Asian Studies, University of Kashmir)

Disclaimer: This article represents the opinions of the Author, and the Author is responsible for ensuring the factual veracity of the content. HinduPost will not be responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information, contained herein.

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K.N. Pandita
K.N. Pandita
Shri K.N. Pandita is the former Director of the Centre for Central Asian Studies, Kashmir University.

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