JNU students- Kanhaiyya Kumar and Umar Khalid JNU students- Kanhaiyya Kumar and Umar Khalid

An Express Series Part 1: The Indian Express travels to Ayodhya, Varanasi, Muzaffarnagar to find a new, harder Hindutva

The JNU campus is more than an overnight train journey away but you can hear the sounds of its turbulence here. In the chime of the bells at the makeshift Ram temple in Ayodhya, in the agitation of BJP officebearers in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency of Varanasi, in the strut and posturing of the BJP candidate who won the recent bypolls in riot-scarred Muzaffarnagar.

The Uttar Pradesh Assembly election is due only next year but the JNU incident has become a springboard for the UP BJP rank and file, for reviving — and rallying — a melee of older resentments and incitements alongside the new.

On a Friday evening last week, the line that connects JNU to a harder BJP, and a harder Hindutva, passes through the graceful Vidhan Sabha building in central Lucknow. Inside, five BJP MLAs have taken a break from the the desultory House proceedings — to discuss the students’ arrests.

It is about patriot-nationalists versus anti-nationals, they say, those who fight terrorists versus those who shelter them. Questions about the authenticity of the video are disallowed or denied. A verdict of guilty has been pronounced, and broader, blunter lines are being drawn to mark out “Us” from “Them.” The overarching theme: The Enemy Within.

Listen to Upendra Tiwari, MLA from Phephana, district Ballia. A former student leader of Allahabad University, he says the JNU issue does not concern a few students alone. “It is about all those who stand against the nation, and the political parties who fan anti-national sentiments — the Congress, the Left and the AAP. It has tarnished the nation’s image in the world.”

There is a “saazish” or conspiracy, he says, that encompasses JNU’s “students, professors, environment”.

Freedom of expression, says Tiwari, cannot include “desh droh ki jai jaikar”, the celebration of anti-nationalism. There must be “kathor se kathor karyavai”, the strictest punishment, so that a “viram” or stop can be put to such activities. Or else, “it will spread from JNU to DU and other universities and colleges” and “desh khandit ho jayega”, the country will splinter into pieces.

“No one should take the law into their hands”, concedes Tiwari, but “a situation was created in which the lawyers had to do so” (the reference is to the lawyers’ attack on Kanhaiya, journalists and students in the court). “This happens, lawyers often beat up the accused, there are police atrocities”, he says. It’s a confrontation, he sums up, “between those who live in India and think for it. And those who live in India, think about Pakistan, and help fuel terror.”

What he leaves unsaid: The new polarisation folds in those who have dominated institutions like JNU vs those who have been, till now, kept at the gates, those who support the Modi government vs its political opponents, those who call themselves Hindu vs those who don’t.

For Rajiv Gumbar, MLA from Saharanpur city, the question is: “Why did Rahul Gandhi go to JNU?” He says that “In the upcoming elections, the people will demand answers from all those who stood in support of JNU”. Because “our youth is being misled and made anti-national” and this is being encouraged by a “shadyantra (conspiracy)” and political “sanrakshan (patronage)”.

To Gumbar, slogans raised by some students at JNU are self-evidently connected with acts of terror: “These things support terror, these people become terrorists. In Kashmir, children grow up to be terrorists. If government had been firm, this wouldn’t have happened”. Now, he says, investigations must target all — “students in the video and others who are not in the video”.

Vimla Solanki, MLA from Sikandrabad, sees “Kashmir secessionists, larger anti-national forces” at work in the JNU episode. Dr Radhamohan Das Agarwal, Gorakhpur MLA and chief whip of the BJP legislature party, says that the main problem is JNU’s Leftist orientation: “when you make such an environment, people take advantage and infiltrate and you cannot recognise them”. He also thinks that the violence “of body language and words is more dangerous than that inflicted by a bullet”. And Raghunandan Bhadoria, MLA from Kanpur Cantt, says the nation is damaged most by the enemy within — “ghar ka bhedi lanka dhaaye” — or by those who eat and drink off the land, “jinhone desh ka ann khaaya hai aur paani piya hai”.

