Dear PM Modi, if challenging status-quo is sedition, I too am guilty! by Ujjal Dosanjh
I am feeling
“seditious”. I am. I am in India, my motherland, the land of my ancestors. I
can literally feel the centuries of Indianness coursing through my veins.
Though the arms I think of are of the peaceful variety yet it is impossible to
escape the call of my conscience to arms.
From India I have been
following the events surrounding the JNU and the allegations of ‘sedition’
and ‘anti-national’ being thrown about so recklessly. There can’t be any real
danger to the world’s largest, well grounded and enduring democracy from some
students shouting what may or may not have been irresponsible slogans. India is
not some airy fairy place that is going to be torn asunder just because some
students talk about whether Afzal Guru’s hanging was legally proper and just.
No one has the right
to dictate what thoughts one can think or articulate even if they may be questionable
in their very essence or how they are crafted including those that may cast
doubt on the legal propriety of Afzal Guru’s hanging by India.
I have no time for any one picking up a gun
to kill or attempt to kill any one let alone the parliamentarians of Indian
democracy that Afzal Guru’s alleged associates did. And I have no time for
those who glorify others such as Nathuram Godse who, in liberated India, killed
the undisputed leader of the freedom movement. One could call those who glorify
Guru or Godse or others like them misguided, gone astray or completely wrong.
But in a true democracy they have a right
to be misguided, wrong or to be led astray. To call them seditious is to
cheapen true patriotism and think India weak and believe that it will readily
crumble under the weight of sloganeering by students at universities. I would
urge the self styled definers of “patriotism” and “nationalism” in India to
stop constraining individual freedoms and start worrying about students at its
universities turning into book worms who never read a newspaper, shout a slogan
or attend a demonstration to change the country.
If all the students become solely
preoccupied by the marks they get at universities and how big their pay packets
might be, in the end India will be a much lesser country and certainly not the
country of the dreams of its freedom fighters. A degree of sedition and
subversion, in other words an undermining and challenging of the status quo, is
inherent in any movement for change. In that sense, RSS is subversive as it
wants to change the nature of Indian state and so are all the political parties
worth their name who have differing visions of India. If they intend no
subversion of the extant reality — the status quo — then they have no business
in politics unless they are in the business of massaging their own egos or
plundering the country. .. read more:
Dosanjh is former Premier of British
Columbia, and former Canadian Minister of Health.
