Where
the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where
knowledge is free
Where
the world has not been broken up into fragments
By
narrow domestic walls
Where
words come out from the depth of truth
Where
tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where
the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into
the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where
the mind is led forward by thee
Into
ever-widening thought and action
Into
that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
This
poem by Rabindranath Tagore is the contemplation of the Poet’s credence about
the kind of freedom he trailed and invoked to God. True freedom means
liberation from fear and head ‘held high’ is a manifested posture of that liberated
mind. True freedom lies in the mind which is always led forward by the
universal mind of the father into ‘ever-widening thought and action.’
But
the irony lies here. Being a treasurer of culture, India is far way from this
kind of freedom. Freedom is here being treated as Prometheus, who is chained by
the Zeus, a capitalist sovereignty.
In
India, if some students in a university had buoyed slogans against the state
and demanded to over through a democratically elected government on the basis
of some unsubstantial or factual grievances, how would have the state reacted?
The recent Jawaharlal Nehru University mishaps have raised mammoth probe into
freedom of speech. The contributors of the meet allegedly shouted anti-India
slogans, leading to the arrest of JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar. This
scintillated a debate regarding what constitutes sedition, who was in the wrong
during & the aftermath of the clash and how much of what the media reports
is true. At this juncture, Let us take a hypothetical example of US where this
kind of anti-national sloganeering had been raised and neither the university
authorities nor the State mandarins would have taken notice of the matter.
“That is a point of view and all points of view are welcome in a university
campus” – this would have been their standard reply. Only if the sloganeering
by the students would have been escorted by violence or destruction of
property, then the might of the State would have come down heavily on them
because such rowdy behaviors would have adversely affected the freedom of the
fellow students.
So
long as their revolutionary fervor was confined to words, verbal or written,
they would be protected by the First Amendment –“The Congress shall make no law
abridging the freedom of speech, or press or assembly”.
Writer and social activist Arundhati Roy has
strong views on the strife-torn and troubled Valley, which many may disagree
with, or regard as extremely contentious. But what possible justification can
there be — as the Bharatiya Janata Party has outrageously demanded — for
slapping a case against her under Section 124 (A) of the Indian Penal Code, for
exciting “disaffection” towards or bringing “hatred or contempt” against the
government? Do we lock up or threaten to silence our writers and thinkers with
an archaic section of the law that carries a maximum penalty of life
imprisonment, merely because they speak their minds.
This
exact things took place On the night of 9 February 2016, left-wing students
organisation Democratic Students Union (DSU) held a protest at Jawaharlal Nehru
University (JNU) campus against capital punishment that was awarded to 2001
Indian Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru. The university authorities
withdrew permission for this event after protests by members of the right-wing
students union Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. Anti-India slogans were
raised at the DSU-protest, which not only led to the arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar
but also of Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya on charges of sedition, the latter
two being the organizers of that particular event.
JNU
Vice-Chancellor constituted a disciplinary committee for investigating the
controversial event. On the basis of the initial investigation report, Kanhaiya
Kumar and seven other students were academically debarred. Kanhaiya Kumar has
been granted six month interim bail by the High Court, on 2 March 2016. On 11
March the involved students were allowed to attend their classes again. The
high-level inquiry committee of Jawaharlal Nehru University found out that
provocative slogans were raised by a group of outsiders, wearing masks inside
the campus. This is the story of JNU in a nutshell.
In
his classic defense of free speech, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill laid down what
is known as the ‘harm principle.' It suggests that the only justification for
silencing a person against his will is to prevent him from causing harm to
others. It is the powerful libertarian mid-19th century principle that we are
stuck to the idea and free speech cannot be tabooed merely because we find it
disagreeable, and that suppressant may be imposed only if such proclamation
comprises a direct, explicit, and indubitable incitement to violence.
There is no such nexus in sloganeering anti-national
slogans on Kashmir & India, which are shaped around the theme of gross
human right violation. But it is a tragic comic that there is talk of
‘sedition' at a time when it is regarded obsolete in many countries. Courts
have ruled that laws that aim to punish people for bringing a government into
hatred or contempt. In Britain, the last completed trial in a sedition case
dates back to 1947. In the United States, Supreme Court rulings have rendered
toothless the most recent sedition law, the Smith Act enacted in 1940.
If
the First Amendment in the US gives the American student the unhindered right
to profess subversive ideas, why can’t the Article 14 of our Constitution give
the students of JNU, or students of any campus for that matter, a similar
right? Those who are pitching in favor of sedition must be some illiterate,
weak or pusillanimous person knows nothing about the true meaning &
difference of patriotism and freedoms of speech.
So, the
controversy over anti national remarks in JNU is essentially much ado about nothing.
Joy Das
( PG MEDIA 2015-2017)