Across the road from the Vidhan Sabha building, in the BJP office, where pre-recorded chants in the Mahadev temple within the precincts drown out all conversations every evening at 6 pm sharp, Harish Chandra Srivastava, party spokesperson for the state, asks rhetorically: “Is there any country that tolerates its own criticism? Yeh wahi log hain, (these are the same people), who raised questions about Batla House and Ishrat Jahan”. And Manish Shukla, media-in-charge, chimes in: “Why did no one highlight what happened in Malda where Muslims vandalised the (Kaliachak) police station (in January)?”

About 275 km from Lucknow, at the Jan Sampark Karyalaya in Varanasi, which functions as Narendra Modi’s parliamentary office off the crowded Bhelupur chauraha where everyone, vehicles, backpacker tourists and animals press ahead slowly and gingerly, and mounds of garbage give the lie to “Swacch Kashi, Sundar Kashi” posters, Kedarnath Singh, MLC, deputed for the day to attend to the irregular stream of the PM’s constituents, talks of “jan aakrosh”, the people’s anger, over JNU.

“Processions are being taken out in city and village, holding aloft the tricolour”, he says. These are not organised by any political party, Benaras is “aandolit (convulsed)”, he claims. In the days after JNU, the BJP took out a march from the Sardar Patel statue to the Chandrashekhar Azad statue in the city centre, and the ABVP has organised small processions of its own.

“We have been watching JNU for long”, says Surendra Narayan Singh, vice-president of the BJP’s UP Panchayat Prakosht. “Umar Khalid is mocking the administration as if he is in Pakistan. They say people came from outside, but who called them? Yes, lawyers were wrong to take the law into their own hands, but why do something that invites such a reaction?”

S.K. Tripathi, state coordinator, training, talks of “bheed ki pravritti”, the way of the mob, as against “kanoon ki prakriya”, the process of law. “The people want instant justice when they get the opportunity. I don’t consider it to be wrong”, he says.

In her home in the middle-class locality of Mahmoorganj, Jyotsna Srivastava, MLA, who alongwith her husband, has held the Varanasi Cantt seat for the BJP six times in a row, rules out any possibility of the incriminating JNU video being fake. “I watch TV every evening between 8-8 30 pm till about 11 pm when I sleep, how can I not believe what I saw? Whatever I saw and heard that first night is true, the rest is damage control.” In any case, she reasons, “Every crime cannot be proved beyond doubt”.

“These people live and eat off this land, and then they call us intolerant. If we are intolerant, leave us, go to Pakistan. If you are Indians, stay here with gratitude”, says Srivastava. What is anti-national, she says, is “to think only of increasing your own numbers, by fair means and foul. To shout slogans that threaten to break India into pieces. And for political parties to appease such people, for their votes. Some people even say that Babar was not an aakramankaari (aggressor)”.

In the BJP office in Varanasi, Laxman Acharya, MLC and regional president in the party, frames the issue as a building face-off between the BJP, Modi government and the People versus the Rest: “On the one side, people can see that Modi ji is trying hard to take the country forward. At the same time, there are those who are misleading the youth. People are watching who is pained, and who is not, by the anti-national slogans at JNU. At the right time, the people, not just the BJP, will answer those who were silent”.

The ABVP in Faizabad marched in a “tiranga yatra”, and also took out a “shav yatra” or a symbolic funeral procession for Congress, Left and AAP leaders, to express its agitation on JNU. Here, Awadhesh Pandey Badal, district general secretary, BJP, says, “It is all pre-planned. First, there was award wapsi, in the name of intolerance. Now anti-national forces, separatists, terrorists, Pakistan-supporters are trying to do this. The Leftists are crossing the line. This issue (of JNU) is a convergence of issues”.

And in Ayodhya, former district president Manmohan Das, lays out his idea of nationalism in the backdrop of JNU: “At the Ramnavmi mela in Ayodhya, poor and rich, backward and upper castes come together, for darshan, and to bathe in the Saryu. Some Muslims also come, but most stay away because they are misguided, and because in their case, after all, the very foundation of nationalism has been mislaid”.

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