The attacks in India should not be seen as a problem limited to secular writers or liberal thinkers
RAWALPINDI: Protests at one of India’s most well-known universities continue to widen and polarise public opinion across that country. Thousands of students have participated in a series of protests and Jawaharlal Nehru University has come to a standstill. The university’s students have been in the news after holding an event on campus against the hanging of Afzal Guru by calling it judicial killing. They also expressed solidarity with the struggle of Kashmiris. Members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accused the president of Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, Kanhaiya Kumar, of harbouring anti-India sentiment. Protests spread when Kumar was arrested last week for sedition, after giving a speech questioning the hanging in 2013 of Guru, over his role in the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament. Activists have long questioned Guru’s conviction, and India’s Supreme Court has described the evidence against him as circumstantial.
While there have always been episodic attacks on free speech in India, this time it feels different. India’s free thinkers and best minds are being systematically hounded. What is even more disturbing is the state’s silence and failure to bring the culprits to book. The attacks in India should not be seen as a problem limited to secular writers or liberal thinkers. They should be recognised as an attack on the heart of what constitutes a democracy.
Afia Ambreen
Published in The Express Tribune, February 21st, 2016.
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