By Parayi for Twocircles.net
Everything is well with the republic. ‘Nationalist’ gundas are beating up students and police is combing the hostels of one of the best universities in the country to identify those who have the ability to dismantle the nation with their tongues. And, a search is on –for the ‘real’ anti-Indian. Predictably, the search leads many of the barking dogs in news studios to the almost frail frame of Umar Khalid.
He is the perfect target for the collective revenge fantasies of the bloodthirsty right wing mob. The nuance of being a communist with a Muslim name is not something that you can explain to those baying for his blood. The news channels are weaving tales about the many meetings that he was planning to organise at different universities. As if words are bombs.
The outrage against words. Why are they afraid of words? In the RSS-Ambani-Modi Disney land, which is being made in India, there will be no JNU. No public university will corrupt the minds of the young with critical thoughts. Dalits will stick to caste occupations and none of them will ever stray into the centres of higher learning to ‘pollute’ them with ‘non-merit’. All women will know their place and will live by the rules of different khap panchayats. Adivasis: obliterated. Minorities….I am sorry, but who are they?
A corporate happy land, with no troublemakers to drop in, and spoil the mood with stray slogans. No country for Kanhaiya or Umar Khalid.
In Nazi Germany, people used to go to great lengths to prove that they were indeed ‘good national socialists (Nazis)’. Maybe we should consider taking a crash course in being ‘Good Sanghis’. And, one of the critical qualities to become a Sanghi is to have a brain which is as limited as a news channel debate.
The first crop of heads which get harvested in every fascist enterprise will generally be that of intellectuals, writers, poets, artists. Once everyone is afraid to think, it is much easier to rule. So, from a tradition where Bhakti poets, Sufi saints and folk artists sang with illiterate peasants about philosophy and the nature of existence, let us try to mutate into a nation which gets epilepsy at the mention of the word ‘Azadi’. Let us lock our minds and give the keys to Sanghis and news channels and pursue the hunt for the ‘real’ anti-Indian. It could be Umar Khalid or Kanhaiya. That ‘real’ anti-Indian could also be Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, or Bhim Rao Ambedkar or Rabindranath Tagore.