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JNU, the Headquarters of the Breaking India Enterprise by Saumya Dey

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JNU, the Headquarters of the Breaking India Enterprise by Saumya Dey JNU, the Headquarters of the Breaking India Enterprise By Saumya Dey There is a bundle of bile and toxicity, namely, a book, available in the market. It is somewhat pompously titled as What the Nation Really Needs to Know – The JNU Nationalism Lectures. This book contains, between two covers, nearly all the opinions and propaganda used by the breaking India protagonists on the JNU campus. Understanding the Breaking India Enterprise We owe the phrase ‘breaking India’ to that wonderfully insightful book co-authored by Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan (Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines). I am rounding it off by adding the word ‘enterprise’ to it, for it is an activity, pursued by a nexus of church groups, private think tanks, academics and NGOs, that employs and provides a livelihood to a lot of people within and outside India (as we see in the book). What is this enterprise’s objective? Well, as Messrs. Malhotra and Neelakandan have demonstrated, it primarily seeks to promote and exploit faultlines in Indian society in order to breed various kinds of separatist identities (Dravidian or Dalit), presumably to further the disintegration of India. There is, however, another aspect to the breaking India enterprise. Many of its votaries seek to alienate Indians from the Indian state through persistent conversations about its oppressiveness. They also harp on the artificiality of the Indian nation that serves as its basis. Their intention perhaps is to ensure that the average Indian ceases to be emotionally invested in the Indian nation-state so that it can be easily undone. Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) is rife with breaking India protagonists of both sorts – those who promote and exploit Indian faultlines and those who seek to alienate Indians from the Indian nation-state. JNU and the Breaking India Enterprise May the reader nurture no illusions; within India, JNU is the intellectual headquarters of the breaking India enterprise. I say this despite owing a massive intellectual debt to that institution. I have done an M.A., M.Phil and a PhD there and if I can read and write a little today, it is on account of JNU. However, besides reading and writing a bit, JNU also taught me to critically reflect on the world. And since the world includes JNU, I must critically reflect on my alma mater too and acknowledge that a substantial minority of the people inhabiting its campus are fairly well invested in the breaking India enterprise. That is why, three and a half years ago, some of them had raised the slogan ‘Bharat tere tukde honge!’ (‘India, you will break into pieces!’). I had described the incident in some detail in an article of mine published by IndiaFacts in March 2018 (The Uneasy Relationship of JNU and the Indian Nation-State). In the same article I had also said that the odious sloganeering had occurred at JNU since a lot of its faculty and students have been prejudiced against the Indian nation-state by Marxist and ‘cultural Marxist’ discourses – they see it as a bourgeois fraud or a regressive ‘Brahmanical’ and ‘patriarchal’ entity. But these discourses are not all there is to JNU’s dislike of the Indian nation-state. There are many other shades of opinions which cause the average master and pupil at JNU to see it in poor light. I wish to bring some of them to the reader’s attention in this article. I was unable to do that in the aforementioned one since it would have then turned out to be far too long. That Bundle of Bile and Toxicity There is a bundle of bile and toxicity, namely, a book, available in the market. It is somewhat pompously titled as What the Nation Really Needs to Know. The JNU Nationalism Lectures. I have wanted to read and comment on this book for a long time now, but was hesitating since I knew that it will be an unpleasant exercise. Read it finally I have and, trust me, the experience turned out be every bit as unpleasant as I had expected it to be. Why so? Well, this book contains, between two covers, nearly all the opinions and propaganda used by the breaking India protagonists on the JNU campus. Flip through it, and you will know why I term JNU the headquarters of the breaking India enterprise. What the Nation Really Needs to Know originated in the aftermath of 9 February 2016. That day a group of JNU students had organized a ‘cultural evening’ to commemorate the ‘judicial killing’ of two terrorists, viz., Maqbool Bhat and Afzal Guru. They had been hanged in 1984 and 2013 respectively. As the ‘cultural evening’ progressed, the ‘genteel’, ‘cultured’ folks attending it took to raising slogans. They raised slogans such as ‘Bharat tere tukde honge! Insha Allah! Insha Allah!’ (‘India, you will break into pieces! Allah Willing!’) and ‘Kashmir mange Azadi, Kerala mange Azadi!’ (‘Kashmir demands freedom, Kerala demands freedom!’). As the reader might remember, the entire country was outraged. Whoever took the name ‘JNU’ in the days to follow, did so with revulsion and anger. However, the Jawaharlal Nehru University Teacher’s Association (JNUTA) seemingly concluded that the country is outraging over some mere sloganeering since it is so ignorant and could do with some tutoring (JNU’s capacity for vanity is immense). So, the JNUTA organized a ‘teach-in’, or a series of open air lectures, in the forecourt of the administrative block of the university, ostensibly on the complexities that characterize nationalism. However, the actual idea appears to have been, as they say at JNU, to ‘problematize’ the nation so that the benighted Indians realize that they are unnecessarily getting worked up on something ‘problematic’ (the integrity of the Indian nation-state) and stop outraging. As I see it, this ‘teach-in’ turned out to be an unwitting exhibition of JNU as the headquarters of the breaking India enterprise. Most of the twenty-four lectures that were delivered in it contained breaking India ideas in some form. Later, after the ‘teach-in’ concluded, these lectures were compiled and released as this volume, What the Nation Really Needs to Know. If the reader wishes to know with what persuasions the average JNU student is recruited to the breaking India enterprise on a daily basis, he or she may look no farther than this bundle of bile and toxicity. Let me concisely present and, wherever required, paraphrase, the most obvious breaking India ideas that it is replete with. The introduction to What the Nation Really Needs to Know is authored by Janaki Nair, a professor at the Center for Historical Studies, JNU.[i] She is also one of the editors of the book. This introduction very effectively sets the register for the material that follows. To my eyes, Prof. Nair comes across as a breaking India protagonist enamored by faultlines. As she writes, “India…is the not the space of benign diversity…but hierarchized, multiple differences, which are of various kinds and intensities.”[ii] On account of this, we are also very incoherent as a country. India, she argues, “has one of the most fragmented social bodies in the world”[iii], in fact, ours is a land “marked by foundational differences.”[iv] The utility of the constitution in such a country is that, she contends, “it alone upholds and defends the idea of difference, while creating a community of equals….”[v] Dear reader, in case you have not realized the full import of her words, let me translate them for you – to properly understand a JNU savant one has to read a lot between and beyond the lines. Prof. Nair does not view our country as a national community, a nation-state, whose members speak different languages and consume varieties of food. We are not one nation exhibiting diversity, but a congeries of “hierarchized differences” (the reference is to caste). We are just so many thousands of castes riven by primordial faultlines (“foundational differences”). She, very likely, does not see us inhabiting a shared space of values and meanings, since the average JNU professor does not acknowledge the existence of something like an Indian culture, or sanskriti. This is all the more reason why we are not a nation-state, just a faultline ridden mass of castes (a “fragmented social body”). Our constitution too, in her eyes, does not create a national, civic community out of us. It merely preserves our differences in a state of equilibrium (so that the strong among us do not set upon the weak) while granting us legal and political equality. Do not assume that these are extreme views by JNU standards. ‘India is a mere congeries of castes criss-crossed by ancient faultilines’ is a pretty commonplace idea at JNU. A lot of people subscribe to it there. Prof. Nair’s introduction is followed by the transcripts of the lectures that were delivered at the ‘teach-in’. The first is by Prof. Gopal Guru, a political scientist (‘Taking Indian Nationalism Seriously’)[vi]. Prof. Guru’s lecture too perceives a faultiline, between the citizenry and the state. He seemed to think that all the outrage being directed at JNU was somehow manufactured by the state; it was not naturally emerging from the Indian nation. “In the present context of JNU,” he said, “it was very clear that the state was overriding the essence of nation. It tried to become more important that the nation.” He thought it important that the state “does not subordinate the nation to its narrow interest”[vii] (of self-preservation?). He also seemingly disapproved of the fact that “right- wing forces use extraterritorial loyalty as the negative criterion to define who is a nationalist” making “ontological association with ‘Bhumi’ or land (motherland)…an absolute criterion to define the nation.”[viii] In plain language, according to Professor Guru, the branding of any Indians with extraterritorial loyalties (nurturing love for a country other than India) as being not nationalist is a right-wing thing (hence bad).
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