The birth of a star isn't necessarily an epochal event in India. The political firmament is riddled with fallen stars no one caught. Some succumb to their own immaturity. Others are destroyed by stronger opposing forces. A few manage to flash a message before they burn out. While Kanhaiya Kumar's meaningful survival is not certain, recent events leave one in no doubt about the power of the counter-reformation that has time and again dragged India back from the brink of revolutionary change.
That sounds more like religion than politics. As Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi knew, one is nothing without the other in India. Nirad C. Chaudhuri believed Gandhi did not bring religion into politics to raise it to a higher plane; he took politics into religion to create a new faith of which he was the prophet. The latest messiah may stride a different platform but the substance and idiom of his famous speech after being released from jail reveal the same astute awareness that Indians most lustily support issues that can be shown to be at bottom both moral and religious. Kanhaiya kept up the tempo on International Women's Day by referring to soldiers raping women in Kashmir and elsewhere. The same evening, three other Jawaharlal Nehru University students, including Jatin Goraya, vice-president of the JNU unit of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, a right-wing organization affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, made the religion-politics connection even more explicit by burning copies of the Manusmriti, following the precedent B.R. Ambedkar set on Christmas Day of 1927.
Goraya and his colleagues were also protesting against the "oppressive and highly discriminatory content of the text", especially its comments on Dalits and women. The main criticism of their action is that hardly anyone at JNU knew of the Manusmriti. But subconscious and atavistic knowledge can be more compelling than conscious awareness. Just as some scholars hold that modern Indian diplomacy began with the Mahabharat (Deep K. Datta-Ray's The Making of Indian Diplomacy: A Critique of Eurocentrism cites K.P.S. Menon describing Krishna's mission as the Pandava envoy to the Kaurava court as a prime instance of ambassadorial duty) contemporary notions about Dalits and women are rooted in Hindu scriptures that go back to between the 2nd century BC and the 3rd century AD. The symbolic burning was no doubt intended to stress the need to expunge the teachings of the Manusmriti from today's consciousness.
As Bertrand Russell wrote in An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish, "Man is a credulous animal and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones." That is even more true of India's huge lumpen element which seeks satisfaction in demolishing the places where others worship and attacking people of a different faith than of more enlightened societies. One reason why despite its admirable ideals, the Congress movement is at sixes and sevens is that neither it nor its audience relate any longer to Jawaharlal Nehru's conviction that "politics and religion are obsolete; the time has come for science and spirituality". Even a State-owned medium like All India Radio panders to popular taste with astrological forecasts that Nehruvians condemned as retrograde. Like newspapers, it is at one with the millions who are most effectively approached through the chants and rituals that played such a large part in Gandhi's public appeal.
The "Ram Lalla" slogan heard at political meetings and the clamour for a temple at Ayodhya testify to the majority's determination that the Indian State should bear its imprint. This has acquired greater urgency since Kanhaiya so cheekily challenged widely-held chauvinistic premises. The resultant counter-campaign recalls Nehru's warning that a majority suffering from a minority complex creates the most dangerous kind of communalism. A party with an unprecedentedly handsome Lok Sabha majority should be brimming with confidence. Instead, its leader is plainly rattled by Rahul Gandhi's jibes and Kanhaiya's cheekiness, while other spokesmen display all the insecurities and persecution complexes of a beleaguered community fearing for its survival. Their tantrums have created a piquant situation. Punitive action in the name of tolerance against some of the more virulent saffron brigade demagogues (Sadhvi Prachi of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or the Bharatiya Janata Party MP, Yogi Adityanath) might be denounced as intolerance. They can turn round and insist, citing Kanhaiya, that they, too, have the right of free speech. The sting lies in Adityanath's further contention that free speech "does not mean that one gets busy in conspiring against the country or that the traitors are glorified". "Conspiracy" and "traitors" are highly emotive subjectively interpreted key words that are central to orthodoxy's counter-blast. It's like an earlier era's deliberate branding of freedom fighters as terrorists.
There must be men and women even in the BJP who are sufficiently educated to understand that their party doesn't need to clutch at the late P.N. Oak's laughably revisionist Hindu-centric fantasies. They must know the "wonder that was India" existed long before sangh parivar brashness and will survive the tin-pot politicians who strut the contemporary stage. Murli Manohar Joshi, for instance, can advise rabble-rousers of customs, practices and institutions that underpin an essential unity from Kashmir to Kanyakumari that the commercial and political links forged by British rule only reinforced. If Jaswant Singh were well enough he could have shown ignorant ultra-nationalists his priceless collection of maps proving India was a nation before it became a State. But one hears only a vulgar cacophony because the shrewd traders of the ruling party see a double benefit in the folk religion of paganism - the practices and rituals of the pagus or village. It fetches the highest dividend from the mass of voters. It's also the form of worship with which they themselves feel most comfortable.
There are many reasons why Kanhaiya's star might fizzle out. Despite a leading role in the All India Students Federation, the student wing of the Communist Party of India, he lacks organizational backing either in his native Bihar or in Delhi where he was last year elected president of the JNU students' union. The causes he espouses - opposing special powers for the armed forces in officially designated "disturbed areas", for instance - are not tailored to any particular agenda. The professional hacks among Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha members probably squirm with embarrassment at the high degree of passion and idealism that marks his speeches. Even if they don't actually think his " Azaadi!" call is seditious, many will deliberately say so. It's the verbal equivalent of the physical attacks to which Kanhaiya is no stranger.
India's conveyor-belt politics gives short shrift to knights errant. The only position P. Seenivasan, the student leader who defeated K. Kamaraj in 1967, held, and that, too, briefly, was of deputy speaker of the Tamil Nadu assembly. The CPI expelled J.M. Biswas, the cyclist from Bankura who defeated another formidable king-maker, Atulya Ghosh, at the same time. Shibdas Bhattacharjee, who had the better of Jyoti Basu in the 1972 mid-term election from Baranagar, also fell by the wayside. Although an AISF activist, Kanhaiya is not a conventional leftist. West Bengal's demoralized Left Front didn't exactly rush to welcome Sitaram Yechury's suggestion that he campaign for the assembly elections, an invitation he wisely declined.
This is not the first time the Left has done the Right's dirty work for it. The annihilation of an individual is a matter of small moment, cleansing the system matters more. Kanhaiya may lack the ability to undertake that Herculean task. But from Ajatsatru's edict against Buddhism that the maid Srimoti flouted with such dire consequences in Tagore's " Pujarini" to the tracts, speeches and mockery that attacked and ridiculed the Brahmo Samaj in the 19th and 20th centuries, the forces of counter-reformation have demonstrated skill, cunning and brute strength. By promoting paganism, they are now contributing to the further barbarization of India.
