On the night of February 9, at a cultural evening at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, a few hundred students, perhaps joined by a few outsiders, rent the air with slogans denouncing the hanging of Afzal Guru and demanding "Azaadi" for Kashmir. Apparently, one of the slogans sought the dismemberment of India.
Modi's government has cracked down on those at the function, arresting the JNU Students' Union president Kanhaiya Kumar on the charge of "sedition". The same BJP is earnestly attempting to reconstruct its alliance in J&K with the PDP who openly declare that Afzal Guru's hanging was a travesty of justice, and his mortal remains must be returned to his family in Kashmir for appropriate funeral rites. Hunting with the hounds and running with the hare has always been a BJP specialty.
The issue, however, is far more serious than the inconsistency and opportunism of BJP politics. Its origins go back to that moment in history - 1919 - when the Government of India Act disappointed those who trusted the colonial authority really meant it when they promised substantial self-government to Indians at the conclusion of World War I, but were shocked to find the betrayal of the 1919 Act reinforced by the Rowlatt Act, named after the President of the Imperial Legislative Council, which reiterated that "sedition" - the incitement of disaffection against the Crown - was a crime punishable with up to six years in exile in a foreign prison. Sir Sidney Rowlatt had earlier chaired the Sedition Committee that recommended the indefinite extension of the wartime Defence of India Act. In 1908, Lokmanya Balgangadhar Tilak had been sentenced to six years in Mandalay on the charge of sedition. Later, in 1922, Mahatma Gandhi was tried and sentenced for sedition after the first Non-Cooperation Movement. The JNU's student union president has been charged with the same crime by independent India. It is a provision of the Indian Penal Code that had been characterized by Jawaharlal Nehru as "obnoxious".
Sedition, in section 124A of the IPC, is defined as "exciting disaffection" towards the government by promoting "disloyalty" or "feelings of enmity". While the "Explanations" statutorily added to the section seek to mitigate interpretations of sedition that might contravene the fundamental right to freedom of expression and the right to seek lawful change, it remains possible for the authority to invoke the section to crack down with brutality on those who are deemed "anti-national". It is, however, not a section to be invoked against students in a university who are peacefully, if vociferously, giving vent to their political opinion.
This is less a matter of jurisprudence than prudent handling of secessionist sentiment. For if the Modi government can negotiate with the avowedly separatist National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isaac-Muivah), without resorting to section 124A, and interact with the Hurriyat in Kashmir that is not reconciled to the state being an integral part of India, it is certainly an abuse of power that Kumar has been detained even though he and the Students Federation of India, of which he is a member, have denied that he or they joined the slogan-mongering for "Azad" Kashmir or the dismantling of India.
Then again, the government needs to learn from history. In Indian history, the sedition laws had the opposite of the intended effect. Far from smothering anti-Empire sentiment, the Rowlatt Act and the happenings that flowed from it, particularly Jallianwalla Bagh, ended the illusion of a benevolent Imperial order and constituted, in many decisive ways, the turning point when the demand for a greater measure of association of Indians with the governance of the country was transformed into the demand for Swaraj. Gandhiji relinquished his Kaiser-e-Hind medal. Motilal Nehru virtually abandoned his enormously lucrative law practice to come to the legal aid of the hapless victims of martial law who faced imprisonment or even the gallows for alleged acts of "sedition". Returning his knighthood, Rabindranath Tagore, in a scathing hand-written letter to the Viceroy declared, "The very least I can do for my country is to take all the consequences upon myself in giving voice to the protest of the millions of my countrymen, surprised into a dumb anguish of terror. The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring".
If Modi thinks he can drive the JNU students into a "dumb anguish of terror", he is wholly mistaken. He has only generated a massive resolve among students and youth everywhere in the country to resist a government that so blatantly abuses the law.
The indubitable fact is that there is a section of public opinion in the Valley that does seek "azaadi". It has to be dealt with firmly but principally through debate, discussion and dialogue. Invoking sedition laws only provokes them to greater determination to promote their cause. We must always bear in mind that however vocal and aggressive they might be, they constitute a minority of Kashmiri opinion. That is why they shy away from elections, even as up to 90 per cent of the electorate in so disturbed an area as Kishtwar vote in the panchayat elections despite threats from militants and terrorists, as also in assembly and Parliament polls. So long as theirs is a voice with some audience in Kashmir, we have to realistically expect its reverberations in a cosmopolitan university like JNU. Indeed, it is a tribute to inclusion in higher education that deserving Kashmiri students are welcomed on the rolls of the university.
Contemporary history also shows that persuasion rather than a harsh crackdown better ensures the integrity of the nation. After all, the Dravidian movement was secessionist for a full 15 years after Independence, but was coaxed into the mainstream, not by banning it or throwing its leaders into jail, but by welcoming its political leader, CN Annadurai, into the Rajya Sabha and letting them see that Indian democracy was as much for the Tamils as for any other Indian.
So also was Rajiv Gandhi's masterstroke in Mizoram in 1986 to end two decades of insurgency. By appointing the leader of the Mizo National Front, Laldenga, as the Chief Minister immediately after signing the peace agreement, and the elected Congress Chief Minister, Lalthanhawla, stepping down to serve as Deputy to the man who had been gunning for him for years, violence-ridden Mizoram has now been rendered the most peaceful state in the country.
Similarly, in Assam in 1985, asking the elected Congress Chief Minister, Hitendra Saikia, to step down, and encouraging Prafulla Mahanta to field his Assam Gono Parishad in the elections that followed, when the defeat of the Congress and the victory of the AGP was assured, was what brought the state back to normalcy. Political wisdom does not lie in draconian laws but in statesmanship.
Finally, consider the treatment of secession in several developed countries. The obvious example is Scotland. Their leaders are not subjected to sedition laws but to referenda. The Scottish National Party, Britain's Hurriyat, lost the last referendum but ended in the general elections that followed as the third-largest party in the House of Commons. Their avowed objective is to beak up the United Kingdom. However, they are not thrown into jail but advised to prove that they have a majority.
Similarly, in Canada, the demand for "Quebec Libre", that is independence for the French-speaking province of Quebec, has repeatedly been put to the vote and repeatedly defeated - albeit sometimes by razor-thin margins. Yet no Canadian government sees fit to bung people into prison for demanding "azaadi". In France, the demand for independence for Brittany (Bretagne) and in Spain for the Basque lands is handled in the same way - democratically and politically. It is usually national unity that wins out. A nation's sovereign integrity is best assured in a democracy by deft political handling, not police action.
Of course, the Modi government's intention might be quite different - rousing hyper-nationalist sentiment in JNU to open the way to definitively denying minority status to the Aligarh Muslim University. They are playing with fire, but their ulterior objective is to polarize political opinion on communal lines as the BJP readies for its final political litmus test - the UP elections a year from now. Be warned. Be vigilant.
(Mani Shankar Aiyar is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha.)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.