Students across India are rallying against Modi government's attacks on academic freedoms. Massive protests were triggered when the Modi government arrested Kahaiya Kumar, the student union president at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).
Universities across India are ringing with the following slogans:
"Geelani bole azaadi, Afzal bole azaadi, jo tum na doge azaadi, toh chheen ke lenge azadi! (Geelani and Afzal demanded freedom. If freedom is denied, we will snatch it!)".
"Modi ka
Hindutva nahin sahenge, Modi ke Brahmangiri nahin sahenge." (We will not tolerate Modi's Hindutva oppression. We reject upper caste Brahmin domination).
Geelani is the separatist leader demanding freedom of Jammu and Kashmir from
illegal Indian occupation. Afzal refers to Afzal Guru who was executed by the Indian government on trumped up charges of terrorism.
Students also chanted in memory of Ishrat Jahan, a 19-year-old Muslim woman who was gunned down in Gujarat in June 2004 when the current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ran the state as its chief minister. In September 2009, Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate called encounter fake. CBI , India's federal investigating agency, did not find link between her and LeT as was alleged by Modi's government in Gujarat.
Afzal Guru was accused of carrying out an attack on Indian parliament in Dec, 2001. The Indian supreme court judgment acknowledged the evidence against Guru was circumstantial: "As is the case with most conspiracies, there is and could be no evidence amounting to criminal conspiracy." But then, it went on to say: "The incident, which resulted in heavy casualties, had shaken the entire nation, and the collective conscience of society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender." This shameful Indian Supreme Court verdict to approve Guru's execution is a great miscarriage of justice with few precedents in legal annals.
Independent educators and academics in India feel they are under siege since
Hindu Nationalist Prime Minister Modi ascended to power. A concerted move is underway in many states across India to Hinduize education. RSS ideologues are being given key positions in India's educational and cultural institutions to realize a Hindu Nationalist vision of India.
Last year, Modi's BJP appointed Gajendra Chauhan as head of Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). The staff and students protested the appointment describing Mr. Chauhan as grossly unqualified for the position. The Indian media have sharply criticized his work that includes films such as “Jungle Love,” “Vasna” (“Desire”), “Jungle Ka Beta” (“The Son of the Jungle”) and various other B-grade movies. Aljazeera reported that his main qualification appears to be his affiliation with the Hindu Nationalist BJP as national convener for culture, responsible for promoting “the party’s ideology through cultural activities,” as he put it in an interview with The Indian Express.
In the Aug. 13, 2015 issue of The New York Review of Books, the economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen described how the government pressured him to step down from his position as chancellor of the newly formed Nalanda University — most likely because of his criticism of Modi before the elections, according to
Aljazeera.
According to the Aljazeeera report, Mr. Sen has listed the ways in which the government has interfered in the management of many academic institutions — the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay and the National Book Trust. It has proposed a bill that would give it direct control of the 13 Indian Institutes of Management. The caliber of two recent appointments is also alarmingly questionable: Lokesh Chandra, the newly selected head of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations, which oversees India’s cultural relations with other countries, has said Modi is an incarnation of God, and Yellapragada Sudershan Rao, the new head of the Indian Council of Historical Research, has praised the
caste system.
Massive student protests in India are the culmination of growing resentment against attempts by the Modi government to curb academic and intellectual freedoms and reshape
educational and cultural institutions and the Indian society at large.
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