Pratap Bhanu Mehta: JNU violence reflects an apocalyptic politics driven by a constant need to find new enemies
The most pathetic moment of the long night
was the finance minister and
minister of external affairs — reduced to tweeting a general, anodyne
condemnation of violence. They are members of the cabinet committee on
security. They could have arranged, through their colleagues, for Delhi Police
to act. If they, with their privileges, exude this kind of pathetic
helplessness, think of the ordinary JNU student or citizen in UP or Kashmir.
Think of those who are the target of vigilante violence and have no recourse to
justice; think of those whose homes were invaded by UP police; think of those
who have disappeared in Kashmir. The aim of the government may or may not be
literal annihilation of its citizens. But its aim certainly is that it
annihilates our will, our reason, our spirit, so that we all become willing
supplicants in its ideological project.
The shocking violence at JNU should convince you of one simple proposition: India is governed by a regime whose sole raison d’etre is to find an adversarial rallying point and crush it by brute force. Cowardly thugs running amok in one of India’s most premier universities, inflicting head injuries on teachers and students, is not a minor scuffle explained away by JNU’s local conflicts. To better understand what is at stake, it is important to listen to the entire range of speeches our honourable, “He Who Must not be Named” Home Minister delivers.
One thing will
become abundantly clear. The current political regime cannot exist unless it
finds a new enemy. It now legitimises itself, not by its positive
accomplishments, but by using the enemy as a rallying point. The targeting of
enemies - minorities, liberals, secularists, leftists, urban naxals,
intellectuals, assorted protestors - is not driven by a calculus of ordinary
politics. It is driven by will, ideology and hate, pure and simple. When you
legitimise yourself entirely by inventing enemies, the truth ceases to matter,
normal restraints of civilisation and decency cease to matter, the checks and balances
of normal politics cease to matter. All that matters is the crushing of real
and imaginary enemies, by hook or by crook.
UP Police Totally Communalised, Tortured Me, Says Activist Sadaf JafarThe events at JNU are another symbol of the apocalyptic politics this government is playing. It is apocalyptic in a triple sense. At the level of discourse, the normalisation of the phrase “tukde tukde gang” abetted by the home minister, with the help of a pliant media, laid the background conditions for this kind of violence. There is no doubt that many of those who were cowardly enough to assault unarmed professors and students and hit them on the head, see themselves as some kind of nationalist warriors: Avenging national honour by unleashing violence in a university. But the fact that they think in this way has been enabled by the larger ideological climate, something government functionaries have done much to inculcate.
There is no getting away from the fact that hunting down your own citizens as anti-national is now part of the ideological construct of this government, as evidenced by the home minister’s speeches. There is no getting away from the fact that the kind of state response that you have seen in UP against minorities, on the heels of the tepid response to earlier episodes of lynching, emboldens the worst elements of our society to act as vigilantes. The state will, directly or through proxies, encourage violence against anyone who is not in tune with it....
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/jnu-delhi-violence-abvp-bjp-jnusu-6203243/
