The End of Imagination by Arundhati Roy Read Free Book Online

“should be hanged instead of being lodged in jail for life or they should be killed by police bullet.” 8 Gyandev Ahuja, a BJP member of the Rajasthan legislative assembly and an empiricist extraordinaire, informed the world, “More than 10,000 butts of cigarettes and 4,000 pieces of beedis are found daily in the JNU campus. Fifty thousand big and small pieces of bones are left by those eating non-vegetarian food. They gorge on meat . . . these anti-nationals. Two thousand wrappers of chips and namkeen are found, as also 3,000 used condoms—the misdeeds they commit with our sisters and daughters there. And 500 used contraceptive injections are also found.” In other words, JNU students were meat-eating, chip-crunching, cigarette-smoking, beer-swilling, sex-obsessed anti-
nationals. (Does that sound so terrible?)
    The prime minister said nothing.
    The students of JNU and Hyderabad Central University, on the other hand, had plenty to say. The protests on those campuses spread to the streets. And then to universities in other parts of the country. In Delhi, on the day Kanhaiya Kumar was to be produced before a magistrate, the war zone shifted to the courts. On two days in a row, sheltering under an oversized national flag, a group of lawyers who boasted openly of their affiliation to the BJP beat up students, professors, journalists, and finally Kanhaiya Kumar himself inside a courthouse. They threatened and abused a committee of senior lawyers that the Supreme Court had urgently constituted to look into the matter. The police stood by and watched. The Delhi police chief called it a minor scuffle. The lawyers gloated to the press about how they “thrashed” Kanhaiya and forced him to say “Bharat Mata ki jai.” For a few days it looked as though every last institution in the country was helpless in the face of this insane attack.
    The RSS has now declared that anybody who refuses to say “Bharat Mata ki jai!” is an anti-national. The yoga and health-food tycoon Baba Ramdev announced that, were it not illegal, he would behead anybody who refused to say it.
    What would these people have done to Ambedkar? In 1931, when questioned by Gandhi about his sharp critique of the Congress—which was seen as a critique of the party’s struggle for an independent homeland—Ambedkar said, “Gandhiji, I have no homeland. No Untouchable worth the name would be proud of this land.” Would they have charged him with sedition? (On the other hand, garlanding portraits of Ambedkar, as the Sangh Parivar has done, and suggesting that he—the man who called Hinduism “a veritable chamber of horrors”—is one of the founding fathers of the Hindu Rashtra is probably much worse.)
    The other tactic the BJP and its media partners have used to silence people is an absurd false binary—the Brave Soldiers versus the Evil Anti-nationals. In February, just when the JNU crisis was at its peak, an avalanche on the Siachen Glacier killed ten soldiers, whose bodies were flown down for military funerals. For days and nights, screeching television anchors and their studio guests inserted their own words into the mouths of the dead men and grafted their tinpot ideologies onto lifeless bodies that couldn’t talk back. Of course they neglected to mention that most Indian soldiers are poor people looking for a means of earning a living. (You don’t hear the patriotic rich asking for the draft, so that they and their children are forced to serve as ordinary soldiers.)
    They also forgot to tell their viewers that soldiers are not just deployed on the Siachen Glacier or on the borders of India. That there has not been a single day since Independence in 1947 when the Indian Army and other security forces have not been deployed within India’s borders against what are meant to be their “own” people—in Kashmir, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Assam, Junagadh, Hyderabad, Goa, Punjab, Telangana, West Bengal, and now Chhattisgarh, Orissa, and